28 Feb Has Trump Gone Too Far?
The other day, the political scientist Ruy Teixeira penned an article in which he asked if President Trump is, perhaps, overstepping his mandate. He concluded, in brief, that “the early polling suggests that Trump is [indeed] going too far too fast.” He continued:
This is the data’s message: Trump was elected to shake up the system, but in the service of specific popular priorities that Democrats ignored, especially cutting illegal immigration and improving living standards. He was not elected to do what excites the most online segment of his GOP base or what suits his personal priorities, such as across-the-board government cuts and pardoning the January 6 defendants.
In short, Trump may be overinterpreting his mandate, just as Biden did in 2021.
Teixeira is almost certainly right about a lot of things in this article, including his conclusion that Trump is focusing too much on the priorities of the hardline and online Right, even as he focuses too little on the nation’s economic well-being. I say this in part because I can read polls too, and in part because, over the last decade or so, Teixeira has been right about a lot of things. After embarrassing himself with his much-ballyhooed early 2000s theory that demographics would create a semi-permanent Democratic majority, Teixeira shed much of his ideological bias and has become one of the most perceptive and honest center-left political analysts in the business. His repeated warnings to Democrats about their focus on divisive cultural issues rather than economic issues were clearly ignored but were just as clearly prescient.
All of that said, the most telling part of the answer to the question about Trump’s performance and whether or not he is “going too far” is one Teixeria understandably ignores, namely whether anyone will be able to make that case coherently to voters and take advantage of it. Trump’s performance, in other words, has to be measured in part by his opponents’ ability to provide a palatable alternative. It makes no difference if Trump cranks the crazy up 10, if the opposition is at 11 and climbing.
And that’s exactly where they are.
When I talk about “the opposition” to Trump, I mostly mean the Democratic Party, but I also mean the media. And if the Democrats are already at 11 – and they are – then the media is out chasing down Graham’s Number. As the Gallup graph below shows, no one likes the media, and no one trusts the media. Their behavior toward and derangement because of Donald Trump is not the only factor in the media’s collapse, but it is a big one.
As for the Democrats, two recent incidents demonstrate the enormity of the problems they face. The first is the following article, published in the premier journal of Leftist politics, The New Republic, about how Democrats should go about bridging the gender gap.
While Democrats were busily reminding women, people of color, and other parts of their base about the dangers of another Trump presidency, Trump was tapping into the anger and vulnerabilities of young men.
You can, as they say, “read the whole thing,” but you don’t really need to. Those 33 words sum up both the article and the Democrats’ approach to men quite nicely: anyone who would vote for Donald Trump, and men who would do so, especially, are dysfunctional. The Left presumes that its approach to politics is the natural, default approach to politics. All things being equal and normal, everyone would vote for our guys (and gals!) because why wouldn’t they? The only reason anyone anywhere would vote for a Republican is because something is wrong. Perhaps they have been deceived. Or maybe they’re just not that smart to begin with. Or it could be that something is bothering them, and they don’t know where to turn for help. We don’t know what the problem is, only that there must be one.
The Democrats treat being male and just wanting to be left alone as a pathology. They can waste all the breath they want trying to figure out how best to “woo” male voters, and they can conduct as many studies on the gender gap as George Soros’s money can buy, but none of it will make a damn bit of difference. As long as they assume that maleness, as it has existed since time immemorial, is something to be studied and analyzed and wooed in specific ways and, ultimately, “fixed,” they will lose the male vote. It’s that simple.
As for the rest of the voters, Democrats – or at least their media mouthpiece who formerly served as Joe Biden’s mouthpiece, Jen Psaki – has settled on explanations #1 and #2 above, as well as a another I didn’t mention: voters are dumb, and we’re just not speaking slowly enough and using small enough words to convince them that Orange man bad; they were “fooled” by crafty and nasty Republicans; and the Democratic Party is simply too darn good and righteous to be able appeal to the generally loathsome electorate:
There are efforts in different places to explore that question … It is a multitude of things. It is how the Democrats are communicating about issues, … it’s misinformation and disinformation.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but if your best explanation for your loss is that your “messaging” was bad, then you’re in HUGE trouble. “Our ideas are great, but they just don’t get it!” has never been an especially effective approach to winning elections, and it will likely be even less so going forward. The Democrats are in quite a pickle.
To be fair, Republicans were similarly pickled in 2021, and they pulled themselves together and won both of the next two elections. And the Democrats can do the same and should, by historical standards, be expected to do the same. But they’re not going to have much luck in the long-term unless and until they understand that their detestation of the electorate is at the root of their problems.
Has Trump gone too far? Maybe. Kinda? But then, maybe he’s not gone far enough. It’s not often that a president is gifted with an opposition that is this clueless and this stubborn. Perhaps he has an historic opportunity here. Perhaps he can do anything and everything he wants to do because the Democrats continue to misjudge the American people and their desire to be left out of their weirdness. I dunno.
Time will tell, I suppose.
