It's Gonna Be a Long Eight Years!
Unfortunately, I didn't mistype. Despite his terrible inaugural approval ratings, his dark and hostile inaugural address, the assurance of endless personal scandal, and a policy forecast suggesting America's 45th President plans to govern in direct contrast to his populist propaganda, I think we're stuck with him until January 20, 2025. And I come to this conclusion not simply as an overcorrection for underestimating Trump in November. After all, I was sounding alarm bells throughout the year that Trump was gonna be stronger than people thought given his message and the dynamics of the race. I think Trump gets a second term because he's uniquely skilled at shoring up a larger slice of the tribal, culture war pie.
The consensus opinion is that Trump's inaugural speech yesterday was unlike anything we've seen in living memory, defying tradition by provoking rather than unifying a divided nation. Trump recognizes it's futile to try to pacify his critics, and is coming right out of the gate by proclaiming solidarity with those--and only those--who bought into the Trump message at the outset. This may portend nasty things for a permanently inflamed divisions in the country, but it's great politics because.....Trump knows those divisions will be inflamed anyway. And given that his governing blueprint is likely to cause even more economic disruptions for his blue-collar base, Trump's highest political priority needs to be keeping the cultural divide at a permanently elevated posture so that his coalition is more distracted by their rage at "those people" than they are about their continued decline, a decline that will be accelerated if Trump and the GOP Congress steals their health care and cuts their Social Security and Medicare as now looks incredibly likely.
Republicans have long been masterful at maintaining the least natural demographics of their coalition by constantly provoking the culture war, but Trump has taken it to a whole different level and managed to bring in millions more downscale voters into the coalition by advancing an economic worldview that contrasts sharply with the laissez faire Republican consensus dating back to the Reagan years (and even before). Most people in the media and even many of Trump's own downscale voters insist that he's merely on probation with this demographic and they'll abandon him if he doesn't deliver. It seems unlikely for two key reasons....
First, Trump is a pathological liar....and no matter how good or bad economic and jobs numbers are three years from now, he will insist they've never been better, and his conservative media echo chamber will validate those claims and soften the edges of whatever unmistakable damage has been done in terms of, say, 20 million Americans having their health insurance taken away. Second, Trump knows exactly how to talk to his voters, while the opposition party and especially its rank-and-file have absolutely no clue how to talk to Trump's voters. Trump will continue to make provocative us-versus-them polemics like yesterday's inaugural speech throughout his entire term, and the left will always respond with snooty tone-deafness. One of Trump's most brilliant rhetorical moments during the 2016 campaign was his proclamation that he "loves the poorly educated", setting up the emissaries of the "people's party" to loudly sneer at the expense of the "poorly educated". Trump knows exactly what buttons to push and what strawman enemies to build and burn down. He's not gonna get less good at this in the years ahead....and given their empty bench, it's very unlikely the Democrats are gonna get better at responding to it when he does.
And about that empty Democratic bench? Where do they go from here? Who is the face of the Democratic Party in 2020 after they've spent three of the last four election cycles watching all of their rising stars getting voted out en masse? All the chatter among progressives is that if Democrats had run Bernie Sanders in 2016, he'd be President right now. I'm not so sure. Even if Sanders was able to do well enough with the white working class to win Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, he'd have been much easier to define as an unthinkable socialist among the cosmopolitan suburbanites in Colorado and Virginia, which are every bit as necessary to get to 270 electoral votes as the Rust Belt states. North Carolina and Florida would likely have been completely off the table as battleground states if the Democrats had run Bernie. That's all Monday morning quarterbacking, but especially now with Trump having so thoroughly claimed the mantle as the voice of the white working-class, it's hard to see much of an opening for a Democrat of Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren's pedigree to poach those voters back, at least without forfeiting moderate voters in the Democratic coalition.
So do the Democrats go with a cosmopolitan slickster of the Gavin Newsom fold, running primarily on a social justice platform and campaigning almost exclusively in big cities in hopes of hanging onto the volatile Obama coalition and winning over just a few more center-right upscale suburbanites embarrassed by Trump to thread an Electoral College needle? We know how well that worked in 2016.....when Trump was completely untested and thus more vulnerable to defining as unacceptable. Incumbent Presidents are hard to beat because even if voters don't really like them, they've proven themselves merely by having governed before. Only if we're mired in a deep recession as we were in 1932, 1980, and 1992, do voters take seriously the idea of throwing out a sitting President in favor of an untested replacement. And given the magnitude of the tribal fault lines in American politics today, I'm not even sure a huge recession would be enough for the majority coalition to abandon their candidate, particularly with as good as Trump is in defining any and all opposition as unacceptable.
Trump started his Presidency yesterday by throwing Molotov cocktails at his critics because he understands what they don't. Success in American politics today has nothing to do with bringing a divided nation together, it has to do with cobbling together a bare plurality of voters by exacerbating the nation's divisions. Trump will spend four years stoking that and the clueless left will respond in kind, continuing to be unaware of just how toxic cultural liberalism is in Middle America. With that in mind, the biggest question will be what the tone of Trump's next inaugural speech on January 20, 2021, will be when he has no more campaigns to run.
The consensus opinion is that Trump's inaugural speech yesterday was unlike anything we've seen in living memory, defying tradition by provoking rather than unifying a divided nation. Trump recognizes it's futile to try to pacify his critics, and is coming right out of the gate by proclaiming solidarity with those--and only those--who bought into the Trump message at the outset. This may portend nasty things for a permanently inflamed divisions in the country, but it's great politics because.....Trump knows those divisions will be inflamed anyway. And given that his governing blueprint is likely to cause even more economic disruptions for his blue-collar base, Trump's highest political priority needs to be keeping the cultural divide at a permanently elevated posture so that his coalition is more distracted by their rage at "those people" than they are about their continued decline, a decline that will be accelerated if Trump and the GOP Congress steals their health care and cuts their Social Security and Medicare as now looks incredibly likely.
Republicans have long been masterful at maintaining the least natural demographics of their coalition by constantly provoking the culture war, but Trump has taken it to a whole different level and managed to bring in millions more downscale voters into the coalition by advancing an economic worldview that contrasts sharply with the laissez faire Republican consensus dating back to the Reagan years (and even before). Most people in the media and even many of Trump's own downscale voters insist that he's merely on probation with this demographic and they'll abandon him if he doesn't deliver. It seems unlikely for two key reasons....
First, Trump is a pathological liar....and no matter how good or bad economic and jobs numbers are three years from now, he will insist they've never been better, and his conservative media echo chamber will validate those claims and soften the edges of whatever unmistakable damage has been done in terms of, say, 20 million Americans having their health insurance taken away. Second, Trump knows exactly how to talk to his voters, while the opposition party and especially its rank-and-file have absolutely no clue how to talk to Trump's voters. Trump will continue to make provocative us-versus-them polemics like yesterday's inaugural speech throughout his entire term, and the left will always respond with snooty tone-deafness. One of Trump's most brilliant rhetorical moments during the 2016 campaign was his proclamation that he "loves the poorly educated", setting up the emissaries of the "people's party" to loudly sneer at the expense of the "poorly educated". Trump knows exactly what buttons to push and what strawman enemies to build and burn down. He's not gonna get less good at this in the years ahead....and given their empty bench, it's very unlikely the Democrats are gonna get better at responding to it when he does.
And about that empty Democratic bench? Where do they go from here? Who is the face of the Democratic Party in 2020 after they've spent three of the last four election cycles watching all of their rising stars getting voted out en masse? All the chatter among progressives is that if Democrats had run Bernie Sanders in 2016, he'd be President right now. I'm not so sure. Even if Sanders was able to do well enough with the white working class to win Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, he'd have been much easier to define as an unthinkable socialist among the cosmopolitan suburbanites in Colorado and Virginia, which are every bit as necessary to get to 270 electoral votes as the Rust Belt states. North Carolina and Florida would likely have been completely off the table as battleground states if the Democrats had run Bernie. That's all Monday morning quarterbacking, but especially now with Trump having so thoroughly claimed the mantle as the voice of the white working-class, it's hard to see much of an opening for a Democrat of Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren's pedigree to poach those voters back, at least without forfeiting moderate voters in the Democratic coalition.
So do the Democrats go with a cosmopolitan slickster of the Gavin Newsom fold, running primarily on a social justice platform and campaigning almost exclusively in big cities in hopes of hanging onto the volatile Obama coalition and winning over just a few more center-right upscale suburbanites embarrassed by Trump to thread an Electoral College needle? We know how well that worked in 2016.....when Trump was completely untested and thus more vulnerable to defining as unacceptable. Incumbent Presidents are hard to beat because even if voters don't really like them, they've proven themselves merely by having governed before. Only if we're mired in a deep recession as we were in 1932, 1980, and 1992, do voters take seriously the idea of throwing out a sitting President in favor of an untested replacement. And given the magnitude of the tribal fault lines in American politics today, I'm not even sure a huge recession would be enough for the majority coalition to abandon their candidate, particularly with as good as Trump is in defining any and all opposition as unacceptable.
Trump started his Presidency yesterday by throwing Molotov cocktails at his critics because he understands what they don't. Success in American politics today has nothing to do with bringing a divided nation together, it has to do with cobbling together a bare plurality of voters by exacerbating the nation's divisions. Trump will spend four years stoking that and the clueless left will respond in kind, continuing to be unaware of just how toxic cultural liberalism is in Middle America. With that in mind, the biggest question will be what the tone of Trump's next inaugural speech on January 20, 2021, will be when he has no more campaigns to run.
posted by Mark at 9:04 AM
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