Whatever one thinks about white working-class voters who favored Trump, calling people gullible is not an effective way to woo back a voting bloc that already feels insulted and alienated.
Missing a Chance
So, when Trump was sworn in last Jan. 20, the ball was largely in his court. He could have focused on rebuilding America's infrastructure; or he could have proposed a serious plan for improving access to health care; or he could have moved pragmatically to resolve a host of international conflicts that President Obama had left behind.
The crowd at President Trump's inauguration on Jan. 20, 2017.
(Image by (Screen shot from Whitehouse.gov)) Details DMCA
Instead, President Trump squandered his first days in office by getting into absurd arguments about his inaugural crowd size compared to Obama's and denying that Clinton had won the national popular vote. His "alternative facts" made him a laughingstock.
Last spring, when I spoke with a group of Trump voters in West Virginia, they were still faithful to their choice -- and wanted Washington to give him a chance -- but they already were complaining about Trump's personal outbursts on Twitter; they wanted him to concentrate on their real needs, not his petty squabbles.
But Trump wasn't listening. He couldn't kick his Twitter habit. He kept putting his giant ego in the way.
As his presidency stumbled forward, Trump also brushed aside suggestions that he reverse his image as a person who had no regard for facts by declassifying information about the conflicts in Syria, Ukraine and elsewhere -- to reveal situations where Obama and his team played propaganda games, rather than tell the truth.
And, lacking sufficient knowledge about the world, Trump failed when presented with sophisticated plans for reshaping U.S. policies in the Middle East to become less dependent on Israel and Saudi Arabia. Instead, Trump jumped into the arms of Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Saudi King Salman.
Pandering to Israeli-Saudi desires -- and trying to show how tough he was -- Trump fired off 59 Tomahawk missiles at Syria over a dubious chemical-weapons incident; threatened more Mideast strife against Iran; and escalated the 16-year-old war in Afghanistan.
Plus, he blustered about war against North Korea and personally insulted the country's leader, Kim Jong Un, as "little rocket man." Rather than rein in neoconservative aggression, he continued to unleash it.
When Trump did address domestic policy, he defined himself as basically just another right-wing Republican, supporting a health-care scheme that would have made matters worse for millions of Americans and backing a tax-cut plan that would mostly benefit the rich while blowing an even bigger hole in the deficit. All that red ink, in turn, drowned any hopes for investments in a modern infrastructure.
In other words, Trump exposed himself as the narcissistic incompetent that his critics said he was. He proved incapable of even acting presidential, let alone showing that he could use his power to make life better for average Americans. He was left with little to boast about beyond the economy that was bequeathed to him by Obama.
Republicans also had little to brag about, explaining why Ed Gillespie, the GOP's gubernatorial nominee in Virginia in 2017, opted for ugly socially divisive attack ads as the best hope for defeating Democrat Ralph Northam, a Gillespie strategy called "Trumpism without Trump."
But Gillespie's approach backfired with a surprisingly strong turnout of Virginia's voters putting Northam into the governor's mansion and almost erasing the solid Republican majority in the state legislature.
Trump was left to tweet about how the Virginia results, which were echoed in other states' elections on Tuesday, weren't a reflection on his own popularity, ignoring his unprecedentedly low approval ratings for a president nine months into his first term.
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