Trump is going tone deaf

Trump's instincts are failing him. Donald Trump is stuck in the past, reliving the Greatest Hits of 2016.

Trump is out of touch with the new reality. 

He thinks people are still worried about MS-13 and caravans of people coming from Latin America to take jobs. He was in Lafayette Park holding up a Bible, and then in Tulsa saying the good citizens of America needed to take back their country, and on Sean Hannity last night talking about Confederate statues and describing Chicago as a hell hole worse than Afghanistan.

Old News

He has reprised the Golden Oldie from Richard Nixon in 1968, describing a "Silent Majority" of fearful people who want "Law and Order" in response to anarchic violence from dark skinned marauders in league with radical anarchist socialists on the left. They didn't show up in mass in Tulsa, but they are out there. They may not fully know they want law and order, he said, but they do in their hearts, and it will pay off for him in November.

Fox News is on board fueling the culture war, spreading the message of outrage over the assault on good, normal, country-music loving, southern fried chicken eating Americans, all of them being abused and insulted by northern elitist socialist Democrats. 

This may work for Fox, but it doesn't work for Trump. Trump misunderstands the moment.  There is a pandemic. There is unemployment. We watched a black man die by suffocation.

MS-13 is no longer top of mind for immigration. Now the story is hundreds of people getting infected in slaughterhouses in Iowa and South Dakota and fruit packing plants in Yakima. Who are those people? Immigrants. Poor people coming to America to do hard, miserable, low paid work in virus hotspots--hotspots the government requires stay open. That is the new face of immigration. It doesn't seem all that ominous to the native born, after all.

Bad timing for Trump

Repealing the ACA--Obamacare--seemed like a good issue for Republicans in 2016. Republicans are on record saying that darned Obamacare was giving subsidized health care to too many poor people and we should stop that socialist nonsense. Trump's Justice Department just yesterday re-affirmed its support of the effort by Republican Attorneys General to declare the ACA unconstitutional. Cutting healthcare and eliminating the mechanism for assuring people can get insurance if they have preconditions comes at a time when Trump's White working class base is out of work, their employee based health care withdrawn, and they are most vulnerable. 

Meanwhile, in a pandemic, the predominate message is that ones own health depends upon the health of others--the very opposite of not-my-problem self reliant message underlying ending the ACA.

Trump's public statements show little empathy or understanding of the root causes of the protests. He lumped the protesters with the looters and anarchists. People who had been willing to ignore racially biased policing--for example in stop-and-frisk policies--have a new sense that, yeah, maybe something isn't quite right. This moment of White reflection might pass--Trump is counting on it--but for now Trump seems heartless and clueless, willing to pour gasoline, not water, on the fires of racial tension.

Trump rolled the dice on how to handle the virus. He understood America's impatience with social distancing and its economic effect. He minimized the virus and represents the get-back-to-work position on the virus and he politicized wearing masks. The Tulsa event was a brazen statement of position. Forget the worrywart so-called experts. Crowd in. MAGA people go mask free. Live free or die. 

There was calculation there. The effect on the economy was brutal and the virus most affected bright blue New York and it poor Black Americans, not the Trump base. It is their problem. Why should you suffer?

That bet is going sour. Swing state Arizona and Florida are becoming hotspots. College football players are getting sick. Trump campaign staffers are getting sick. Secret Service people are getting sick. Trump looks like a hypocrite--going mask free and telling people not to worry--while he himself is surrounded by people getting tested daily. Hypocrite. Bone spur Trump.

Trump come across as out of touch with the current realities. The culture war he is stirring up is a distraction, but now it comes across as a forced and phony distraction. Trump had an element of authenticity in the past. He was a crude guy who spoke his mind and bullies his enemies. But now he comes across more as a crude guy who is obviously trying to con you by manufacturing enemies, and waving a Bible instead of dealing successfully with the economy, the virus, and the real problems in America. 

The message being sent out by John Bolton, General Jim Mattis, Michael Cohen, Anthony Scaramucci, Tom Tillerson, the impeachment witnesses, and the Lincoln Project is that Trump is a con man in it for himself, and not for the country. 

It is starting to stick.