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A Slip Twixt the Cup and the Lip? [Updated]
This is not good at all. President Trump unleashed a series of tweets that have cut short the story about Democrats self-destructing, making him and us the targets now. I don’t know how he’s going to dig himself out of his false claim that any of the “’Progressive’ Democrat Congresswomen,” other than Ilhan Omar, came from another country.
So interesting to see “Progressive” Democrat Congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world (if they even have a functioning government at all), now loudly……
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 14, 2019
….it is done. These places need your help badly, you can’t leave fast enough. I’m sure that Nancy Pelosi would be very happy to quickly work out free travel arrangements!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 14, 2019
They are, as they are happy to point out, “women of color,” so the race card is just too easy to play here. Indeed, President Trump knew this as he chided AOC and her “squad” for falsely accusing Nancy Pelosi of racism. Before he tweeted this Sunday, Maureen Dowd of The New York Times was attacking AOC for her false claims of racism, in a piece mockingly titled “Scaling Wokeback Mountain.” The AOC Squad was advocating “grabbing” power from the old leadership. They were busy self-destructing and President Trump had added fuel to the fire, saying “[Pelosi] is not a racist.” In doing so, the president was voicing the sensible middle of American thought.
The “Squad:” Reps. Ilhan Omar (Minn.), Ayanna Pressley (Mass.), Rashida Tlaib (Mich.) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.)
Then he rolled out a variant of “go back where you came from.” This was a bad move. Had he only addressed Ilhan Omar (“she,” not “they”), he would be on very solid ground. Had he called out the others for loathing the country of their birth that had given them such advantages, including a path to become Congresswomen, he would have been preaching to the sensible center. Instead he created a mess.
He hates apologizing, but here he is going to have to clean up his own mess. Otherwise, he is going to lose reelection and hand the whole Congress to the Democrats. No matter how much he touts economic advances and criminal justice reform helping racial minorities, he has just made a vote for him toxic to suburban women and all the darker skinned ethnic groups he has actually dedicated his administration to helping.
Every member of the administration, every member of Congress, every state and local official, will be forced to denounce these tweets and President Trump for typing them. Time for him to show a skill he has not had to use, finding some way to turn this unforced blunder into a political win.
John Hinderaker calls this “A Blunder of Epic Proportions.” I’m not sure about the magnitude, but it certainly makes a tough reelection tougher. To get how bad the Democrats were doing before President Trump just helped them, see this: “Democrats Start to Worry.” Maureen Dowd was criticizing AOC. The “Squad” was split from Pelosi. PresidentTrump has put them back together, for now, with Pelosi defending the progressive congresswomen who had been attacking her.
When @realDonaldTrump tells four American Congresswomen to go back to their countries, he reaffirms his plan to “Make America Great Again” has always been about making America white again.
Our diversity is our strength and our unity is our power. https://t.co/ODqqHneyES
— Nancy Pelosi (@SpeakerPelosi) July 14, 2019
President Trump seems to recognize his blunder. He has already responded to responses in this way:
….and the many terrible things they say about the United States must not be allowed to go unchallenged. If the Democrat Party wants to continue to condone such disgraceful behavior, then we look even more forward to seeing you at the ballot box in 2020!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 15, 2019
The only fix, in our “Ronnie Raygun the nuclear cowboy,” “Bushitler” “pubic hair on Coke can” “high school rape” reality, is to go on offense. Yet, that offensive must be effective. Tucker Carlson was far more focused and careful in his attack on Ilhan Omar, not conflating any facts with the life stories of her allies in Congress. Perhaps President Trump should be tweeting something like this:
The other Progressive Democrat Congresswomen, who work together, aren’t in the same category as Ilhan Omar. While they all attack America and defend bad foreign governments, only Omar was born outside America…
All the other Progressive Democrat Congresswomen were blessed to be born here but show hate for our country and want to change America to be like the countries so many people are leaving to come here…
My mistake: the “Progressive Democrat Congresswomen” only sound like government mouthpieces from countries whose people these Democrats support more than our legal immigrants and long time American citizens who are ethnic minorities…
Sad, contempt for America is homegrown through our schools and media. The Progressive Democrat Congresswomen, except Congresswoman Omar, have contempt for the country of their birth and success, America. They should go to their hometowns and count the blessings of being born here.
I don’t say President Trump has thrown away the 2020 election. He continues to have strength among the “battle ground states,” with a diverse range of voters who “love him because he listens.” Indeed, there is growing bipartisan buzz that President Trump will be reelected. There is even talk of Democrats worrying about holding the House.
[Monday midday update]
To this end, President Trump has both worked and communicated tirelessly to win over voters who no Republican has ever really fought for in past elections. What do you think the president is doing when he reels off “best African-American employment rate ever, most Latinos, most women working ever?” Stop and really think on this: why does he recite these figures every week, virtually every time he steps in front of any microphone?
You will not get the obvious answer from conservative talk radio or pundits, entrenched in what has always worked for them with their audience. Indeed, Monday morning found talk show hosts pretending President Trump was only tweeting about one congresswoman (don’t believe your lying eyes), or waving it off as Trump being Trump (no big deal if he scratches an Archie Bunker itch), and after all the congresswomen had it coming. The messaging only reinforces core support while amplifying the old message that minorities don’t matter to Republican election plans. Contrast this response to Tucker Carlson getting fired up and hectoring the administration anytime he senses the president steering foreign policy towards the dreaded “neocons.”
Sadly, there is no public voice, besides the president, invested in expanding the electoral coalition, in confounding the Democrats’ plan for long term demographic dominance. President Trump has sought to do well by doing good for demographic groups long written off, taken for granted, by both parties. Now, as he seeks to close the deal, he has made a misstep with people who have never voted for a Republican before, but who he is striving to sell on himself.
I do say President Trump put words on virtual paper that will be rammed down every Republican’s throat. He needs to turn the conversation, again, and not in the good loser direction. Roll out a string of tweets like I suggest above and everyone can say “I don’t need to defend the President’s tweets; President Trump has corrected them completely.”
Published in Politics
“The Jihad Squad.”
Matt Vespa @ Townhall.com weighs in on the kerfluffle …
It is necessary to highlight that anti-Americans are given prominent positions in the Democrat Party. This is a feature of the Democrat Party. May they occupy the spotlight until the election.
Like Bill Gates, Ayanna Pressley started college, then dropped out to work. She did so to support her mother, by the source you cite. Not an “idiot,” an ideologue, by her training and public record. Why do you suppose no Republican would file to run in a district of voters you characterize as “brainiacs?” Perhaps these voters agree with her hard left positions. How hard left? Extreme identity left.
On what basis? Pressley grew up in Baptist churches. AOC is Catholic. But, go with it if it feels good. Then wonder how President Trump goes from winning by a few tens of thousands of votes in key states to losing by the same.Now, are they all on board with anti-Semitism, thinly cloaked in criticism of Israel? Yes. Like formerly “Christian” Europe always has been.Do they all embrace totalitarian movements they see as allies? Yes.
Yes, and “love it or leave it” is an old political slogan aimed at mostly white radicals, stereotypically college kids, in the late 1960s, early 1970s, as distinct from “go back where you come from.”Yet, even the “love it or leave it” phrase has limited and limiting power. See the latest Gallup poll on Americans’ pride in their country. There are stark contrasts by political orientation and party identification.
The 2020 election, then, may see districts shift between parties based on the view of America in each constituency, while we may well see another series of narrow victories in “battleground” states lead to another Electoral College majority with popular vote minority.
Damn, C.A.B., your sword arm never gets tired, does it? Good work on this post and thanks for defending it on this thread better than I or anyone else could do.
The more generic definition of “jihad” is “an ideological struggle”.
And what they’re doing looks all the world like an ideological struggle.
We could call them “The Struggle Squad”, and that would align with Marx’s class struggle. And “Mein Kampf” is “My Struggle”. But it’s a little more awkward.
Okay, go with that!
Exactly like Bill Gates. :-)
Well, she’s certainly skilled at getting elected.I would have expected Boston (“Not much of a college town” — This is Spinal Tap) to appreciate a more intellectually vigorous debate on substantive issues instead of an angry woman spewing racialism.
The real idiots are the GOP, who didn’t even try to come up with an appealing alternative candidate.
Actually, declining to run a candidate against Pressley was uncommonly smart for the Mass GOP. Any money or effort spent there would have been a complete waste.
MA-7 is deep-blue by Massachusetts standards. It includes parts of Boston, Cambridge, Somerville, Milton, including most of the minority areas of those cities. Cook currently rates it as D+34. By comparison, the next most heavily Democratic-leaning district in the state was MA-5, which had a D+18 rating.
There were three other Congressional seats in MA where Democrats ran unopposed. Any of them would have been a vastly better — if still quixotic — investment than MA-7.
All I can say is, these four folks dish it out pretty good. And they can’t take it when someone calls them out on their b.s. Boy do they dish it out. One minute it’s all about the Benjamins with the Jews. Before that, members of the squad were sort of implying that some Congressmen were more loyal to Israel than to America. Now they’re victims. The squad is bad news. Lame-o. Toxic.
By the way, I’m not so impressed with these “brainiacs” as someone put it above. Like all House freshmen, they have zero power in the House. They’ll likely wait years, if not decades, to climb the greasy pole. So the strategy is to make their boring, no power selves the center of attention using social media. They do this by alternating between being victims and victimizers. They’re here to create chaos and benefit politically from it.
Oh, I absolutely understand, and appreciate, that argument. Limited resources, spend them wisely; yep, makes total sense.
But, as our favorite economist, Dr. Sowell, is known to say, “What happens next?”
We agree in general, but disagree in this specific.
Again, there are were three other Congressional Districts in MA that didn’t have a Republican on the ballot in 2016 (which is shameful). Efforts would have been much better spent in them than in MA-7.
I call them the Furious Four.
^Good description!
Sure, that makes sense. And those are MA-1 (D+12) Richard Neal, MA-4 (D+9) Joe Kennedy III, and MA-8 (D+10) Stephen Lynch.
But at the same time, it also makes sense to spend limited resources on low-hanging fruit. And Pressley, being a so militantly anti-American, is by far the lowest-hanging of the fruit.
So I think it’s fascinating from a Game Theory perspective.
The angry spew harks back to the old Souther Democrats’ original invention of the “race card” — a gambit for candidates to outdo each other in tough talk and hate towards blacks. They played the race card because there was no policy difference inside the party and no real opposition party.
We see the same thing now in some hard left districts. There is no such thing as an appealing alternative GOP candidate. If someone runs, and I think the state party should fund and back such, it would only be to get a party message out, not to seriously compete for election. Unless a party rewards losers in a good cause, no quality person of any ambition is going there.
Unless strong candidates primary the “Squad,” they are going to be reelected. No Republican has a chance, not the reincarnation of Reagan nor the clone of Trump, to win those districts…yet. Change can come, with long effort over multiple cycles.
yes, and.
If the Republican Party is not resigned to ultimate defeat and marginalization, it must embark on a long, sustained march back into relevancy. This likely includes supporting and rewarding candidates carrying the party message into every district and to every community, even while expecting them to lose.
Donald Trump had one job short term- step aside once he came to Pelosi’s defense and let the Dems continue to fight among themselves. He blew it (and sounded like an ignorant jerk in the process) which makes his longer-term job, getting reelected, harder. The fact that many here on Ricochet like what he said does not mean squat. He was going to get our votes anyway. And that’s not enough.
To your point I was surprised after the 2018 mid-terms when looking at the individual races I realized that in 32 House races the GOP did not even field a candidate, while the Democrats contested all but 2 races.
I’ve been thinking about Trump’s original statement. He didn’t name the congresswomen or say he was talking about 4 of them. Is it possible he was thinking only about Omar, but was adopting a way of speaking we often hear when someone comments on something one person did or said, but uses a plural to generalize it? I can’t think of an actual quote, but people often speak this way.
That’s a stretch. The 4 of them have been in the papers all year. It’s not reasonable to think he’s only referring to Omar.
Is this the biggest screwup in history? Nope, and nobody’s saying it is. It’s like Obama’s “Bitter clingers” remarks; it’s not going to destroy him but it’s going to be a lasting self-inflicted wound.
If Trump really wants to defeat Trump, nobody’s going to stop him.
I am astonished that only four Republicans in the House of Representatives voted to admonish Trump.
I agree with David French that Trump’s tweets were malicious and that Republican silence as to them is deafening. https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/donald-trumps-tweets-were-malicious-and-republican-silence-is-deafening/
I agree with the several articles at The Bulwark that condemn Trump’s tweets and ask why in the world the rest of the Republican Party is quiet. See https://thebulwark.com/what-would-it-cost-for-republicans-to-condemn-trump/, https://thebulwark.com/silence-of-the-reluctant-trumpers/, and https://thebulwark.com/the-method-behind-trumps-racism .
I think that Trump is beyond stupid by insisting the endangered Senators such as Martha McSally (AZ), John Cornyn (TX), and Cory Gardner (CO) should be defending Trump. https://www.politico.com/story/2019/07/16/trump-republican-politics-1417595
I agree with George Will in a podcast where he said
“I believe that what this president has done to our culture, to our civic discourse … you cannot unring these bells and you cannot unsay what he has said, and you cannot change that he has now in a very short time made it seem normal for schoolboy taunts and obvious lies to be spun out in a constant stream. I think this will do more lasting damage than Richard Nixon’s surreptitious burglaries did.”
https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/15/politics/donald-trump-george-will-presidency/index.html?fbclid=IwAR0C0E_FIR-K4opJuDQJb5LkHBCkyUUI08djAOlcpG8gRL89TH3FL-fBk8Q
We were killed in the 2018 elections, losing women, the young, the educated, and the suburbs. If we lose the Senate in 2020, Trump’s bigotry and his insistence that he be defended by Republicans will be a strong reason.
If Omar said something outrageous about Israel, and Trump responded, “So now Democrats [plural] are saying things that sound like they come from Louis Farrakhan…” Or something like that. It’s a very common way to speak in politics.
So the options are, Trump actually thought they all came from another country, or he knew they didn’t but intentionally said they did (the current accepted interpretation), or he was speaking only about Omar.
If there was only Omar and no squad, Trump could have made the exact same tweet verbatim and no one would have said, “Why did he say Congresswomen, plural?” And that’s because it makes sense either way.
Since the latter interpretation fits what he said, his advisors aren’t doing him any favors by not realizing this and pointing this out and making the opposition admit that he could have meant that.
Clifford, why should he have to tell them that they should steer clear of being ungrateful and hateful of their own country? It is clear they enjoy being ungrateful and hateful.
These women are all adults, and Trump is not their father. And by being so unappreciative of our society, they are furthering their own careers within the Democrat Party. The tactics they utilize on a daily basis are tactics of the Communist Party as demonstrated under Stalin in Soviet Russia and under Mao in Communist China. Citizens who are influenced by these women will help them betray the principles the nation is founded on.
Although it would not be possible for the three women born here to “go back to the countries they came from,” it wouldn’t bother me one bit if they packed up and left, before they harm our society more.
Does this repetition mean we’ll be spared your other post on the topic?
There’s much to discuss about this. The fact you agree with French, Will, and The Bulwark isn’t part of it.
Trump is not a bigot, however much you continue to hate him and resent that we voted for him and will again, in equal or greater numbers as last time.
He works every day to improve and empower the lives of Americans who only get lip service from other politicians. Hence his daily recitation of African-American, Latino, now Asian, and women’s employment rates. Hence his multiple events celebrating and showcasing ex-cons freed from prison and integrated back into the workforce.
Your comment is of a length that suggests a solid original post.
Gary, please let me take the shovel from your hands. You are making the same mistake Trump did with his tweet. You are making your argument in a way that will not persuade anyone who does not already agree with you.
As you may have noticed there is considerable disagreement on this thread about the wisdom of Trump’s tweet but what we all have in common is we would like to see Trump win in 2020. Those of us, like me, who think the tweet unwise do so because we think it can hurt his chances of reelection. The people you quote in your post are all Never Trumpers who want Trump to lose and are willing to have one of the progressive nuts as our next President. Quoting them will persuade no one here.
I’m almost always sympathetic to complaints about the political consequences of Trump’s intemperate tweets. But let’s understand that there are two categories: those that are subject to criticism because they are dumb and those that are subject to criticism because they can be portrayed as dumb in a climate where almost everything is perceived as “racist.”
One can argue, I suppose, that Trump should be savvy enough to realize that the bottom line in both categories may amount to the same. But I can’t go there. I strongly disagree that the comments were a “variant” of “go back where you came from.” That is, unless one’s definition of “variant” is relatively all-encompassing.
Sorry, there’s more there than “get out.”
When I heard about this I was so deeply disappointed. I have been trying to explain to people about the policies and unemployment, but all that is just background noise now. Whether or not Trump gets out of this one somehow, it’s people like me who have to explain how I can support someone who says things like this. I think I know what he meant, and I agree with the sentiment (I believe it was more of a love it or leave it kind of thing, rather than go back where you came from, regardless of the actual words), but what I think doesn’t matter. This just turns the dumpster fire into a constantly-burning tire fire for his supporters. These tweets will be on every Dem. advertisement and tv ad in 2020. There are people who may vote for Trump based on these tweets, but it will be hard for many to ignore the racist drumbeat from the media. It’s a mess.