Trump to Congresswomen: Go back to your own country!

[_EAllusion]

I read the poll. It just finds much lower approval for Trump among Republicans than the average of polls. Gallup, for instance, finds an approval rating for Trump among Republicans right now at 90%. The other side of the story is that his approval dipped among independents by 4 points and among Democrats by 2 points, leading to an overall dip. Because of the sample size, it's hard to know if the fluctuation in the subgroups represents real movement or is just normal variance. My best guess is this news story is going to lead to a small, but detectable dip in his polls that he'll rebound from shortly thereafter.

[_EAllusion]

If we get back to the original point, it was that it benefits Trump to make the Squad the face of the Democratic party over any of the Democratic Presidential field or the party leadership.

Oh, that's not easy to say either. Suppose you are a Democrat who has median Democrat policy goals. If the public face of the Democrats is further to the left, that makes people to the right of them seem more "moderate" by comparison, and the public loves itself some moderates. The result is you end up shifting people's sense of what a moderate political position is and win political battles that way. Republicans have been benefiting from this overton window shift for literal decades. Democrats could plausibly benefit too. I mean, it probably already has with Sanders' success. The public is measurably shifting to the left on economic policy and it is very plausible that the Sanders' wing's pull on people's sense of what moderation looks like is at least partially responsible for that.

even with Sanders or Warren as the face of the party.

The politics of "the squad" are right in the area of Sanders and Warren. Warren is arguably to the left of them. The only difference is they are younger and therefore speak "woke" more naturally.

[_ajax18]

Negative messaging on Trump might be working, you know.

As it does on any Republican even a RINO.

I'm willing to trust the guy who delivered a victory rather than fall back and take the soft route of compromise led by someone who did nothing but lose (Mitt Romney).

[_Brackite]

As it does on any Republican even a RINO.

I'm willing to trust the guy who delivered a victory rather than fall back and take the soft route of compromise led by someone who did nothing but lose (Mitt Romney).

I never got the list pointing out from that list of all the Republicans of which ones are the RINOs and of which ones are the true and real Republicans. Apparently, Trump is a true and real Republican. But I wouldn't classify Trump as a real fiscal conservative since the National debt has increased by about $2.5 trillion during his Presidency.

[_Res Ipsa]

I read the poll. It just finds much lower approval for Trump among Republicans than the average of polls. Gallup, for instance, finds an approval rating for Trump among Republicans right now at 90%. The other side of the story is that his approval dipped among independents by 4 points and among Democrats by 2 points, leading to an overall dip. Because of the sample size, it's hard to know if the fluctuation in the subgroups represents real movement or is just normal variance. My best guess is this news story is going to lead to a small, but detectable dip in his polls that he'll rebound from shortly thereafter.

I believe the difference is between approval rating and net approval rating.

[_MeDotOrg]

By the way, the EEOC identifies 'go back to where you came from' as a anti-discrimination law violation:

Many on social media have been pointing to a federal guidance from the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) that identifies the phrase "Go back to where you came from" as language that could violate anti-discrimination laws in the wake of recent attacks by President Trump targeting four lawmakers of color.

On its website, the federal agency, which enforces the government's employment discrimination laws, states that “ethnic slurs and other verbal or physical conduct because of nationality are illegal if they are severe or pervasive and create an intimidating, hostile or offensive working environment, interfere with work performance, or negatively affect job opportunities.”

"Examples of potentially unlawful conduct include insults, taunting, or ethnic epithets, such as making fun of a person's foreign accent or comments like, 'Go back to where you came from,' whether made by supervisors or by co-workers,” it adds.

I wonder if 'Go back to where you came from' is part of Melania's 'Be Best' campaign. She is a woman who worked without a green card in the good ol' US of A and then brought her parents in through chain migration. Is she looking over her shoulder? Probably not.

[_EAllusion]

I read the poll. It just finds much lower approval for Trump among Republicans than the average of polls. Gallup, for instance, finds an approval rating for Trump among Republicans right now at 90%. The other side of the story is that his approval dipped among independents by 4 points and among Democrats by 2 points, leading to an overall dip. Because of the sample size, it's hard to know if the fluctuation in the subgroups represents real movement or is just normal variance. My best guess is this news story is going to lead to a small, but detectable dip in his polls that he'll rebound from shortly thereafter.

I believe the difference is between approval rating and net approval rating.

That is the difference.

[_EAllusion]

Brian Beutler sums up what happened here in just a few words:

"Trump tweeted an unprompted racist attack on the four congresswomen because he saw them on a Fox News segment, and when the racist attack drew outrage, he invented a cover story and picked a scapegoat, who is now the victim of endless slander and in physical danger."

[_EAllusion]

Maybe we need to have a adjective-free day. Terms such as "brilliant" or even "strategic" are getting tossed around and inserted where they weren't originally used, implied, or in the case of strategic, outright argued against.

I was following Kevin's initial comment that talked about people who think the president is playing "4-D Chess." It is the case there is a contingent of people out there convinced that Trump's various outrages are actually a very sophisticated strategy to manipulate media coverage and people's attitudes that's working. This often comes with a scoldy attitude that people are wrong for focusing on this or that because it is somehow playing into Trump's hands to do so.

The reality is Trump is a not very bright person who has a lot of offensive opinions he shares constantly. Sometimes it is deliberate trolling, but often times he's just reacting live to stuff he's seen on Fox News. And while Trump is a beneficiary of creating so many outrages that the media and public have a hard time focusing in on any one particular one, thus preventing widespread realization of just how bad some of his individual scandals are, it is not the case that Trump being a endless series of scandalous things is actually good politics. Trump is way more unpopular than the conditions gifted to him should dictate.

It just happens to work well in the world of social media and 24 hour news cycles. That a tree grows in the crack of a rock isn't evidence of the intelligence of some brilliant tree planting strategy. It's just that one seed happened to land where the conditions were ripe for it to take root and grow there.

We agree about this, of course. Though I would add that "work well" is a relative term in this context.

[_EAllusion]

I've seen the Trump admin described many times as "malice tempered by incompetence." The idea that has consumed me is whether Trump being a total buffoon is part of the secret sauce to his relative success or if you could have a Trump who knows what he is doing exploit the same faults in the system. Trump being a clown seems to be disarming for some of what he gets away with in relative terms, but he's also showing how the guardrails are down. He should've been impeached by now, and it's not going to happen.

So what if there was a Trump who was actually a good politician? I don't know, but the prospect of a a smarter Trump, like a President Tom Cotton, is very concerning. Given the overall state of the Republican party, we're not very far from becoming another Hungary or Poland.