I ran across this article from Victor David Hanson, whom is a conservative commentator and unlike most of the stuff out there, he doesn't hate Trump from what I can tell. He brings up some salient points and something to think about in the 2020 election cycle. The truth of the matter, He doesn't think Trump will fare badly and probably do well if he does what he did in the 2016 election. Trumps appeal is to the "Middle class" the forgotten ones that form the bedrock of the society and their concerns are dismissed, they are called "Deplorable" or mocked for being "Bitter Clingers" remember this gem from the Messiah? This was said during a fundraiser for one of the democratic candidates by the 44th President of the United States.
You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small
towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and
nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton
administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive
administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna
regenerate and they have not.
And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or
religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or
anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain
their frustrations.
This attitude is where Donald Trump picked up so much support especially
in the "Blue line states that traditionally went democrat. You have
Obama and then the 2016 democratic candidate Hillary trying to run coal out of existence for example, or destroy other industries because they are "politically incorrect". The democrats have forgotten their base and are totally ate up with identity politics. This will in my opinion will burn them in the 2020 election cycle.
Just seven months into
Donald Trump’s administration we are already bombarded with political
angling and speculations about the 2020 presidential race. No one knows
in the next three years what can happen to a volatile Trump presidency
or his psychotic enemies, but for now such pronouncements of doom seem
amnesiac if not absurd.
Things are supposedly not going well politically with Donald Trump
lately, after a series of administration firings, internecine White
House warring, and controversial tweets. A
Gallup Poll
has him at only a 34 percent positive rating, and losing some support
even among Republicans (down to 79 percent)—although contrarily a recent
Rasmussen survey shows him improving to the mid-forties in
popularity. Nonetheless, we are warned that even if Trump is lucky
enough not to be impeached, if he is not removed under the 25th
Amendment or the Emoluments Clause, if he does not resign in shame, even
if he has the stamina to continue under such chaos, even if he seeks
reelection and thus even more punishment, he simply
cannot win in 2020.
In answer to such assumed expertise, one could answer with
Talleyrand’s purported quip about our modern-day Bourbons that “They had
learned nothing and forgotten nothing.”
Namely, Trump’s enraged critics still do not grasp that he is a
reflection
of, not a catalyst for, widespread anger and unhappiness with
globalization, interventionist foreign policy, Orwellian political
correctness, identity politics, tribalism, open borders, and a Deep
State that lectures and condemns but never lives the consequences of its
own sermonizing.
In particular, the current conundrum and prognostications ignore several constants.
Do Americans Really Believe that Pollsters and the Media Have Reformed?
One, despite the recent Gallup poll, most polls still show Trump’s at
about a 40 percent approval rating—nearly the same level of support as
shortly before the November 2016 election. That purported dismal level
of support is pronounced to be near fatal, when in fact it is not.
Since a) pollsters likely have not much changed their methodology
since 2016, and since b) it is fair so assume that the media and those
who poll for them continue to despise Trump, and since c) Trump’s
exasperating eccentricities continue to make his supporters cautious
about voicing their support (even to anonymous pollsters and political
surveyors), we can conclude that his actual support could be about 45-47
percent—or close to the percentage of the popular vote he won in 2016.
Given that Trump’s base in the key swing states of the Midwest (the
so-called Democratic “blue wall”) has not weakened, there is no real
reason yet to think Trump could not win the Electoral College again in
2020 in the same fashion as 2016. In 2004 and 2012, we were told
respectively that an unpopular George W. Bush and a sinking Barack Obama
might lose reelection; instead they both were re-elected largely with
the same election calculus and an even stronger base of support that
carried them to victory four years earlier.
Do Americans Really Believe the Messenger Nullifies the Message?
As in 2016, many of those who voted for Trump would prefer that he
curb his tweets, clean up his language, sleep eight instead of five
hours, and follow all the conventional-wisdom admonitions offered about
his misbehavior. But that said, nearly half of the country is probably
still willing to overlook his eccentricities for several reasons.
Trump now has a presidential record of eight months. Despite the
media’s neglect of it, one can sense changes by just getting out and
traveling the country. Even in rural central California, one can feel
that it really is true that there is a
76 percent drop in illegal immigration, and immigration law is being taken seriously as never before.
It was no accident that the National Council of La Raza without warning dropped its racialist nomenclature and is now
UnidosUS
(“Together, US”). Why is the Democratic Party now feigning a focus on
class, not racial, issues with its new “Better Deal” FDR/Truman-like
echo?
The same pragmatics about changed attitudes are reflected in dozens
of local roadside canteens in my environs that have taken down their
showy Mexican flags and are now waving even larger American ones. Cement
trucks and construction cranes are ubiquitous on the roads in a way not
true over the prior eight years. Talk to business people, and they are
citing new projects and investments, not voicing anxieties about higher
taxes and more regulatory hostility.
The point is not just that no one can know the ultimate
fate of the Trump agenda, but rather that so far media hysteria and
congressional calcification have not stopped perceived conservative
progress. The bottom line is that Trump did prove to be far more
conservative than Republican establishmentarians had forecast.
Much of Trump’s success so far comes despite congressional ossification and is clearly
psychological:
people with money to invest or to build things prefer to do so when the
head of the regulatory state urges them to create jobs, make money, and
help their country get richer, not when he warns them that it is not
the time to profit, that they need to share and spread around their
wealth, that they must calibrate when they have made enough profits, and
that they should concede that the state built their businesses as much
as their own daring and talent.
Despite congressional failure so far on reforming Obamacare,
conservatives are delighted not just with the Neil Gorsuch Supreme Court
appointment, but also with literally dozens of conservative lower
federal court appointments, who are both youngish and judicially
restrained. Would they have preferred to let Hillary Clinton decide the
trajectory of the Supreme Court for the next two or three decades?
Does anyone think a President John McCain or
Mitt Romney would have pulled out of the Paris climate change accord?
Trump’s team is reinventing the Environmental Protection Agency,
giving clean coal a second life, opening up natural gas and oil
exploration on federal lands, building pipelines, and exporting energy.
The crash in world oil prices is bankrupting exporters like Russia,
Middle East autocracies, and the Gulf States, whose influences are now
pruned back by a dearth of cash.
The major cabinet officials are competing to deregulate the deep state and free up individual initiative.
At home the economy grew at
a 2.6 percent annualized rate last quarter,
and corporate profits at are record levels. So is the Dow Jones
Industrial Average. Unemployment is lower than at any time in an over a
decade.
The trade deficit is even shrinking and lots of companies have
announced relocations to the United States, in reaction to record cheap
energy costs and a perceived favorable business environment. And all
this comes at a time when the United States is neither seeking optional
military interventions nor backing away from thuggish aggression, but is
trying to thread the needle in restoring deterrence along the lines of
“principled realism.”
The point is not just that no one can know the ultimate fate of the
Trump agenda, but rather that so far media hysteria and congressional
calcification have not stopped perceived conservative progress. The
bottom line is that Trump did prove to be far more conservative than
Republican establishmentarians had forecast. To his supporters, Trump’s
message is usually distinguished from Trump, the messenger. Politically
that means pragmatist supporters can focus on his agenda not his tweets,
while Trump’s die-hard voters like his Twitter combativeness, viewing
it as a long overdue media comeuppance.
Trump himself is less rather than more likely to keep running a
chaotic White House. Appointments like John Kelly as chief of staff, or
H.R. McMaster as national security advisor and James Mattis as defense
secretary are not symptoms of a sell out to the Deep State, but evidence
of Trump’s own acknowledgment that for his populism to be effective, he
needs structure and focus.
In sum, lots of Americans support what Trump is doing rather than
agreeing with what he sometimes is saying and tweeting—and even more of
his base like both.
Do Americans Really Listen to the Conservative Elite Establishment?
Third, Trump does not run in a vacuum, but always in a landscape of
alternatives. The Republican Party is split, but so far the NeverTrump
establishment is smaller and less influential than the returning
Tea-Party/Trump/Reagan Democrat conservative base that in part sat out
in 2008 and 2012 or once voted Democratic.
One of the strangest ironies of the present age is that Trump’s populism (e.g., “our farmers”, “our vets”, “our coal miners”, “our workers”),
which saved the Senate and House for Republicans and delivered the
greatest Republican majorities on the local and state level since the
1920s, is either ridiculed or ignored.
What Trump loses to elite Republican and conservative disdain
expressed in op-eds and news show round tables or to Lindsey Graham and
John McCain-like denunciations, he has more than made up with new
populist Republican support in small towns and communities nationwide.
For now, it is hard to imagine any other potential Republican nominee
rallying a crowd like Trump or appealing to the losers of globalization
in such dramatic fashion.
That we are, once again, being advised that Republican grandees are
looking for a new version of Evan McMullin, or that a cranky John Kasich
will reenter the primary race in 2020, or that Jeff Flake insists that
he is the moral superior to those who stooped to vote for Trump, to be
honest, means
nada.
More than 90 percent of Republicans voted for Trump before he had a
political record, and about the same will do it again based on his
conservative agenda as expressed and enacted so far. If the economy hits
3 percent economic growth, with near 4 percent unemployment, the Dow
does not crash, and if the Russian collusion charges end up only with
symbolic scalps (and all that is possible if not likely), Trump will win
over half the independents, solidify his base and likely take the
Electoral College.
One of the strangest ironies of the present age is that Trump’s populism (e.g., “
our farmers”, “
our vets”, “
our coal miners”, “
our
workers”), which saved the Senate and House for Republicans and
delivered the greatest Republican majorities on the local and state
level since the 1920s, is either ridiculed or ignored.
Yet the more the economy picks up, the more the administration prunes
back the regulatory state, and the more the United States restores
deterrence, the shriller will be the argument that Trump’s tweets and
behavior nullify solid achievement. Just watch.
Will the New Democratic/Progressive Party Really Rebuild the Blue Wall?
Fourth and finally, the less publicized split in the Democratic Party
is probably worse than that of its Republican counterpart. The latter
did not stop Trump’s victory in the Electoral College, the former helped
ensure Hillary’s “Blue Wall” collapsed.
Truth is, the party mortgaged its soul to the identity
politics lobby, and thereby embraced a number of fatally wrong
assumptions.
The current head of the Democratic National Committee, Thomas Perez,
is best known for his profanity-laced tirades; his more unstable
subordinate Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) recently claimed that Kim
Jong-un was a more responsible actor than the president of the United
States, while Justice Neil Gorsuch was an illegitimate Supreme Court
judge. The former DNC head, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, is facing myriad
bizarre scandals. Her replacement Donna Brazile became most famous as a
CNN talking head who leaked debate questions to the Clinton campaign.
With disreputable icons like these, who needs opposition research?
Almost any of Bill Clinton’s 1990s talking points on government,
immigration, race, taxes, or law enforcement could not be voiced today
by any mainstream Democratic politician. In 2008, Hillary drank with
boilermakers; in 2016 she smeared the lower middle class with taunts of
“deplorables” and “irredeemables.”
Truth is, the party mortgaged its soul to the identity politics
lobby, and thereby embraced a number of fatally wrong assumptions.
First, record minority registration and turnout for Barack Obama were
not automatically transferable to other Democrat grandees. Obama pushed
the party hard leftward with a new strategy of uniting previously
feuding minority groups under an us/them binary of anti-“white
privilege” while at the same time soothing liberals with his Ivy League
pedigree, his exotic hip multicultural name, and his mellifluent
banality. It is hard to see too many other candidates recreating such
political gymnastics.
Democrats are finally worrying that they have lost the
white working class; they should be even more terrified that they might
lose 40 percent of the traditional minority vote if the economy keeps
growing and Trump keeps talking about protecting low wage-earners from
the dual threats of globalization and illegal immigration.
Second, if Obama did not bequeath an upside legacy, he certainly left
a downside. Tribal obsessions with identity politics were implicitly an
attack on the white working class. Those in Ohio and Pennsylvania were
not just angry for being written off as bitter clingers, irredeemables,
and deplorables, but also furious to be scapegoated for having “white
privilege” by those who alone enjoyed it. A party run by Pajama Boys,
half-educated media talking heads, Middlebury-prolonged adolescents, Bay
Area billionaire techies in t-shirts and flip-flops, Hollywood gated
grandees, Al Gore green elites, and Black Lives Matter activists is not
going to win easily back Michigan and Wisconsin.
Finally, the Democrats failed to see that class-based populism is a
far more inclusionary and thus dynamic phenomenon than is racial
tribalism—for both whites and non-whites. Democrats are finally worrying
that they have lost the white working class; they should be even more
terrified that they might lose 40 percent of the traditional minority
vote if the economy keeps growing and Trump keeps talking about
protecting low wage-earners from the dual threats of globalization and
illegal immigration.
In sum, the Democratic Party has learned nothing and forgotten
nothing. It is doubling down on exactly what lost it the Blue Wall.
Ditto the Republican NeverTrump establishment that seeks to recapture
relevance by reemphasizing exactly what lost it influence in 2016. The
argument that Trump, the man, is so beyond moral redemption that Trump’s
agenda is irrelevant will not fly with those who feel that they are
already better off than in 2016. And the idea that conservative populism
is a temporary deviation from a winning and properly orthodox Jeb Bush
conservatism is delusional.
Trumpism is not an eponymous political movement
per se. It was merely an adjective for the reification of far greater preexisting political realities
