Trump to Congresswomen: Go back to your own country!

[_Some Schmo]

Trump being popular with his base is easily explained by noting that people flock to like-minded people. If there was an election for the king of the apes, an ape is going to have a much better shot at it than a dolphin. When you think, talk and behave like an idiot, you will appeal to other idiots.

People will say Trump knows "just what to say" to his base. Yeah. And a dog knows which end of a dog to sniff to get to know them.

[_honorentheos]

...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.

In some way, his shamelessness helps protect him as well. He says things in public that probably make his lawyers question their own life choices, like the Comey firing as just one example that comes to mind. But it's brashness creates a buffer that wouldn't be there if it was exposed through leaks or investigative reporting. It's not "crazy like a fox" behavior, he's just lived a privileged life where he rarely suffered consequences that might have otherwise taught him there are line that ought not to be crossed. His inability to handle criticism is evidence for this.

He should've been impeached by now, and it's not going to happen.

I agree. I don't think the future historians are going to be kind to this chapter of our history regardless of it being a bump or a watershed moment heralding our shift away from the liberal values of the nation's founding.

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.

It seems we have a perfect conflation of key people in the wrong places that enable this. Of the players, I would put Mitch McConnell far above Trump as shouldering responsibility for the state of things. Unlike Trump, McConnell knows how the machine of Democracy works, and is deliberately removing gears so it only works in his favor. Without McConnell the dynamics in the Senate would be far different, as would the country. Paul Ryan may have caved early on, but one has to ask if Congress as a whole had stood by their supposed principles would we be seeing the nation's financial future being flushed down the drain for current polling advantages? I don't know. McConnell is the villain in the story, in my opinion. Trump is a clown and a dangerous one. But a clown nonetheless.

[_EAllusion]

McConnell is a malevolent figure, but I am fairly certain that it is mostly McConnell’s all the way down. Strike down McConnell, and a McConnell will replace him.

[_DarkHelmet]

I'm curious about the Trump supporters chanting "send her back". How would this work? Do they think Trump can sign an executive order and have military personnel drag her out of the capital building and put her on a plane to Somalia? How can Trump send her back? Do they believe it is possible, or are they just saying stupid crap because Trump has them worked up? And I'm afraid to ask this question, but do they really, honestly want Trump to do that?

[_EAllusion]

It’s not rational Dark. It’s just a variation of saying Go back to Africa. It’s a primal expression of saying this country isn’t for your kind; it’s for ours.

[_Xenophon]

It’s not rational Dark. It’s just a variation of saying Go back to Africa. It’s a primal expression of saying this country isn’t for your kind; it’s for ours.

To expand on this and touch on DarkHelmet's question I think we have seen this same kind of pattern over and over again. Most of them are elated to hear Trump say the same things they think and say. Whether it is that immigrants are rapists and criminals, building the wall, locking Clinton up, a Muslim ban, or any other of the terrifying things he has said it isn't really about the action itself. Rather, it is about him signaling that he is "one of them" and that he "gets them" with the base happy to accept that acknowledgement.

[_Res Ipsa]

It’s not rational Dark. It’s just a variation of saying Go back to Africa. It’s a primal expression of saying this country isn’t for your kind; it’s for ours.

It’s worse than that. They claim she committed immigration fraud by marrying her brother as justification for revoking her citizenship. Birtherism all over again.

[_EAllusion]

It’s worse than that. They claim she committed immigration fraud by marrying her brother as justification for revoking her citizenship. Birtherism all over again.

That’s a new twist to me. I was just referring to the chant and “go back” mentality.

I was commenting elsewhere that I am seeing Republicans not willing to go all in on obvious racist tropes have found a wonderful middle ground where they argue that while Omar et. al. say horrible, hateful anti-American things all the time, that doesn’t make it ok to tell them to leave. That their qualifier itself is a dishonest smear is being glossed over in coverage of them and it gets to look like the moderate take.

This itself is of course relies on racial stereotyping, but if you try to point that out, you leave yourself open to the, “you guys think everything you don’t like is racist” gambit.

Once you get past the whole President leading a hate rally thing, my attention was focused on getting away with the big lie that these Congressional Reps are darkly unpatriotic by manufacturing a racist debate about whether it is ok to want them to leave for that reason.

Birtherism redux just adds more awfulness to this.

[_Res Ipsa]

I think all this hand wringing is unwarranted. This incident drove Trump’s approval down among independents. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa- ... SKCN1UB2UD Democrats aren’t driving away the center — Trump is.

Epstein will be back in the news. What Trump did was drive the story of divided Democrats in disarray out of the news for a bit. Trump says and does outrageous things every day to fire up his base. But let Democrats do something that fires up their base, then the sky is falling.

We Democrats heard this same song and dance during the Kavanaugh hearings: this was sure to result in losing the 2018 midterms. How’d that work out?

How it worked out was the GOP base was energized in a way that quite possibly prevented the very improbable Democrat taking of the Senate that looked possible in September 2018 despite the odds being stacked against it.

This isn't about hand wringing. It's about being clear-eyed and disciplined.

Other than the breathless exclamations of a few pundits, I never saw any evidence at any time that the Democrats had a chance in hell of retaking the Senate. The narrative during and after the K hearings was that the D’s had blown their chance to retake the house, with lots of hand wringing.

Part of why the Relief Society succeed at doing outrageous things is that they do it with confidence and even swagger. Playing to their base is seen as a strength. Relief Society on the other hand react to everything the Ds do by loudly proclaiming that the ads have just insured a Republican victory. And the Democrats fall for it every time.

I think we Democrats should fret less about the R base, which Trump can easily energize by simply lying to them, and act with more confidence in promoting our plans for making the US a better country.

[_EAllusion]

Democrats had an outside shot at the Senate. It didn’t pan out, but I don’t think a Republican victory was obvious from the point of view of Sept. 2028.

I think the real takeaway from the torrent of “Democrats are blowing it by not doing what conservatives want at every turn” narratives is that they have absolutely no clue what actually motivates voter behavior.