Trump's Fixation on Pleasing His Base May Torpedo 2020 Chances

As a former Republican I have been complaining for years that the GOP seemingly has no long term plan for survival as it increasingly focuses on the hatreds and bigotries of a shrinking base of aging, religiously extreme, low education whites. Donald Trump, a/k/a Der Trumpenführer, is taking this losing approach no new levels as he ignores the House results in the 2018 midterm elections, his toxicity among Millennials and the increasing revulsion with which he is viewed by the college educated and suburbanites.  And that doesn't even consider the Midwest voters who are now facing a collapse in the soybean market or workers losing their jobs due to steel and aluminum tariffs and might not give Trump his 70,000 vote margin spread over three rust belt states that gave him his Electoral College win (the failure of the Electors to do their duty as envisioned by the Founding Fathers and reject Trump is a topic for another post).   A piece in the Washington Post looks at Trump's hopefully failing focus.  Here are highlights:

President Trump’s headstrong refusal to reopen the federal government without new border wall funding has set him on a risky and defiant path for 2019, relying on brazen brinkmanship to shore up his base support and protect him ahead of a challenging year for his administration.

The latest overtures in the wake of the midterm elections, which brought about sweeping Democratic gains and the end of GOP control of Congress, stand in stark contrast to the historical behavior of modern presidents, who have moved at least briefly toward the political center after being humbled at the ballot box.

But Trump — counseled by a cadre of hard-line lawmakers and sensitive to criticism from his allies in the conservative media — has instead focused on reassuring his most ardent supporters of his commitment to the signature border pledge that electrified his followers during his 2016 presidential run even though it is opposed by a majority of voters.

Trump’s fervent appeals to his supporters — not just on the wall but in his sharpening criticism of Federal Reserve Board Chairman Jerome H. Powell, special counsel Robert S. Mueller III and Democrats — leave him both emboldened and hamstrung heading into the new year, according to top Republicans and Democrats. While he is galvanizing his base amid political and economic uncertainty, he is also making it difficult to work with Democrats or recast his own presidency.

Republican critics, such as veteran strategist Mike Murphy, say Trump is threatening the GOP by “learning nothing from November and playing to the third of the country that he already has.”

“He’s trapped,” Murphy said. “He’s playing poker holding two threes and suddenly putting all of his chips in. It’s pure emotion, the mark of a panicking amateur.”

Democrats see a president unready for the siege coming in the new year from empowered House Democrats and developments in the special counsel probe of Russia’s role in the 2016 election — and flailing as the financial markets endure a roller-coaster of highs and lows.

Democrats have also pointed to another recent online poll by Morning Consult showing a six-point decrease in Trump’s approval rating since mid-November as evidence that their position remains strong even as the effects of the shutdown become more severe. . . . . “Talking only to your base while alienating the rest of the entire country is not a recipe for success.”

Pelosi, in a recent interview with USA Today, mocked Trump’s ultimatum as the battle cry of a weakened executive searching for a legislative fig leaf: “Now he’s down to, I think, a beaded curtain or something, I’m not sure where he is.”

Some Republican pollsters have also been watching the president’s tactics with concern, noting that there is little evidence he has grown his electoral coalition after the 2016 election, when he won the White House despite losing the popular vote.

“The problem is that the base is nowhere close to a majority of the nation,” GOP pollster Whit Ayres said. “In a government of the people, for the people and by the people, it sure helps to have a majority of the people behind what you are trying to do.”

As Trump has rallied [while at al-Asad Air Base in Iraq], House Democrats say they believe their leverage has only increased. They have repeatedly highlighted Trump’s claim this month that he would be “proud to shut down the government for border security,” which was made in a televised meeting with congressional leaders where Trump expressed dismay with Democrats by acting as an avatar for his base voters.

One longtime Trump adviser, who requested anonymity to speak candidly, said Trump has been “spooked” not by the midterms but by a brewing rebellion on the right earlier this month when he was considering accepting a deal from Democrats to fund the government through early February.

“He’s spooked by what the world would be like for him if the base wasn’t there” for whatever comes from the Mueller probe or House investigations, the Trump adviser said, adding that the volatility of Wall Street has increased Trump’s private frustrations to include not just Democrats and the media but the Federal Reserve.

Trump’s current border stance has polled poorly. A Quinnipiac University poll in mid-December found that 62 percent of the country, including 65 percent of self-identified independents and one in three Republicans, oppose shutting down the government over wall funding. The same poll found that Americans oppose building a wall on the Mexican border by a margin of 54 to 43 percent.

Trump’s 2016 victory was dependent on winning over white voters in the Midwest who did not attend college by using populist and nativist pitches, and some officials and allies continue to believe he can repeat the same success.

In a 2018 study of the nation’s changing demographics, Brookings Institution political scientist Ruy Teixeira concluded with his colleagues that increasing margins and maintaining turnout among this group provided Republicans the greatest opportunity to continue to win the White House. . . . “It’s the way to finesse the structure of the electoral college,” Teixeira said. “White non-college, in the center of the country.”

If Trump ends up causing a recession in the middle of the country, all bets will be off.  And that assumes he doesn't get indicted or impeached. 

Republicans Prepare for A Civil War

Back in 2000, George W. Bush and the so-called GOP establishment made a concerted effort to court the Christofascists and, less overtly through dog whistle racist slogans, white supremacists.  Locally, that translated into seeing a member of the Christian Coalition elected to a vice-chairman of the Republican Party of the City of Virginia Beach.  At the same time, I and others found that the party that we had known was slipping away.  Religious extremism, especially anti-gay hysteria, and growing overt racism became a near litmus test for party membership.  I left the party and in the years that followed, most of my family did so as well.  Over the years since, the extremism of the party platform has increased with this year seeing the most anti-gay platform ever adopted.  Add in Donald Trump's poisonous racist rhetoric and the situation is now totally toxic.  With Trump hopefully headed to a resounding defeat and the GOP position in Congress threatened, Paul Ryan and other faux moderates are seeing the fruits of years of peddling misogyny.  Some predict a civil war. A piece in the Washington Post looks at the GOP's self-created disaster and the shrinking, and increasingly poorly educated, party base.  Here are highlights:

Anne O’Reilly, a lifelong Republican activist, was in the audience here waiting for Donald Trump to arrive Saturday morning. She remains hopeful that Trump can win the presidency but has no doubt what will happen if he doesn’t.

“I think it’s going to be an eggbeater in the Republican Party,” she said. “I think you’re going to see pieces going all over the place.”

The speech was a laundry list of familiar promises on the economy, national security, immigration and other issues, though the candidate’s message was muddled by his assertions of coming lawsuits against the women accusing him of sexual misconduct and his pledges to break up media companies that he said are trying to deny him the presidency.

It was ironic that Trump chose Gettysburg, the site of one of the most decisive battles of the Civil War, for his speech. Win or lose, Republicans are probably headed toward a civil war of their own, a period of conflict and turmoil and a reckoning of potentially historic significance. . . . . It will only intensify after Nov. 8.

[T]he Republicans face defeat — a potentially sizable one — in the presidential race, along with the possible loss of control of the Senate and the prospect of a smaller majority in the House. Trump’s future is in his hands. Saving the Senate and protecting the House are the priority of GOP leaders.

[A] major problem: The Republican coalition now represents growing shares of the declining parts of the electorate — the inverse of what an aspiring majority party should want.

The major demographic changes are well known. The United States is becoming more diverse racially and ethnically, better educated overall and with a population that is aging. Pew’s analysis found the following: “The Democratic Party is becoming less white, less religious and better-educated at a faster rate than the country as a whole, while aging at a slower rate. Within the GOP, the pattern is the reverse.”

By putting together the demographic shifts with changes in party allegiance, the Pew study underscored two big changes — one talked about for some years, the other an ongoing issue for Republicans that Trump’s candidacy has highlighted. Both bode poorly for the Republicans if they cannot adjust their appeal rapidly.

In 1992, whites accounted for 76 percent of Democrats or Democratic-leaning independents. Today, whites make up 57 percent. Meanwhile, whites made up 93 percent of Republicans a quarter-century ago. Today, they’re still 86 percent. In other words, there’s been a 19-point shift inside the Democratic Party and only a seven-point shift in the GOP coalition.

In 1992, the Republican Party had a slightly younger cohort than the Democrats. Today, the GOP is significantly older in its makeup than the Democrats — and older by two years than the median age.

The other big shift is the education levels of the two party’s followers. When Bill Clinton was elected president, Republican voters were in general much better educated than Democratic voters. Today’s Democratic Party followers have somewhat higher education levels than Republicans.

Trump’s loyalists want a future Republican Party in which the Paul Ryans and others in the current establishment play a reduced role. Those in the party who have openly opposed or resisted Trump want just the opposite.

As I have noted so often, I believe that the GOP is past reform.  The party needs to die and be replaced by a new party that doesn't embrace ignorance and hate and bigotry.

Trump and the Exploitation of White Male Rage

The husband and I are in Somerset, Pennsylvania for the weekend for family reunions on my husband's side.  As in the past, the area makes the Hampton Roads area of Virginia seem like the cosmopolitan, liberal center of the universe in comparison.  Indeed, in driving around town and the countryside, we have yet to see a single Hillary yard sign.  In contrast we have seen a number of Trump signs.  The Somerset area is in some ways a perfect setting for Trump and the white male rage that he is exploiting to fuel is frightening campaign if one listens to the regular media narrative: mostly white, many non-college educated, and a region where the demise of coal mining and other industries has hit the economy hard.  However, a new Gallup survey suggests that the narrative is at least partially incorrect.  The real root of the rage: the poison of Fox News and right-wing talk radio, plus a heavy dose of sense of lost white male privilege.  A piece in Salon looks at the issue.  Here are highlights:

We’ve all seen the videos replayed over and over again on social media and cable news. The past couple of weeks, however, featured two videos illustrating what I’d consider to be typical Trump supporters. Indeed, by now many of us can easily profile a Trump voter before they even have a chance to shout “Traitor!” into our not-surprised faces.

Generally speaking, Trump supporters are non-college-educated white men, ranging from younger “bros” to, more typically, white male baby-boomer retirees with plenty of spare time to be relentlessly irradiated by Fox News and AM talk radio.

While the lack of a college diploma binds most Trump supporters together, there are more obvious tells — ones that we can plainly see but that can’t be fully measured by pollsters. Specifically, it’s not easy to quantify the growing resentment of white males who believe they’re slowly losing their millennia-long grip on societal power. Likewise, it’s difficult to measure the brainwashing of Trump’s loyalists by the Fox News and talk radio echo-chamber. Yet we see it on display every day.

[A] similar incident occurred with an older white man who was filing out of a Trump rally in Kissimmee, Florida, but who stopped for a minute or two to completely humiliate himself by shouting incoherent bromides at the press. “You are traitors! I am an American patriot!” .... the man yelled, his eyes cartoonishly bulging out of his head. “I am a patriot! And your name is ‘Traitor!'” he continued to the delight of his fellow Trumpeteers.

The disconnect between how we expect older men like him to behave and how they’re comportingthemselves today is, in a word, disturbing.

Context is, of course, vitally important here. The Kissimmee fracas occurred seconds after Trump finished another of his rambling blurt sessions, and the man was obviously wound up and affected by what he heard. But we don’t expect older people to be this impressionable. . . . .  fully revealed his vulnerability to the suggestions of a charismatic would-be dictator, and didn’t mind his unspooled rantings being recorded and aired by the press. He didn’t seem to be at all concerned, nor did it even occur to him how, to the rest of the thinking world, he came off as a crazy person. A laughingstock. Except to so many others just like him.

When discussing Trump’s base, sympathetic words are often tossed into the mix due to the common wisdom indicating how they’re frustrated with the allegedly awful economy, struggling to make ends meet. . . . [however]  a new study by Gallup shows that economic issues aren’t necessarily driving Trump’s base.

According to this new analysis, those who view Trump favorably have not been disproportionately affected by foreign trade or immigration, compared with people with unfavorable views of the Republican presidential nominee. The results suggest that his supporters, on average, do not have lower incomes than other Americans, nor are they more likely to be unemployed. 

Gallup went on to suggest that other factors could be contributing to the discontent among white working-class Americans, but the economy and immigration don’t appear to be fully animating the mania that’s so prevalent among Trump’s people.

Trump isn’t necessarily responsible for the behavior of his most activated loyalists, but he’s certainly tapped into an existing cache of psychosis and he’s exploiting it for political gain. Trump’s base has been pre-tenderized by what David Frum calls the “conservative entertainment complex.” Since at least the Clinton administration, white men have been slowly indoctrinated and, in too many cases, brainwashed by conservative media and its rather loose grip on reality. 

A recently released documentary by Jen Senko, titled “The Brainwashing of My Dad,” covered this particular phenomenon: . . . . The film follows the life of Senko’s father, who was once a Kennedy Democrat and, through daily assaults by right-wing radio and television, transformed into a racist conservative zealot. Similarly, it’s not difficult to diagnose the Kissimmee man and his cohorts as having been similarly brainwashed by the extremist rhetoric of both conservative entertainment and the Republican Party itself . . . 

If you convince enough men that alleged outsiders (women, minorities, immigrants) are stripping them of their long-held power, as Fox News and others have done, there’s going to eventually be a fight, especially when one of those so-called outsiders is a black president with the middle name “Hussein.” Older white men don’t intend to hand over power quietly . . . . based on recent video footage, I wonder if they’re even aware of how ridiculously deranged they appear, alone or most often in large groups.

Trump, White Male Fragility, and Unfiltered Hate

The New York Times has put together of video clips from Donald Trump rallies over the last few months The video can be found here).  The picture it paints of the supporters of Trump is nothing less than ugly.  Hatred of others and misogyny in general is a constant underlying theme.  And who is embracing this message the most? White males without degrees, white evangelical Christians for whom racism goes hand in hand with their toxic religious beliefs, and white supremacists.  Even among friends who much to my dismay are supporting Trump, latent racism seems to be a driving forces despite the fact that a majority of these individuals would deny it.  I suspect anti-gay animus also motivates many of the "godly folk" who are rallying to Trump's world view which is the antithesis of the true Gospel message.  The New Civil Rights Movement looks at the Times compilation.  Here are highlights:

"Sieg heil!"
"Fuck you, Hillary!"
"Hang the bitch!"
"Kill her!"
"Trump the bitch!"
"Get out of here, you fag!"
"Fuck that nigger!"
"Hillary Clinton needs to get her ass spanked!"
"Ignorance and immigrants. They mix together!"
"Fuck those dirty beaners!"
"Hillary is a whore!"

Those are some of the comments made by Trump supporters at rallies the Republican nominee for president has made over the past few months, as the New York Times shows in a compilation of various clips they've put together and published today.

The video, clearly, is disturbing, but what's more disturbing is the culture Trump has created, fostered, nurtured, and allowed at his rallies. 

Perhaps even more revealing are the comments of one Trump supporter included in the video, an older man who says he feels Trump is his last chance to "preserve the culture I grew up in."

Its ugly to say the least.  But sadly, what the video clips disclose are the true face of today's Republican Party regardless of whatever smoke screen the party elite may try to utilize.  A column in the New York Times makes the case that the time has come to cease giving Trump and his most foul supporters a pass.  Their racism and wide ranging hatred must be confronted and called out.  Here are column excerpts:

Donald Trump . . . . appeals to something deeper, something baser: Fear. His whole campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again,” is in fact an inverted admission of loss — lost primacy, lost privilege, lost prestige.

And who feels that they have lost the most? White men.

As the New York Times’ Upshot pointed out in July, “According to our estimates, Mrs. Clinton is doing better among basically every group of voters except for white men without a degree.” Put another way: “Hillary Clinton is largely performing as well or better than Barack Obama did in 2012, except among white men without a degree.”

Indeed, a Monday report in The Times put it this way: “A New York Times/CBS News poll two weeks ago found that white men preferred her Republican opponent, Donald J. Trump, to Mrs. Clinton almost two to one, 55 percent to 29 percent.”

He appeals to a regressive, patriarchal American whiteness in which white men prospered, in part because racial and ethnic minorities, to say nothing of women as a whole, were undervalued and underpaid, if not excluded altogether.

White men reigned supreme in the idealized history, and all was good with the world. (It is curious that Trump never specifies a period when America was great in his view. Did it overlap with the women’s rights, civil rights or gay rights movements? For whom was it great?)

Trump’s wall is not practical, but it is metaphor. Trump’s Muslim ban is not feasible, but it is metaphor. Trump’s huge deportation plan isn’t workable, but it is metaphor.

There is a portion of the population that feels threatened by unrelenting change — immigration, globalization, terrorism, multiculturalism — and those people want someone to, metaphorically at least, build a wall around their cultural heritage, which they conflate in equal measure with American heritage.

In their minds, whether explicitly or implicitly, America is white, Christian, straight and male-dominated. If you support Trump, you are on some level supporting his bigotry and racism. You don’t get to have a puppy and not pick up the poop.

And acceptance of racism is an act of racism. You are convicted by your complicity. . . . Supporting Trump is indefensible and it makes you as much of a pariah as he is.

For as long as racism and tribalism and xenophobia exist in this country, Trump’s foibles will not signal his ultimate failure. But let’s not let off the people who prop him up, claiming that they’re simply being party loyalists, or Hillary haters or having Supreme Court concerns.

Trump is a mirror. He is a reflection of — indeed a revealing of — the ugliness that you harbor, only it is possible that you may have gone your life expressing it in ways that were more coded and politic. Trump is an unfiltered primal scream of the fragility and fear consuming white male America.

Like I have long argued about with conservative Christians, it is time that the larger public recognizes that these people are not nice, decent or deserving of deference.  They need to be exiled to the cultural and political wilderness and shunned by truly decent people. 

Trump Fuels Resistance of Whites in Decline

With Donald Trump's strongest support coming from working class white males with a high school education or less, it quickly becomes obvious that Trump is preying on these citizens who have lost out to the forces of globalization and the growing requirement of a college degree for meaningful long term employment.  Hence Trump's targeting of immigrants, minorities and non-Christians who are easy targets of the angst and hatred that are the core of Trump's base.   Make no mistake, by "Make America Great Again," Trump means the reinstatement of unchallenged white privilege.   A lengthy piece in the New York Times looks at Trump's pandering to these voters and the manner in which he has mainstreamed hate and bigotry and won the cheers of white supremacist organizations.  Here are article highlights which I find very disturbing.  Here are article excerpts:

In countless collisions of color and creed, Donald J. Trump’s name evokes an easily understood message of racial hostility. Defying modern conventions of political civility and language, Mr. Trump has breached the boundaries that have long constrained Americans’ public discussion of race.

Mr. Trump has attacked Mexicans as criminals. He has called for a ban on Muslim immigrants. He has wondered aloud why the United States is not “letting people in from Europe.”

His rallies vibrate with grievances that might otherwise be expressed in private: about “political correctness,” about the ranch house down the street overcrowded with day laborers, and about who is really to blame for the death of a black teenager in Ferguson, Mo. In a country where the wealthiest and most influential citizens are still mostly white, Mr. Trump is voicing the bewilderment and anger of whites who do not feel at all powerful or privileged.

But in doing so, Mr. Trump has also opened the door to assertions of white identity and resentment in a way not seen so broadly in American culture in over half a century, according to those who track patterns of racial tension and antagonism in American life.

On the internet, Mr. Trump is invoked by anonymous followers brandishing stark expressions of hate and anti-Semitism, surprisingly amplified this month when Mr. Trump tweeted a graphic depicting Hillary Clinton’s face with piles of cash and a six-pointed star that many viewed as a Star of David.

“I think what we really find troubling is the mainstreaming of these really offensive ideas,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, which tracks hate groups. “It’s allowed some of the worst ideas into the public conversation in ways we haven’t seen anything like in recent memory.”

The resentment among whites feels both old and distinctly of this moment. It is shaped by the reality of demographic change, by a decade and a half of war in the Middle East, and by unease with the newly confident and confrontational activism of young blacks furious over police violence. It is mingled with patriotism, pride, fear and a sense that an America without them at its center is not really America anymore.

In making the explicit assertion of white identity and grievance more widespread, Mr. Trump has galvanized the otherwise marginal world of avowed white nationalists and self-described “race realists.” They hail him as a fellow traveler who has driven millions of white Americans toward an intuitive embrace of their ideals: that race should matter as much to white people as it does to everyone else. He has freed Americans, those activists say, to say what they really believe.

Demographers began to speak of a not-too-distant future when non-Hispanic whites would be a minority of the American population. In states like Texas and California, and in hundreds of cities and counties around the country, that future has arrived.  It is the changes that are taking place that have created the national constituency for Donald Trump,” Mr. Buchanan said.

For many Americans, President Obama’s election, made possible in part by the rising strength of nonwhite voters, signaled a transcendent moment in the country’s knotty racial history. But for some whites, the election of the country’s first black president was also a powerful symbol of their declining pre-eminence in American society.

Few politicians were better prepared than Mr. Trump to harness these shifts. While open racism against blacks remains among the most powerful taboos in American politics, Americans feel more free expressing worries about illegal immigrants and dislike of Islam, survey research shows. In Mr. Trump’s hands, the two ideas merged: During Mr. Obama’s presidency, he has become America’s most prominent “birther,” loudly questioning Mr. Obama’s American citizenship and suggesting he could be Muslim.

In June 2015, two weeks after Mr. Trump entered the presidential race, he received an endorsement that would end most campaigns: The Daily Stormer embraced his candidacy.

Founded in 2013 by a 32-year-old neo-Nazi named Andrew Anglin, The Daily Stormer is among the most prominent online gathering places for white nationalists and anti-Semites, with sections devoted to “The Jewish Problem” and “Race War.” Mr. Anglin explained that although he had some disagreements with him, Mr. Trump was the only candidate willing to speak the truth about Mexicans. . . . across this spectrum, in Mr. Trump’s descriptions of immigrants as vectors of disease, violent crime and social decay, they heard their own dialect.

Mr. Taylor, who has written that blacks “left entirely to their own devices” are incapable of civilization, and whose magazine, American Renaissance, once published an essay arguing that blacks were genetically more prone to crime, wrote on his blog that Mr. Trump had handled the attacks on him “in the nicest way.”

[O]n the flatlands of social media, the border between Mr. Trump and white supremacists easily blurs. He has retweeted supportive messages from racist or nationalist Twitter accounts to his nine million followers. Last fall, he retweeted a graphic with fictitious crime statistics claiming that 81 percent of white homicide victims in 2015 were killed by blacks. (No such statistic was available for 2015 at the time; the actual figure for 2014 was 15 percent, according to the F.B.I.)

In January and February he retweeted messages from a user with the handle @WhiteGenocideTM, whose profile picture is of George Lincoln Rockwell, the founder of the American Nazi Party. A couple of days later, in quick succession, he retweeted two more accounts featuring white nationalist or Nazi themes.

In fact, Mr. Trump’s Twitter presence is tightly interwoven with hordes of mostly anonymous accounts trafficking in racist and anti-Semitic attacks. 

All of which makes me re-post this image in challenge to Trump supporters: