By John Krull
TheStatehouseFile.com

INDIANAPOLIS – They use the same words.

Every time.

Whenever I get an email or note from a Donald Trump supporter arguing that the president couldn’t possibly have lost the 2020 election because, they say, “Joe Biden barely even campaigned.”

Their complaint misses the mark on at least two counts.

The first is the least important. The contention that Biden beat Trump “without ever leaving his basement” – another favorite phrase – doesn’t exactly reflect well on their candidate.

Arguing that their guy got beat by someone who didn’t have to work all that hard to administer the beating is less than a sterling endorsement of the president’s strengths as a campaigner.

But that’s not the Trump supporters’ biggest misunderstanding regarding why their candidate lost this time around.

In one important way, it didn’t matter who ran against Donald Trump this year or what sort of campaign that person ran.

That’s because, as he does with all things, the president made this race all about him.  He turned the 2020 presidential election into a contest not between competing visions for the country and its future but into something singular and far more personal.

A referendum on Donald Trump.

He made it into an up-or-down vote not just on whether he was a good president, but whether he was someone with whom Americans wanted to spend another four years.

And he lost.

Big.

Joe Biden was almost irrelevant to that debate. All Biden had to do was be friendly and inoffensive and say, “I’m not Donald Trump.”

That alone likely gained him about 60 million of the record 81 million popular votes Biden captured.

I’ve been covering politics for 40 years. In that time, I’ve never seen a political phenomenon like Donald Trump.

No one else has been able to dominate the national discussion the way he does. His basic assessment of himself – that he’s a ratings magnet for television and great copy for newspapers and magazines – is on the mark, as far it goes.

His supporters follow his every move, their attention bordering on idolatry. They don’t admire him. They worship him.

His detractors watch him with the same sort of transfixed and horrified fascination inspired by gruesome wrecks on the highway. They hate themselves for being so absorbed by him, but they can’t help themselves.

This rare gift of the president’s has allowed him to survive political crises that would have felled any other political figure. His ability to divert the nation’s attention from, say, a pristine recording of him boasting about sexually assaulting women or proof that he encouraged a foreign leader to falsely smear a political opponent would have been deadly to even the most popular of his predecessors in the Oval Office.

The ancient Greeks, though, had a belief that applies to this president and this time. They thought that a person’s greatest strength was also that person’s greatest weakness.

Trump’s singular knack for draining all the oxygen out of the room – for making sure that every eye was always turned, whether in adoration or disgust, toward him – forced Americans to make a choice.

They needed to decide if they wanted to spend another four years of having Donald Trump demanding their attention – getting into their faces – every second of every minute of every hour of every day, all the time, without break or end.

A fair number of Americans – just over 74 million – said that was all right with them.

But even more – a little more than 81 million – decided they’d had enough of Donald Trump. They wanted some peace and quiet and an end to the circus on a rollercoaster that has been the Trump presidency.

Maybe the reason Joe Biden didn’t run an aggressive, vigorous campaign is that he didn’t have to.

Given that Donald Trump was busy beating himself, the basement was as good a place as any for Biden to watch the show.

FOOTNOTE: John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students.

The City-County Observer posted this article without opinion, bias or editing.