Donald Trump is trailing Joe Biden by 8.5 points nationally — the biggest polling deficit that any incumbent president has ever faced this late in a campaign. One major cause of Trump’s woes is his collapsing standing with self-described “moderate” voters. In 2016, Hillary Clinton won this group by 12 points; some recent polls have Biden winning it by roughly four times that margin.

But the president has a plan for expanding his coalition: He will reassure moderate skeptics by putting greater emphasis on his indifference to public health, contempt for democracy, and support for political violence.

Or at least, this is what Trump’s messaging might lead one to think. Over the past 24 hours, the president has vowed to fire Dr. Anthony Fauci, praised a caravan of Trump supporters that surrounded a Biden campaign bus in Texas and nearly ran it off the road, and argued that voters whose ballots aren’t counted on Election Night deserve to be disenfranchised.

Fauci, the government’s top infectious-disease expert, boasts a 64 percent job-approval rating, according to a recent Morning Consult survey. By contrast, approval of Trump’s handling of the coronavirus sits at just 39 percent.

And yet, at a rally in South Florida last night, when Trump’s die-hard supporters broke into a “Fire Fauci” chant, the president replied, “Don’t tell anybody, but let me wait until a little bit after the election.” This statement implies both that Trump intends to fire a widely trusted public-health official in the middle of a pandemic and that the only reason he hasn’t done so yet is that he does not want pro-Fauci voters to know his true intentions before they cast their ballots.