WHAT IF YOU WERE DONALD TRUMP?
Imagine that you are Donald Trump. Although you can’t admit it, perhaps even to yourself, your presidency has been less than a great success. There has been almost nothing positive accomplished during the last two years. The great tax reform that you promised turned into a give away to the very rich. And, most of the things that have been accomplished by weakening regulations and standards may harm the very people who came to all those loud angry rallies.
Plus, you have to run as a Republican. Republicans, back in the Fifties, ran as the party most competent to deal with the communist menace. They were right about the Russians. The aggressive leadership in Russia and its captive satellite countries was a menace. Republicans emphasized the value of freedom, of personal initiative. And, as a business oriented party they were the party of competent administration. Beginning in 1953, the victorious World War II general Dwight Eisenhower, skillfully led the country through two terms.
That is all gone now. No one could rationally accuse current national Republicans of being competent. Almost nothing is done in what John McCain used to call “the regular order”. Ordinary Republican members in the Congress decide nothing. Everything is decided by a few people in the leadership. Legal procedures are ignored. There is no regular budget. An 1159 page spending bill came last week. By law it should have been passed at the end of last September. The bill will have been put together by staff with a large input by lobbyists. As President, you carefully avoid reading anything, but you will sign it. You have to.
Still, you want to run again. You don’t want to be a “loser”. What do you do? You can’t really run on your accomplishments (no real Wall), even after a long government shutdown. You can’t run on those promises of jobs you made to these rally goers (coal production has gone down during the last two years, large numbers of auto workers are being laid off). You can say that you have kept the faith on abortion. That will resonate with many Republican voters (a recent Fox survey found that 55% of Republicans believe God wanted Donald Trump to be President). For many of them, abortion is really the only issue.
You do have some advantages. People do want the President to be successful. They are desperate to believe that everything is going well. Your most avid supporters primarily get their information from sources favorable to you (read Fox news). They will not be able to accept that they may have been wrong in 2016. They are certainly not going to vote for Democrats. The problem will be with other Republicans, and with voters who think of themselves as “independent”.
What you can do, is to get them to vote for you by finding things for them to be angry with. The tax payers are paying a great deal of money so that you can go right on holding those rallies that made up your 2016 campaign. At those rallies you can talk about the dangers of socialism. Most of the rally goers will have no idea what socialism is. They will know that it’s dangerous, and evil, and promoted by the Democrats.
Voters will be told that that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a dangerous socialist. It’s true that Cortez is only one of 435 members of the House and does not have the power to really do very much (she is good at getting noticed and using Twitter). Young Alexandria, at 29, is going to be the new Hillary (you do remember Hillary and her emails). As Hillary was in 2016, Alexandria is going to be featured in almost every Republican campaign ad for the 2020 elections. For many Republicans she will become a dangerous monster!
Both political parties try to find anger symbols that will help draw voters to them. Republicans have tended to use anger symbolism more successfully than Democrats. They have to! This is not the Fifties! Current national Republicans have little to offer ordinary voters. They have fought desperately to keep wages low (if the minimum wage had been allowed to keep up with inflation it would be about $18 an hour). They voted to kill the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) more than fifty times. Even Republicans from the poorest states where medical care is widely unavailable felt compelled to vote against it. So, if there is little that you really want to do for voters and you still want to be returned to office, it does help to give them something to be angry with.
There is a danger that Donald Trump’s crude attempts at manipulating anger (often through the use of ungrammatical tweets) will drive away the very Republican and independent voters that he must rely on if he is to win reelection. Still because a primary drive of his administration has been to weaken the protections and the economic prospects of the people who attend his rallies, he, or you, have little choice. Poor Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has to be just awful!
H.J. Rishel
2/19/2019
