After All The Lies And Chaos, Is The Rust Belt Over Trump?

Does someone in the White House really think sending Trump to do more of his hate rallies in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Ohio will reverse his Rust Belt slide? Won't his unique, divisive and super-polarizing presence further accelerate the slide? Somehow what Peter Baker at the NY Times dubbed the Four Letter Presidency isn't wearing well outside of the deepest of deep red areas. Midwest swing districts that helped him beat Hillary in 2016 seem repulsed by his filthy mouth. Unlike his predecessors, Trump seems to revel in being "the profanity presidency, full of four-letter denunciations of his enemies and earthy dismissals of allegations lodged against him. At rallies and in interviews, on Twitter and in formal speeches, he relishes the bad-boy language of a shock jock, just one more way of gleefully provoking the political establishment bothered by his norm-shattering ways. In a single speech on Friday alone, he managed to throw out a 'hell,' an 'ass' and a couple of 'bullshits' for good measure. In the course of just one rally in Panama City Beach, Fla., earlier this month, he tossed out 10 'hells,' three 'damns' and a 'crap.' The audiences did not seem to mind. They cheered and whooped and applauded." He's coarsened the national dialogue. It's what people meant about him being unfit to serve as a role model for their children.

While traditionalists may deem it unpresidential and a poor example for children, Martha Joynt Kumar, a longtime scholar of presidential communication, said gritty language was part of the show put on by Mr. Trump, the onetime reality television entertainer, for his fans.

“He knows they like him to use words that lie over the edge of the traditional boundary of presidential decorum,” she said. “His controversial word choices are an aspect of his role as the disrupter he promised his constituents he would be.”

But critics say the vulgarity comes at a cost. “No one has debased the civil discourse in this country more than President Trump, and the president really does set the tone in the country,” said Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California. “We see it reflected in our offices by the hateful, belligerent, obscene and violent calls that we get now that we didn’t used to get.”

Mr. Schiff has experienced it personally when Mr. Trump turned his name into a profanity last fall by nicknaming him “little Adam Schitt.” Mr. Schiff said, “The last time that happened, the person who did that had their mouth washed out with soap by his mother.”

An unscientific survey seems to suggest that if anything, Mr. Trump is growing more comfortable with crudeness. He used the word “bullshit” in public just once in his first two years in office, according to the Factba.se database that tracks his speeches, but on four occasions in the last three months.

He has either coarsened the public discourse or reflected it, or perhaps both, depending on your view of him, but he is not alone. Society in recent years has embraced what used to be considered profanity. Even the New York Times, the so-called Gray Lady with all the news that’s fit to print, found it fit to print the B.S. word just 14 times in the many years before Mr. Trump’s inauguration, according to a Nexis search, but has used it 26 times since-- not all in stories covering the president.

...Never has any president pushed the boundaries of language as far as Mr. Trump. He had a foul mouth long before politics, of course, but he seemed to try, however fitfully, to clean it up for a while when he set his sights on the White House. Still, he could not resist at times. At one rally during his 2016 campaign, he quoted a supporter calling a Republican rival, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, a “pussy.”

Once taking office, he tried, at least, to keep it private, but he was uninhibited when the cameras were not on. After the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, was appointed, he told aides, “I’m fucked.” Speaking with lawmakers, he called African nations “shithole countries.”

Yet Mr. Trump feigned shock in January when the newly elected Representative Rashida Tlaib of Michigan said she and her fellow House Democrats were “going to impeach the motherfucker.” The president told reporters that “she dishonored herself” by “using language like that in front of her son and whoever else was there.”

...Any restraint Mr. Trump may have sought to exhibit early in his term seems to have eroded in recent months. In a January interview with The Times, he boasted that he had “beat the shit out of” Republican rivals in 2016. A month later, he told the Conservative Political Action Conference that his enemies were trying to take him out “with bullshit,” a word he then took up with vigor.

A few weeks later, he told a rally in Grand Rapids, Mich., that Democrats were peddling it. In April, he used it to describe some statements in the special counsel report.

By the time the president took the stage before the National Association of Realtors in Washington on Friday, he was in a feisty mood.

He recalled that a consultant tried to make work for himself by identifying environmental concerns on a property Mr. Trump wanted to develop. “I fired his ass so fast,” the president recalled.

Active Shooter by Nancy Ohanian

He told the Realtors that he used to refuse to pay brokers their traditional 6 percent commission and instead gave them just 1 percent. “I was famous for that,” he said. When they booed, he quickly retreated. “Don’t worry. Nobody accepted it. But I tried like hell.”

Then he went after one of his favorite targets-- journalists-- claiming that recent reports of infighting within his national security team were made up. “There is no source,” he said. “The person doesn’t exist. The person’s not alive. It’s bullshit, O.K.? It’s bullshit.”

And with that, the television networks had to hit their bleeper again.

Back to shoring up his collapsing approval numbers in the Rust Belt, Trump was in tiny Montoursville Pennsylvania yesterday (Lycoming County)-- fresh off the campaign trail with his shit-show in Wisconsin and Michigan this month. I suppose this makes his crude, course racist base happy. But that's not going to win him a reelection. The most recent Pennsylvania polling from Quinnipiac (May 15) shows any of the Democrats likely to win the nomination, beating Trump:

• Biden beats Trump- 53-42%
• Bernie beats Trump- 50-43%
• Elizabeth Warren beats Trump 47-44%
• McKensey Pete beats Trump 45-44%
• Kamala Harris ties Trump 45-45%

An Emerson poll of Iowa voters in late March showed Biden and Bernie each beating Trump. And the Emerson poll of Wisconsin voters in late March show the Dems all beating him as well:

• Biden beats Trump- 54-46%
• Bernie beats Trump- 52-48%
• Elizabeth Warren beats Trump 52-48%
• Beto beats Trump 51-49%
• Kamala Harris ties Trump 50-50%
• Amy Klobuchar ties Trump 50-50%

And results for Michigan were similar. Emerson (March 11):

• Biden beats Trump- 54-46%
• Amy Klobuchar beats Trump 53-47%
• Bernie beats Trump- 52-47%
• Elizabeth Warren beats Trump 51-49%
• Kamala Harris beats Trump 51-49%

Trump's rallies in these states are more likely to hurt his polling numbers than help them. Last night in a airplane hanger in the middle of nowhere, he did nothing but lie and brag, berate Biden, accuse unnamed people of treason and criticize Fox for not doing what he wants them to. But rallies aren't the only way the White House is trying to turn the beat around. Alex Isenstadt reported that "Behind the scenes, they've rushed to the aid of languishing state Republican Party machines and have raised concerns that a potential GOP Senate candidate in Michigan could hurt the president’s prospects there. They are also scrutinizing the map for opportunities to fire up his base in the trio of states... The Trump campaign recently completed a 17-state polling project that concluded the president trails Joe Biden in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, according to two people briefed on the results... People close to the president insist they’re not panicked. They think Biden’s numbers will drop once the honeymoon stage of his campaign wears off."

Yet there’s nagging concern after a midterm election in which Republicans across the Midwest got clobbered-- and as Trump’s trade war is threatening farmers and factory workers who helped put him in office.

The president won each state by less than 1 percentage point in 2016.

...Former Trump White House chief of staff and ex-state GOP chairman Reince Priebus was among those who pushed for a post-midterm study to assess what went wrong for the GOP. It resulted in a scalding, 15-page autopsy concluding that the Wisconsin Republican Party had “drifted from its roots as a grassroots organization and became a top-down bureaucracy, disconnected from local activists, recklessly reliant on outside consultants and took for granted money that was raised to keep the party functioning properly.”

To fix the financial woes, the report said, “we need to understand the missteps fully and put a flag in the ground to say ‘this ends now.’”

Released last week, the autopsy followed a brutal midterm election that saw Republicans lose the governorship, traditionally a key organizational and financial asset in presidential elections. The report detailed a series of steps the state party needs to take ahead of 2020.

Priebus, who still speaks with the president, is expected to brief major contributors on the report next month in Milwaukee. Efforts are already underway to pay off the party’s post-midterm debt: Republican mega-donor Diane Hendricks, a Trump 2016 fundraising committee vice chair, recently gave the state party $500,000, two people familiar with the donation confirmed.

“At its core, we did the autopsy because 2018 didn’t go the way we wanted it to go,” said Wisconsin GOP Chairman Andrew Hitt, an attorney for Trump’s 2016 campaign. “It really became clear that some things just fundamentally didn’t go right and so we wanted take a deep dive and look at them and correct them.”