Margaret Sullivan/WaPo:
Trump’s Oval Office address was a pure propaganda opportunity. Networks shouldn’t allow it next time.
News junkies, journalists and particularly astute citizens undoubtedly realize that much of what Trump said is exaggerated or simply false. Those who read a quality newspaper Wednesday morning or endured hours of non-Fox cable news on Tuesday do, too.
But most Americans don’t absorb their news that way.
They see a headline on their phone and swipe it away. They look up in annoyance as the president’s words intertwine with “The Conners” or “NCIS,” and they pay attention for a few minutes.
And so false information wins out. And even if Trump doesn’t get his border wall, he gets a win of sorts. He sows lies, or at least confusion.
Yep. Cover it, critique it, supply context, don’t broadcast it live.
McKay Coppins/Atlantic:
Trump’s Oval Office Address Was Classic Stephen Miller
The young speechwriter has a signature style: blood, gore, and a penchant for provoking rather than persuading the president’s adversaries.
While it’s impossible to say just how much of the address he wrote, all of the tics and tropes of Millerian rhetoric were on display. The scary immigrants (“vicious coyotes and ruthless gangs”). The gory anecdotes (a veteran “beaten to death with a hammer by an illegal alien”). The decidedly un-Trumpian flourishes (“a crisis of the heart, and a crisis of the soul.”)
In setting the stage for Trump’s prime-time address, White House officials had insisted that the president was making a good-faith effort to win over skeptics of his border-wall proposal and get the government reopened. But the speech he ended up giving was not calibrated for persuasion. It was, by and large, dark, divisive, and shot through with the kind of calculated provocation that ralliesthe president’s fans and riles his enemies. It was, in other words, classic Stephen Miller.
Robert Schlesinger/NBC Think:
Trump just learned that the presidency is nothing like the movies. It only took two years.
Few presidential speeches have ever turned the tide, let alone a cooled-down pastiche of Trumpian rhetorical left-overs.
Unfortunately, watching the actual address one got the impression that, without anything new to say, Team Trump hoped that the setting would imbue the speech with some sort of magic, swaying voters (or at least skittish Republican lawmakers) through sheer majesty and gravitas.
Jared Kushner, Trump’s senior adviser and son-in-law, seemingly had this notion in mind when he called members of Congress ahead of the speech. “Kushner’s message: Public support will grow for border wall after Trump’s speech and his visit to the border,” CNN’s Manu Raju reported Tuesday afternoon. “The hope is to rally GOP support and pick up a Dem defector.”
Note to the Boy Wonder: When you are in the minority in the House, no one cares what you think.
David Frum/Atlantic:
Trump Has Defeated Himself
The president, trapped without a decent exit in a predicament of his own making, will yield everything and get nothing.
The solution to that problem is not a lengthy process of design, tendering, land expropriation, grading, and construction. The solution is to get more adjudicators into the asylum system now. If cases are resolved fast, and border-crossers removed promptly, the surge of asylum seekers will abate, as it abated in 2015 after the Barack Obama administration cracked down on the 2014 Central American border surge.
But Trump has never wanted a solution. He has wanted a divisive issue and a personal monument. Futile though that monument may be, he could have gotten it, too, had he been willing to trade something attractive to Democrats. But Trump was never willing to bargain. Senate Republicans would not let him: They saw no point in the border wall, and were unwilling to barter for it.
More fatefully, though, Trump’s vision of leadership allows no room for bartering. He imagines the presidency to operate on the principle, “I command; you obey.” More even than his wall, he wanted to coerce the Democrats into a surrender by the sheer force of his mighty will. Except Trump did not have the clout to achieve that
Eric Levitz/New York Magazine:
Why Tucker Carlson Plays a Critic of Capitalism on TV
Thus, the bedrock logic of the alliance between social conservatives and reactionary capitalists was this: One valued “small government” because it (supposedly) enabled the patriarchal family (and/or racial hierarchy), while the other valued the family because it enabled “small government.”
Social conservatives have paid a price for hopping into bed with the worshippers of mammon.
But social conservatives were always the junior partners in the GOP coalition. And when the dual objectives of rolling back the New Deal bargain — and reviving cultural traditionalism — came into conflict, the former took priority.
As a result, the logic of social conservatives’ alliance with capital has fallen apart. In his monologue, Carlson correctly observed that “free market” capitalism is deeply implicated in the social decay of white rural America — and that, in hindsight, it was also implicated in the social decay of “Detroit and Newark”; which is to say, in the very species of social “disorder” that led many fans of the patriarchal family to embrace libertarian arguments in the first place.
These aren’t new truths. But contemporary conditions have made them harder for red America to ignore.
A few pieces from The Bulwark (new conservative replacement for Weekly Standard):
There Is a Crisis at the Border. Trump Created It.
He made it happen and a wall isn't going to solve it.
The “Crisis” Isn’t at the Border
There is an emergency all right, but it’s at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave
Trump Is a Special Snowflake
Why is it that the president's supporters think he should be immune to criticism and challenges?
Nancy LeTourneau/Washington Monthly:
Why Populist Movements Eventually Lose Their Appeal
As we saw prior to the 2018 midterm elections in this country, Trump and the Republicans attempted to create a crisis about the caravan of migrants heading towards our southern border. That is because the only way populism survives is by inventing an existential threat. When the crisis fails to materialize, populists lose their appeal.
We’re watching that unfold now with the lack of support, even among some Republicans, for the president’s government shutdown over a wall. Eventually populist energy dissipates (it is difficult to maintain anger and fear over the long term), and might even swing against those who promulgated the fake crisis in the first place.
Fisher [article posted Monday] isn’t claiming that populism is dead, or even in its death throes. Instead, he forecasts that, while populist appeal will never attract a majority, “they will remain in a strong position to challenge liberalism’s postwar hold over Western democracies.” That could be more disruptive in countries with parliamentary systems. In this country, it simply means that Republicans will continue to try to scare people by suggesting that “those people” are a threat to “us.” Same as it ever was.
David Measer:
I'm just an advertising guy, but thought I'd put a marketing lens on the news of Manafort sharing "polling data" with a Russian operative.
Seems benign in the grand scope of everything, right? It's not.
Like politics, the goal of advertising is persuasion. And like politics, we call our efforts a campaign.
At the heart of any campaign, big or small, is data. Data about the market, people, the competition. In politics, this is called "polling." Same thing.
Data is the raw material in the battle that brands fight to win hearts and minds, and get people to choose one product over another. To vote with their wallets.
Gleaning the data is very expensive, it's labor intensive, and it takes a LOT of time.