Ah, sweet mystery of President Trump. Why, when he wants so much to win, doesn’t he try to win something bigly, rather than just hanging on?
Where most politicians try to move out from their core to attract other voters, he is the first politician in all human history who seems consciously trying to narrow his of appeal. He loves his base. He loves making it happy, which means feeding it chunks of red meat in the form of berating and baiting the much larger number of people who are not on his side.
The math seems to say this is not a good model. His base is there, it can’t grow anymore, and it’s not going anywhere, even if he pulls back on the provocations and insults. On the other hand, he offends and drives off many people (some of whom are or might have been his own voters), who find much in his manners so grossly offensive they can barely contain their own rage.
It’s not that he doesn’t need to attract some new voters. The commanding nature of his edge in the electoral college masks the fragility on which it was based. His approval ratings today are ten points underwater, and have seldom been better. The day he won, one-fifth of his own voters thought him unfit to hold office.
His margin of victory was about 70,000 votes in three states in the upper Midwest, which were severely affected by economic calamity. In 2000, George W. Bush lost the popular vote by something over 500,000, which was inside of the margin of error. Trump lost the popular vote by three million votes to someone as charmless as Hillary Clinton (and yes, her entire vote spread was from California, but still.)
All Trump had to do the day after the election was to be gracious to Clinton and to her voters, and the protests that day would have seemed ridiculous. All he had to do at the inauguration was to emulate Thomas Jefferson, who said “We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists,” after one of the nastiest elections in history. He left office after eight years at the head of a one-party country. All Trump had to do once he won was to tone it down a few notches, and he would have confused his opponents, and dispersed their incentive.
Instead, he called out and inspired a great burst of fury, that threatens his hold on the House. Trump today is the best thing that the Left seems to have going. He and abortion are their lone points of unity. Their rage against him is the sole sign of life in their party, which otherwise seems to have no idea what it wants, where it’s going, or what its members want it to do.
So why in that case does he continue to feed it, adding more and more gasoline to the fire, in case it might start to die out?
