Warren has him worried
by digby
It turns out that his juvenile nickname didn’t do the trick this time:
It’s been 131 days since Donald Trump bragged that he killed Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign by mocking her claim to Cherokee ancestry, but her candidacy is more alive than ever. The Democratic senator tripled her fundraising haul last quarter, is commanding massive crowds, crushing the debates, and has settled into a comfortable third place in primary state polling, putting pressure on Bernie Sanders. The “Pocahontas” slur, Republican insiders fear, isn’t cutting it.
Several strategists tell the Daily Beast that Trump was caught off guard by the resonance of Warren’s populist rhetoric—a skill set that in some ways mirrors his own,[bullshit, bullshit,bullshit —digby] minus the mental effluvia and human rights violations—and said she might be “tougher” to compete against than he realized, repeatedly asking advisers whether they consider Warren to be a “fighter.”
Others confessed that, despite their best efforts to comb her record for dirt and to workshop attacks, the GOP oppo machine has been struggling to land any blows. Sure, some of Warren’s proposals are pie-in-the-sky, and maybe the math is hazy, but have you listened to Donald Trump? One strategist suggested that conservative think tanks have been struggling to keep up with the sheer volume of white papers Warren has been generating.
It doesn’t help that anti-Warren stories haven’t gotten as much pickup in the media, mainstream or otherwise. “We all push out the bad Warren stories but they don’t go very far,” the source said—a point echoed by nearly a dozen others. “Sure the Republican base will ultimately loathe Warren, but she doesn’t inspire the same kind of historic vitriol that Hillary Clinton did,” one of the strategists told the Beast. “That, combined with fact that SCOTUS isn’t on the line as it was in ’16, and remembering that Trump needed the perfect inside straight to barely win last time, and any Democrat is going to be tough to beat, Warren included.”
I think he has already telegraphed one line of attack:
Could you imagine having Sleepy Joe Biden, or Alfred E. Newman or a very nervous and skinny version of Pocahontas (1/1024th), as your President, rather than what you have now, so great looking and smart, a true Stable Genius! Sorry to say that even Social Media would be driven out of business along with, and finally, the Fake News Media!
Yes, he actually tweeted that.
I would assume that the Republican strategists are all begging him to attack her policies if she does win the nomination. But he’s incapable of that. He doesn’t understand policies and doesn’t care about them anyway. He could attack her on trade but he’ll have to lie outright in a way that won’t resonate with the people who pay attention to that issue.
And anyway, that’s not his style. He will go after her personally. And he has a feral instinct for how to scratch the misogynist id so I’d expect it to be about her looks and her personality in a way that will speak to the many men in this country (and, sadly, women who love them) who simply can’t stand the idea of a woman leader. But I don’t think it has the resonance that it had with Clinton. She had been a target of the right-wing for 25 years and that had taken its toll even on people who were ostensibly on the same side of the partisan divide. Warren doesn’t come with that baggage.
I have no idea who will win the nomination. If it’s one of the women, gender will be a factor. But they all have their vulnerabilities, including the white guys. Trump only knows how to run using character assassination and he truly enjoys it, as do his followers. He will depend on voter suppression and outside help, possibly foreign, as well. The question will be if the electorate is as gullible as they were in 2016.
All the candidates are subject to his personal insults and considering how much his personality has been degraded over the course of his presidency so far, I’m going to guess they will be even more disgusting than before. They are all surely aware that it’s going to be the dirtiest most revolting campaign in history.
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