Whenever a cable news anchor has a self-induced seizure over “hate and division” in politics, you can be certain that he’s talking about an issue that resonates with at least half of the country. It just happens to be the half he doesn’t like.
Chris Cuomo on his CNN show Monday night berated President Trump for five minutes over the “hate and division” he’s promoting as he readies for the 2020 battle. Because didn’t you know that fights over democracy are fought with sweetness and light, like giving federal prison inmates the right to vote?
“Hate and division” is always defined by liberals and the news media as “intensely potent” with voters they don’t like.
Cuomo, at the end of his program, made his “closing argument” against Trump’s recent focus on abortion, Trump’s rebuttal against Joe Biden’s lie about what the president said about Charlottesville, Va., and the president’s on again, off again fight over immigration.
“Abortion, immigration, right-wing extremism,” Cuomo said.
“This is all a sell, a Trump trifecta,” said Cuomo. “Culture wars that push hate and division. Abortion, immigration, right-wing extremism.”
As for the first two — who knew that it was “hate and division” to bring up policy debates when you’re president of the United States?
Trump’s greatest political gift is an intuition that tells him what motivates specific groups of people to act. In the business world, where Trump is from, this is called “sales.” In the political world, where the overpaid consultants live, this is called “driving voter turnout.”
Take the issues one by one and you find that Trump holds either an overwhelmingly popular position, or a position widely shared enough to put any one of his opponents in doubt, or he’s simply calling out a lie that the media and Democrats have been pushing for two years, and which deserves new scrutiny.
At a rally in Wisconsin over the weekend, Trump knocked the state’s Democratic governor for having vetoed a bill clarifying that it would be illegal for a doctor not to administer care for a baby born after a botched abortion.
“Your Democrat governor here in Wisconsin, shockingly, stated that he will veto legislation that protects Wisconsin babies born alive, born alive,” he said. “The baby is born. The mother meets with the doctor. They take care of the baby. They wrap the baby beautifully. And then the doctor and the mother determine whether or not they will execute the baby.”
That’s a scenario that the bill, at its highest aspiration, aimed to prevent.
“Shame on him for even suggesting that,” said Cuomo.
For suggesting what? Abortion is an issue with rightfully inflamed passions. It’s a debate split evenly down the middle, but public opinion is solidly against it later in pregnancies. The Democratic governor’s veto of this bill was divisive — it’s not especially divisive for Trump to bring it up. But Cuomo doesn’t want Trump talking about this, because it’s a winning political issue for him and a losing issue across the board for Democrats.
Same for immigration. A new Washington Post poll found that 35% of Americans now say the border situation is in a “crisis,” an 11-point increase from January. That bump was seen across by both parties and independents, but the biggest jump came from Democrats. In January, just 7% of that party’s voters said there was a crisis at the border. In the new poll, it’s 24%.
Cuomo doesn’t want Trump talking about it because it’s quickly becoming another winning issue.
As for the “right-wing extremism,” Cuomo is talking about the tired lie that Trump in 2017 drew a moral equivalence between sick white supremacists and the sweet little lambs who were only there to counter protest the hate. Trump had to defend himself again on this after Joe Biden jumped into the Democratic presidential primary with a video that microwaved the dumb controversy.
“He said there were, quote, ‘Some very fine people on both sides,’” said Biden in the video. “Very fine people on both sides?”
It deliberately took what Trump said out of clear context. By “people on both sides,” he was referring to people who supported and opposed the removal of the Robert E. Lee statue that had prompted the protests in question. In fact, Trump explicitly made clear that he was not referring to the neo-Nazi marchers: “I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally.” Cuomo ignored this in bad faith. And, by the way, there were counter protesters who were spraying paint and bags of urine. It was a matter of “both sides.”
Cuomo wants to know why Trump is revisiting the issue. But he isn’t! Biden and the media are. By Cuomo’s reckoning, Trump can’t do right no matter what he does.
That’s because the “hate and division,” for Cuomo, is what’s working for Trump and is making Democrats look very bad.
