"When you know you're driving a stolen car, you want to avoid collisions."

[dalton99a]

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/01/americans-arent-rallying-trump/604612/

Americans Aren't Rallying to Trump
A president who writes off half the country can't expect to garner support from a crisis of his own making.
10:17 AM ET
David Frum

Trump supporters are trying to re-create the atmosphere of 2003, to claim the high ground of patriotism and defense of the nation. That can never work for them, because at every turn they and the country confront the weird hold Russia’s Vladimir Putin seems to hold over the U.S. president. Trump defenders angrily denounce the facts of the Trump-Putin connection as a “hoax,” but the country does not believe them. As of mid-summer 2019, only 35 percent of voters accepted the president’s claims of “exoneration.” A majority believe that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help Trump; a plurality believe that Trump colluded with that effort.

A president regarded by so many Americans as Putin’s puppet cannot plausibly wave the flag against domestic opponents.

Trump himself seems to intuit the danger—which is why he always flinches from foreign-policy confrontations at the last minute, first with North Korea and now with Iran. When you know you’re driving a stolen car, you want to avoid collisions.

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(Yeah, I know it's David Frum...)

[dewsgirl]

1. So what if it's David Frum? Look how popular, Rick Wilson,

George Conway, Steve Schmidt, Nicole Wallace, etc..have gotten on the left...at least for now.

They will never, ever pull it off. I don't care what the circumstances are, it ain't gonna happen.

[gratuitous]

2. Frum, yes, but this is an underasked question

The media simply regurgitate Trump's brag about his "landslide" victory in 2016, rarely noting that he lost the popular vote by 2.8 million votes. While the media are fond of the "Cletus safari" narratives where they go out into the diners of the hinterlands to ask Trump voters how happy they are with Trump, they never seem to get around to asking people who didn't vote for Trump in 2016 about voting from him in 2020.

Trump's re-election is contingent on a very thin margin, and there's very little he has done to attract more support from voters who didn't cast their ballots for him in 2016.

I realize the media are like crack addicts when it comes to their horse race narratives, and folks aren't going to tune in for a blowout. So they don't ask non-Trump voters if he's won their vote this year; the answers would be too telling. It's not a done deal by any stretch of the imagination, but we should be about our electoral business with a cheerful and eager heart, talking up the Democratic platform and the prospects for better days ahead.

[StrictlyRockers]

3. Frum calls us "a large majority"

I like Frum.

He's a good writer. He's been right a lot lately.

[The Blue Flower]

4. The central point in the article:

"With the departure of Secretary of Defense James Mattis at the end of 2018, there is no figure left in the administration who does command broad respect from the public, Congress, or American allies—who can credibly step forward and say, “'This time, the president is not lying.'”