Yeah well, they knew he was a snake etc, etc… That’s what they liked about him.
by digby
Philip Bump of the Washington Post wonders what it would have been like if trump were a totally different person than it was obvious he was from the moment he rode down on that silly escalator:
There is a very good reason that most presidents reach across the aisle to build relationships and decide against constantly lying about things both big and small. Enacting an agenda as the head of the executive branch usually means cajoling the opposition into action, which itself often means having to demonstrate that the opposition’s base won’t revolt against the president’s idea.
This is not the path President Trump chose. He chose to continue the pattern he demonstrated during the campaign: Lying or misleading about things big and small and focusing his attention and energy almost exclusively on his core base of support.
His thinking seems to be: Hey, it worked for me in 2016. But it’s worth wondering what his presidency would have looked like had he approached the job with a more traditional, inclusive approach. There would still have been many skeptical Democrats, certainly, but it’s more than possible that much more of the Democratic base and many more independents would be willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. Trump says there’s an emergency on the border? Well, many more voters might have thought, we can trust him to both be honest about that crisis and to be putting the country’s needs first.
So we end up with poll numbers like this one, from Fox News.
Only about 20 percent of Americans think that there’s an emergency on the border — including only 4-in-10 Republicans. Trump has insisted that it’s an emergency, even toying with the idea of declaring a national emergency to get a wall built. But Americans aren’t convinced.
It’s not clear, in fact, that Trump’s convinced Americans of much. A poll from the Associated Press and NORC asked respondents what effect they thought the construction of a wall might have, specifically focusing on issues that Trump has touted as problems that the wall would solve. The result? Most Americans — often including Republicans — don’t seem to be buying Trump’s rhetoric.
For example, the pollsters asked if a wall would make the country more safe, a central tenet of Trump’s pitch. Only about a third of the country said it would, including about 3-in-10 independents.
The Wall isn’t really about anything to do with safety and a vast majority of the country knows that, probably including Trump. Its about two things: delivering for the racists and dominating the majority of the country that rejects them. In fact, those two things are really the same thing.
Trump isn’t capable of learning and even if he could, Trump is in so much trouble that at this point he’s dependent on keeping at least one-third of the Senate in that camp in order to prevent conviction in an impeachment trial. His base is his survival.
Someone needs to tell him that if he loses the presidency, he will also lose this daft immunity from prosecution while in office.
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