Peter Beinart, writing at The Atlantic, is on to something when he writes, “In the past, the president riled up his base by exploiting violent incidents in the news. Now he just manufactures his own controversies.”
Here is a taste of his piece:
Over the past two weeks, as President Donald Trump has picked fights with Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, and now Elijah Cummings, a consensus has emerged: Trump has begun his reelection campaign. He’s stoking bigotry to motivate his conservative white base.
It makes sense. But if Trump is launching an offensive, he’s also trying to solve a problem: He has less material. Over the course of Trump’s 2016 campaign, the United States and its allies experienced spasms of deadly violence, which helped him convince white Christian Americans that only he could protect them from a supposed threat from Muslims and blacks. Today, although America still experiences plenty of violence—mass shootings, for instance—it’s not the kind that fits Trump’s narrative. So instead of exploiting incendiary events, he has to create them.
Read the rest here.
Some weeks ago, a TIME magazine article claimed that Trump’s 2020 strategy is to whip his base up into new heights of Fanaticism and ignore all other demographics, counting on the zeal of a fanatic base to carry the election. (Don’t know about you, but this sounds like a very risky strategy.) Some blog comments on the subject added that this strategy also lends itself to a fallback “Second Amendment Solution” Twitter call
if he should loseif the Deep State steals the election.In many ways the Dems are not so much a party as a European politics-style coalition of One True Way factions kept from fragmenting by the presence of an outside enemy, the GOP. I keep seeing parallels to the former Warsaw Pact nations, when literally thousands of political parties (many of them with only one member) popped up after Gorbachev’s Fire Sale, no two of them cooperating — and kept getting rolled over for years by the former Communist Party’s established political machine.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is ideally suited to be the Poster Child for The Other/The Enemy; in many ways she’s like Trump — inexperienced, shoots off her mouth off-the-cuff, a in-your-face maverick who “does not play well with others”.