Why Trump Was the Real Loser in Alabama

Jacob Heilbrunn

Poitics, North America

So far Trump’s approach has yielded him steadily sagging polls and zero legislative accomplishments.

Roy Moore’s victory party last night in Birmingham, Alabama was blasting Lynyrd Skynyrd’s southern rock anthem “Sweet Home Alabama.” At the outset of the song, lead vocalist Ronnie Van Sant ordered, “Turn it up.” But the crowd yesterday was quickly stilled by the news that their man had lost his crusade to enter the Senate. And so there was no sweetness, only bitterness, for Moore’s myrmidons as the finality of the election result sunk in. Too lazy, or too scared, or too something to bother campaigning, Moore had spent the weekend at West Point, where he watched the Army-Navy game, which the Black Knights won in a squeaker over the Midshipmen. By one point in fact, the very same margin by which Democratic candidate Doug Jones surpassed, or, to put it more precisely, outhustled, the hapless Moore last night.

The consequences for Donald Trump may well be dire. Yes, it’s possible to argue that Alabama is one-off with no broader national implications. Roy Moore was a louse, someone who never had a chance of winning. And so on. But this may well be a case of whistling past the political graveyard.

The fact is that Trump and Steve Bannon went all-in, but the charge of Trump’s ideological light brigade ended up becoming a fresh lost cause. By the end of the campaign, Trump was vociferously backing Moore, both declaring that Jones, a supporter of abortion rights and stricter background checks on guns, was a bad hombre and that the allegations about Moore’s misdeeds were nothing more than fictions cooked up in some Democratic political operative’s laboratory. Now Trump stands exposed. For him the result is all pain and no gain. This is the second in Alabama that he has been unable to deliver his base; the first time was when he scorned the advice of Bannon and endorsed Luther Strange; the second was when he heeded the advice of Bannon and endorsed Moore, compounding his original error. In this instance, Trump would have been wiser to have listened to Mitch McConnell, the savvy leader of the Senate, who saw disaster coming and tried to avert it, but was stymied by the reality TV show director in the White House, who apparently thinks that he can conduct the government via his Twitter account.