Trump Won't Change Course -- He Thinks He Won

[DonViejo]

By Frank Rich @frankrichny

In the run-up to yesterday’s election, amid an escalation in political and ethnic violence, Donald Trump and the Republican Party sent voters to the polls with a message of fear and racial resentment. Will anything that happened yesterday make the party rethink that strategy?

Trump is the Republican Party. Most of the few remaining feckless, and, frankly, worthless “moderate” Republicans in the House were wiped out yesterday even as a quasi–Nazi sympathizer like Steve King won reelection in Iowa. So the notion that “the party” might rethink anything is a non sequitur. The only question is whether Trump would rethink anything, and the answer is a resounding no. His entire political program is white male nationalism, with a full arsenal of racism, misogyny, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and homophobia that he wields with both glee and malice for his own political (and often financial) profit. I doubt that he would change course even if there had been a two-chamber blue wave in the midterms. He certainly won’t change it now. As his morning-after tweetfest predictably reveals, he thinks he won. He is plotting more MAGA rallies for the start of the year. More immigrant caravans will soon be wall-to-wall on Fox. The moment presumptive Democratic House committee chairmen like Adam Schiff and Jerry Nadler start wielding gavels, we will be hearing about how they are in the pay of George Soros and other shadowy “globalists.”

Despite the somewhat murky purplish hue of the midterm results, this was a clarifying election, confirming and solidifying the two Americas that Trump’s 2016 victory brought to the surface. One of them is predominantly old, white, male, rural, and what Trump himself calls “the poorly educated.” Though it is not exclusively that — his coalition also includes billionaires who directly profit from Trump’s generous tax and anti-regulatory handouts to America’s top one percent. (Not for nothing was Stephen Schwarzman, the New York billionaire whose name is plastered all over the New York Public Library, at the White House watching the returns with the president last night.) What we know about the Trump GOP from both 2016 and 2018 is that it is not large enough to win the national popular vote, but it is large enough to eke out victory in the Electoral College and win Senate races in the former Confederacy as well as rural states west of the Mississippi. The second America, which is synonymous with the Democratic Party, is self-evidently younger and more diverse. But as we learned in this election, its coalition of liberal whites and racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities is getting younger and more diverse even as it is joined by formerly Republican women. Trump’s unapologetic misogyny has driven suburban women out of the GOP much as Richard Nixon’s racist “Southern strategy” pushed blacks out of the party a half-century ago.

Demographic change is on the Democrats’ side in the longer term. But meanwhile the country continues to have a fight for its very identity on its hands. The 2018 midterms were merely a battle in what looks like an extended trench war. The next battle? It’s only a matter of time before Trump fully mobilizes his base, complete with its retinue of gun-toting alt-right vigilantes, to augment whatever extralegal tactics he chooses to fight back against the reckoning of the Mueller investigation. For all the inevitable talk about 2020 today, it is the Mueller D-Day that will come first and likely be the most decisive factor in the fate of the Trump presidency.

Now that the Democrats control the House, they have the opportunity to subject Trump and his Cabinet to actual congressional scrutiny. Can they hold Trump accountable?

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http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/11/frank-rich-trump-wont-change-course-he-thinks-he-won.html

[Stuart G]

1. Trump is really too stupid to know..what he thinks and what is ..it ain't the same...nt

[ProudMNDemocrat]

2. If the pressure gets too hot, they will jump the TRUMPTANIC....

In droves. That leaves Trump no recourse than to lash out and call for the arrest of those he feels BETRAYED him.

Life for WH staffers, the Cabinet, and surviving Republicans in office, just got more precarious.

We will be watching and coming to get them in 2020. The due has been cast as the 2020 Presidential and Congressional campaigns have begun more or less.

[moondust]

3. He's already started doubling down.

Firing Sessions is his first step toward ending the Mueller investigation and becoming king for life. He and his klan boys may test the limits of the "unitary executive" by issuing lots of executive orders and finding out how far the courts will let him go. Kavboy and Gorsuck will be glad to help when they get to SCOTUS. The RW think tanks are probably already working overtime figuring out all the ways their king can bypass Congress.