The Blanket Coverage of Trump's Sins

New York Times
columnist
Thomas Friedman

Thomas L. Friedman's latest New York Times op-ed, "Keep Up the Blanket Coverage of Trump. It Hurts Him," prescribes the wrong fix for our ailing democracy. Mr. Friedman's premise: "Just a little wave of disgust among Republican moderates is all that is needed to turn several key states from red to blue."

His prescription (aimed mainly at those in the news media who decide what material gets covered the most): Don't stop the ongoing vituperative coverage of everything the president does wrong and everything he cruelly and falsely utters.

Mr. Friedman's hope: " ... there are decent Republican moderates who, while they may never pull the lever for a Democrat, just might get too disgusted to vote. It’s the best hope."

Too disgusted to vote??? Don't pull any electoral levers at all, if you feel you can't tolerate Trump and refuse to vote Democratic??? The recommendation is itself undemocratic. In itself, if carried out, it would further wound our democracy.

Moreover, Mr. Friedman's logic is self-refuting. He says there has indeed been ongoing blanket coverage of Trump's neverending faux pas. No one would challenge this fact, I agree. Yet in the latest RealClearPolitics average of polls, Trump still has a personal approval rating of 43 percent.

Trump's job approval ratings since he took office in January 2017 are shown by the lower black line in this graph:

They're right where they were just after his inauguration! Though they've leveled off in the last couple of months, in the first half of 2018 they have even climbed, after having bottomed out at 37 percent last December!

So the incessant bad press hasn't really hurt Trump.

Mr. Friedman says, in what I consider a tellingly weak argument:

I want all of this heard and spread from sea to shining sea. Because though [Trump's words of "bullying arrogance"] do rally Trump’s base, they also rally Democrats and evidently embarrass Republican moderates and alienate independents.

The veteran pollster Stanley Greenberg told me that he’s seeing signs of this is in his recent focus groups: One was with moderate Republicans, all of whom “were put off’’ by Trump’s behavior, and another was with “secular conservative Republicans,’’ half of whom were put off.

Overall, it seems the ongoing vituperativeness of most of the media coverage toward Trump has had marginal impact on G.O.P. voters, if only half of secular conservative Republicans have been "put off." Mr. Friedman continues:

In addition, Greenberg said, the full Trump — insulting black sports heroes, threatening conservatives who dare cross him, praising Vladimir Putin and attacking the F.B.I. — “reminds evangelical conservatives of the devil’s bargain they made in supporting him. Seeing him in all of his overreach and mania and self-absorption doesn’t make them second-guess their choice, but it makes them uncomfortable about it.’’

Just "uncomfortable"? Just "put off"? The continuing assault of our rational media upon our irrational president hasn't shown itself to be a great strategy, I'd say. So now the best prescription is: if you're not a confirmed Democrat but are uncomfortable with and put off by Trump, just don't vote?

No, I say, that is the worst sort of prescription, if we want to save our democracy. We need to find a way to convince as many as possible of the 40-45 percent of the electorate who continue to form Trump's base to abandon him at their polling places. We need to convince those who cast no vote at all in the 2016 election, and those strong Democrats who might otherwise fail to vote this November, to come out and vote against Trumpism. Let's maximize voter turnout, not minimize it!

Closing in on Chaos

There's a useful article in this Sunday's Washington Post, "Loyalty, unease in Trump’s Midwest," subtitled "Voters gave Trump a chance. Some remain all in. Others have grown weary of the chaos." By longtime Post political reporter Dan Balz, it's an extended look at how opinion about President Trump has shifted — and how it hasn't — in parts of four upper-Midwestern states, two of which states helped put the current chief executive in office in the November 2016 presidential election.

Balz's interviewees were people in key counties and congressional districts in Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Illinois. Most of the interviewees voted for Trump Those localities had a history, prior to 2016, of voting Democratic. This national map shows how so many of those localities are clustered around the upper Mississippi River:

The white areas on the national map above represent localities which went for Hillary Clinton in 2016. All the other areas, shown in pink or red, are localities that went for Trump. That they comprise an area far, far greater than that of those that supported Clinton in an election which saw Trump narrowly lose the overall popular vote is testimony to the fact that most of Clinton's voters came from cities and localities with much denser population concentrations than the areas which Trump won.

Here's the way the electoral vote broke in 2016:

Minnesota and Illinois stayed in the Democratic column they had occupied in 2012, but Iowa and Wisconsin, which had tipped toward Barack Obama in 2012, in 2016 supported the GOP candidate. If the results in Minnesota and Illinois had depended just on localities shown in dark red in the first map, those two upper-Midwestern blue states might likewise have flipped into the Trump column.

*****

In the Post article, Balz's interviewees mention a plethora of issues and concerns that (a) influenced their pro-Trump voting behavior in 2016 and (b) still influence the attitudes of many of the interviewees toward President Trump today.

My main reaction is one of wonder at the sheer number of issues and concerns that get mentioned in the interviews. I can't recall a presidency that, 16 months in, evoked such a wide diversity of concerns.

A thought experiment: pretend that, as you begin to read the Balz article, you've sharpened a brand new pencil so as to make a note of each distinct issue or concern mentioned by the interviewees. My guess is that you would have to sharpen that pencil over and over again, and by the end of the article it would have been sharpened down to a nub.

Now try to imagine doing the same for a similar article 16 months into the Obama presidency — or that of George W. Bush, or Bill Clinton's, or any of the other presidents before them. My hunch is that, as passionately as many people felt about particular concerns at those respective times, the number of those concerns would not have required nearly as many sharpenings of your hypothetical pencil.

*****

To me this suggests we're closer to political chaos than we've been in recent memory.

By chaos I mean the way scientists and mathematicians studying "chaos theory" define the term. In chaos theory, certain kinds of systems operate in a way that makes their future states fundamentally impossible to predict. These systems are among what the mathematicians call "dynamical systems" — systems that change in mathematically describable ways over time. Such systems can be orderly or chaotic, and they can move from order to chaos in response to various perturbations. Once they are in the chaotic regime, they are prone to the "butterfly effect": a small change in the current state of such a system can result in large-yet-unpredictable differences at a later date.

I think our political system is close to chaos, in that mathematical sense of the word. As one of Balz's interviewees so aptly puts it the next-to-last paragraph of the article, " ... no one can predict the future."

So many of the interviewees seem truly torn, now mentioning a lot more things that they don't like about Trump than those same people mentioned in earlier interviews. I feel some of the interviewees are presently on the edge of turning against Trump. Clearly, though, the slightest Trump-friendly event might reinstate their full support. This is why I think of the political situation as being very close to chaos.

I hear predictions from some of my fellow liberal Democrats that this year's midterms will constitute a "wave election." By this they mean that Democrats will do so well in November as to return control of the House of Representatives, and possibly even of the U.S. Senate, to Democratic hands. As a result, Democrats will be in good position to take back the White House in 2020.

I join my fellow progressives in hoping that's true. However, I really think the butterfly effect is what will decide the 2018 outcome. Some tiny perturbation may make Democrats' dreams come true. On the other hand, an equally minute perturbation might boost Trump's Republicans into even greater power than they possess now, at state and local levels as well as nationally.

Stay tuned. It's going to be interesting ... and unpredictable.