From: januarybaybee@gmail.com   
      
   The Secret to Cracking Trump’s Base   
      
   New polls show that some of the most hard-core Trumpsters are starting to get   
   a clue. It might be because he finally crossed a line: He’s now insulting   
   them.   
      
      
   We know that Donald Trump, the first president without a pet since James K.   
   Polk, appears to hate dogs.  And the feeling is mutual, according to one of   
   his ex-wives. He also uses pooches as pejoratives when insulting women.   
      
   Dogs, though known for their loyalty, can take only so much from one abusive   
   human.  Alas, the same cannot be said for the aging, white, rural and southern   
   people who make up Trump’s base.  He can lie to them, hurt them with   
   tariffs, make a mockery of    
   their values, suck up to freedom-hating dictators they once distrusted, and   
   they’ll stick with him.  Cult 45 is thought to be impermeable.   
      
   But surprise — a raft of new polls show that some of the most hard-core   
   Trumpsters are starting to get a clue.  I know, hold your applause.  It’s   
   like discovering that climate change is not a hoax when your town is under   
   water, and all your commander    
   in chief can do is throw you a roll of paper towels.  And the woke among the   
   true believers is small.   
      
   The decline could be because Trump’s increasingly moonstruck tweets have   
   lost their power.  Or maybe it’s because all of the people around him   
   believe he’s an idiot and they’re going public with the consensus inside   
   the White House (another    
   reason to get a dog).  But I think Trump’s base is showing some erosion   
   because his followers feel he finally crossed a line: He’s now insulting   
   them.   
      
   It didn’t go over well in Alabama that Trump reportedly called his   
   ’Bama-bred attorney general, Jeff Sessions, “a dumb Southerner” and   
   ridiculed his accent. Trump has denied the account from Bob Woodward’s new   
   book, “Fear.”   
      
   Abraham Lincoln said, “No man has a good enough memory to be a successful   
   liar,” and Trump clearly doesn’t have the bandwidth for the magnitude of   
   his mendacity.   
      
   I’ll take the word of Woodward, White House stenographer for at least six   
   presidents, over Trump — who just passed the 5,000 mark for false or   
   misleading statements during his presidency.   
      
   Trump has used the regional dis before, calling the family of another ex-wife,   
   Marla Maples, “dumb Southerners” and “hillbillies,” as one reporter   
   recalled.  Last week, the longtime Trump confidant Roger Stone trashed   
   Sessions as an “   
   insubordinate hillbilly” — expressing a double dose of hick hatred.   
      
   It’s in Trump’s character to deride those without gold-plated bathroom   
   fixtures as inferior.  His people, as he said in a North Dakota non sequitur,   
   have the best apartments and the nicest boats.  But you don’t need what   
   comes out of his mouth as    
   proof of his class disdain.  Look at the two biggest policy initiatives of his   
   presidency ......   
      
   He has tried mightily to destroy Obamacare and all the lives dependent on it.   
   He’s still pushing a repeal plan that would leave upward of 18 million   
   people without health care.  And who are those people?  His supporters, mostly.   
      
   Working-class whites, particularly in the old Rust Belt, were the main   
   beneficiaries of the expansion of health care under President Barack Obama.    
   In Midwestern states that flipped from Obama to Trump, far more    
   on-college-educated whites gained health    
   coverage than did whites with degrees or members of ethnic minorities,   
   according to an Urban Institute study.   And if the president’s party   
   succeeds in choking the last life out of Obamacare, these Trump voters stand   
   to lose the most.   
      
   As noted, some of them are catching on.  A Quinnipiac poll out this week   
   showed that even among non-college-educated whites — the strongest   
   demographic holdout for Trump — a plurality now say they’d like to see   
   Congress be more of a check on the    
   president.  Since his election, he’s down 14 points among the “poorly   
   educated” that Trump once professed to love, a CNN poll found.   
      
   In West Virginia, where Trump could shoot the Mountaineer mascot and still   
   walk at the head of a parade, attacks on Obamacare are killing Republican   
   chances of taking down Senator Joe Manchin.   
      
   The other signature issue is the tax cut. Remember how Treasury Secretary   
   Steven Mnuchin, another plutocrat who has trouble hiding his contempt for   
   flyover country, described it last year?  “Not only will this tax cut pay   
   for itself,” he said, “but    
   it will pay down the debt.”   
      
   We’ll soon be running a trillion-dollar deficit, up 32 percent this fiscal   
   year, thanks to the tax cut.  Wasn’t this the sort of thing that roused Tea   
   Party opposition to President Obama — crippling our children with a legacy   
   of debt?   
      
   The collapse in revenue will hurt Trump supporters in other ways.  One is the   
   paucity of federal dollars for investment — in community colleges, roads,   
   opioid treatment, Pell grants for students, ultimately even Social Security or   
   Medicare.   
      
   Another is that, by forcing borrowing costs up, the Trump deficit contributes   
   to rising interest rates.  That makes it much harder for working families to   
   buy homes.   
      
   In truth, economics will probably not move Trump supporters.  Their vote for   
   him was more about status anxiety in a changing nation than about financial   
   uncertainty.  They’ll stay with him only so long as they allow themselves to   
   be easy marks for the    
   insulting con of this presidency.   
                                                       _______________________   
      
   "Say what you will about Trump, he is not stupid.  He is a smart man with a   
   deep understanding of what stupid people want." - Andy Borowitz   
      
      
      
   www.nytimes.com   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)