Trump wraps arguably one of worst weeks of presidency as Republican strategists fret about November

Analysis: GOP strategists see a cooped-up president who is running out of time to make the 2020 race about himself and Joe Biden

For Donald Trump this week, when it rained, it poured. Of course, that’s going to be the case when you are, for the most part, the one dousing your struggling garden with vinegar.

The president on Friday wrapped arguably one of the worst weeks of his presidency out of public view, mostly broadcasting messages for his political base on Twitter. He was gearing up for his official return on Saturday night to the campaign trail – and seemingly lying low on Juneteenth.

The quiet day at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue marked a noted change for team Trump after the president’s bruising week that accelerated a sense among some Republican strategists that his re-election chances are sputtering largely because the president simply cannot get out of his own way. John Bolton‘s damning book excerpts painted a picture of an ill-equipped commander-in-chief. The Supreme Court handed him a major immigration defeat. His poll numbers continued to sink. There were new questions about his coronavirus response efforts.

His address amid a major shift in public opinion on issues of race was widely taken as a pro-police speech that failed to address black America’s concerns. And he ignored a small business owner’s story of dealing with Covid-19 as he checked his phone and even fired off a tweet during a White House event with reporters and cameras feet away chronicling the surreal scene.

As the president ignored a national mood overwhelmingly favouring policing reforms with a Rose Garden address that amplified his defence of police departments and his own get-tough approach to recent protests over racial inequality, he followed that with a Friday tweet threatening any protesters who might show up outside his Tulsa rally the next night.

“Any protesters, anarchists, agitators, looters or lowlifes who are going to Oklahoma please understand, you will not be treated like you have been in New York, Seattle, or Minneapolis. It will be a much different scene!” the president tweeted. With the tweet, many of his critics mused on Twitter that he had implied any protester is a lowlife.

Republican strategists acknowledged on Friday there are growing concerns that Mr Trump’s increasingly erratic behaviour and declining poll numbers are not only damaging his own re-election bid, but could hurt GOP House, Senate and gubernatorial candidates. They see a cooped-up and frustrated president.

“In the last two or three months, he has been locked down,” said one GOP strategist. “I think that has caused him to fall prey to day-to-day rather than looking at larger picture.”

As the president struggles to see the political forest by trying to fight every blue tree, some independent political prognosticators see a race that is now former vice president Joe Biden‘s to lose. Fox News released a poll Friday that put the presumptive Democratic nominee 12 percentage points ahead of Mr Trump nationally, and a list of other polls shows the former VP leading in most major battleground states.

The Cook Political Report altered its electoral college forecast on Friday, tilting it even more towards Mr Biden. “Democrats have 248 electoral votes in the ‘Solid, Likely and Lean’ ... categories and would need 23 (27 per cent) electoral votes from the Toss Up column,” according to a summary of its projection. (A candidate needs 270 electoral college votes to win the White House.)

“With just under five months until the election, President Trump is a severe underdog for re-election. Polls show that voters do not trust him to handle the two most pressing issues of the day -- the coronavirus pandemic and race relations -- which has helped drive his job approval to 41 percent,” according to Cook’s Amy Walter.

“National polling averages show him losing to Joe Biden by 9 points,” she added. “And, with every tweet, he only digs himself further into this hole.”

But inside the Trump-Pence 2020 campaign, officials continue to shrug off their boss’s declining public poll numbers. Internal polling shows the president is “competitive” in 17 states it tracks when Mr Trump is pitted against “a defined Joe Biden,” Tim Murtaugh, the campaign’s communications director, told Fox News on Friday.

Mr Murtaugh dubbed Mr Biden a “great candidate for us.”

Even so, the Cook Political Report puts 188 Electoral votes in the “solid Democratic” column and 125 in the “solid Republican” column.

Republican sources noted there are still over five months until Election Day, giving the president and his team time for a comeback win.

“But the clock is ticking,” the GOP strategist said.

Another Republican source echoed that sentiment, saying the Trump White House will need to quickly craft solid policy blueprints -- not always its strong suit -- to rebuild the Covid-crippled economy and get rid of the virus once and for all

“Well, after a week like this, I imagine the White House feels lucky the election is still months away,” said Michael Steel, a former aide to Speaker John Boehner and Jeb Bush. “There’s a lot of time for the president and his team to right the ship, but they’re going to need a plan for real, sustained improvement in both the economy and the public health situation. High unemployment plus a lingering pandemic is a recipe for defeat in November.”

Shy of any new White House plans, Mr Trump and his campaign team are trying mightily to shift the election away from a referendum on the president to a race that is about which candidate is best suited to handle an economy in recession.

“The Democrats are doing totally false advertising. They have done NOTHING for years, including when Sleepy Joe was V.P.,” Mr Trump tweeted on Friday. “And they now have a Fake ad that my China Deal is losing us jobs. Opposite, & China is paying us $BILLIONS.”