Expect More, Not Less, Of Trump's Race-Baiting Madness As The 2020 Campaign Heats Up

Louisiana's junior senator, Jon Kennedy, was first elected to statewide office as a Democrat but jumped the fence most of the way through his second term. Now he takes every opportunity he can to remind Louisiana Republicans that he's exactly as racist and bigoted as they are. On Fox yesterday he defended Señor Trumpanzee's racism and attacked AOC, Ilhan, Rashida and Ayanna as the "four horsewomen of the Apocalypse." Echoing Trump, he told an appreciative and deluded Fox audience that "The simple fact of the matter is, the four congresswomen think that America was wicked in its origins. They think that America and its people are even more wicked now, that we are all racist and misogynistic and evil... They’re entitled to their opinion. They’re Americans. But I’m entitled to my opinion, and I just think they’re left-wing cracks, and they’re the reason there are directions on a shampoo bottle. I think we should ignore them." He also thinks MSNBC viewers should ignore Trump's racist tweets. They caught up with him in a hallway and he told them Trump's tweets we're racist, "but a poor choice of words." Oh.

And speaking of Fox and delusional thinking, Eric Trumpanzee was on Fox & Fiends yesterday: "I'm telling you, 95% of this country is behind him in this message." I don't think so, but it was shocking Tuesday evening hearing to comments from Republican NPR listeners who completely agreed with Trump. I guess that accounts for the spike in his approval ratings among self-identified Republicans this week-- as it sunk even lower among normal Americans. Approval is now 41% and disapproval is 55%. Among Republicans its 95%. Sad.

When asked if he thought Mark Sanford could beat Trump, Tim Scott (R-SC), the GOP's only African-American senator, laughed and said, "No. I think President Trump is unbeatable in a Republican primary." Maybe that has something to do with the media mentality demonstrated by Keith Woods, NPR's VP for newsroom training and diversity, who says that journalists should not be using the term "racist" to describe Trump's tweets. "Leave the moral labeling to the people affected," he said... cluelessly.

Monday night, the Washington Post published a piece by Seung Min Kim about the Trump anti-immigration legislative agenda. It details "the type of immigrants the administration wants to admit to the United States." But there are already problems. "Senior Republicans in the Senate," she wrote, "on Tuesday immediately began downplaying the prospects of the White House’s proposal-- an effort led primarily by senior adviser Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law-- even before they had been briefed on its details. Said Senate Majority Whip John Thune (R-SD): 'To get it to the floor, you have to have some bipartisan buy-in. There would have to be a lot of work that would get done, and I don’t sense that they’re anywhere close to having done that work with Republicans, let alone with Democrats.'"

MAGA poster by Chip Prosser

What's it really all about, as Thune well knows, is Trump's 2020 strategy, well-laid out yesterday by Jim VanderHei and Mike Allen for Axios readers: Trump's premeditated racism is central to his 2020 strategy. "It might seem," they wrote, "like improvisational madness when President Trump tells American citizens in Congress to 'go back' where they came from, but those close to Trump say there's a lot of calculation behind his race-baiting. It’s central to his 2020 strategy, they say. Trump's associates predict more, not less, of the race-baiting madness. The rough calculation goes like this: 

1- Trump knows that in 2016, he won the white vote by 20+ points.
2- He hopes he can crank their turnout even higher, especially among older, white evangelicals. He knows most of those voters are unlikely to ditch him, no matter how offensive his comments.
3- He watches Fox News and knows AOC, in particular, is catnip to old, white voters, especially men. She is young, Hispanic, female and a democratic socialist-- a 4-for-4 grievance magnet. Last week, AOC got nearly as much online attention as all 2020 Democrats combined.
4- Trump believes he did better than Mitt Romney among Hispanic voters because many who came here and went through the legal process agree with his views.
5- Axios sat in on a focus group in Michigan where white swing voters agreed with Trump on immigration. Carlos Algara, a political scientist at UC Davis, told the NY Times that a forthcoming analysis of the 2018 midterms found that even without Trump on the ballot, "white Democrats with high levels of racial resentment were likely to vote ... Republican."
6- Facebook is often his incubator. He has spent three times more than all Democratic contenders combined on Facebook, with a mix of message-testing immigration lines to appealing to Hispanics who seem susceptible to his worldview.
7- So Trump calculates that (white voters + some Hispanic voters) (tough immigration rhetoric + race-baiting language) = narrow 2020 win.

Even The Mooch! An old crony of Trump's-- and his former White House Communications director (for 10 days after Sean Spicer's 49 days but before Hope Hicks' 225 days)-- says he's appalled by Trump's racism and xenophobic and dishonest vitriol against AOC, Ayanna, Ilhan and Rashida. He told CNN's Alisyn Camerota this morning that Trump's unhinged statements of the last few days have been "racist and unacceptable" and that he's not going to vote for him if they continue (although he didn't say for how long). "And so what ends up happening is it's such a turnoff to a large group of people that you are running a risk that 15% of the people that you want to get you through that electoral map and back into the presidency say, 'You know what? I love the policies, but I don't like the send her back rhetoric. I don't like the racist rhetoric of sending people back to the homes that they came from.'" As a result, the Palm Beach County Republicans disinvited The Mooch from a fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago.