Sen. Ben Sasse, R-Neb., on Saturday did what he does best: put forth an inconsequential idea that might get him booked on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” again.
Sasse on Twitter asked his 280,000 followers whether they believed President Trump to be “mostly a CAUSE of our lack of national unity” or “mostly a CONSEQUENCE” of it.
How about C? Trump is a president whose campaign message inspired the needed voters in the right states to win.
Liberals, Sasse and other anti-Trump Republicans will never accept that Trump did not sneak into office while the rest of us weren’t looking. Contrary to the idea that Trump insulted his way to the White House, the hard reality is that he had an effective message with popular policy positions.
The notion that Trump took a bunch of extreme positions during the 2016 cycle but somehow got lucky and tripped into office is a myth.
There’s a deep divide among Americans (that we shld be able to debate without screaming at each other)….
**is Trump mostly a CAUSE of our lack of national unity?
OR…
**is he mostly a CONSEQUENCE of our lack of national unity?Thoughts?
— Ben Sasse (@BenSasse) December 8, 2018
Take what is arguably the most controversial thing Trump said before the election. “Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on,” he declared on Dec., 7, 2015, at a rally in South Carolina (which may be one of my home state’s proudest moments).
So “controversial” was Trump’s call for a ban on non-citizen Muslims that a YouGov poll found that more than half of Americans supported it. Among just independent voters, support was at an astounding 62 percent.
When Trump’s much more practical ban on incoming travel from specific countries took effect once he was in office, 60 percent of registered voters supported it, according to a Politico-Morning Consult poll from July 2017. To unite 60 percent of Americans nowadays behind any idea — well, why shouldn’t we call that “unifying?”
And is Trump the cause or the result of this unusual level of unity?
Sasse should probably ask instead whether Trump is the “cause” or the “consequence” of his obsession with political divisions. For the people who supported Trump, he was neither the cause nor the symptom. He was the cure.
