here<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\nPlenty of people in \u2018flyover\u2019 country like not only Trump\u2019s message \u2014 and actions \u2014 but also Trump, the loudmouth messenger.<\/p>\n
The political verdict seems out on Trump\u2019s current political future.<\/p>\n
His supporters have won four special congressional elections. Yet, more recently, Republicans lost more local and state offices. Pundits argue about the degree to which these surrogate campaigns are referenda on Trump\u2019s future.<\/p>\n
Trump still polls between 39 percent and 42 percent approval, occasionally higher in supposed outlier surveys. Yet most concede that such polls did not in the past, and do not in the present, fully account for the \u201cTrump Embarrassment Factor.\u201d That is the strange phenomenon of a sizable minority of Trump voters \u2014 including Democrats and independents \u2014 proving reluctant to express support even to anonymous pollsters. Ask independent or moderate Republican voters whether they really voted for Trump: If they hesitate for more than three seconds before they answer, they probably did.<\/p>\n
Registering dissatisfaction with Trump, the person, is also not the same as stating a preference for Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, or Kamala Harris in a two-way presidential poll. Trump may be off the ballot in 2018, but in 2020 he will be opposed one-on-one by a real, progressive candidate.<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s fate in the 2018 midterms \u2014 aside from the fact that first-term presidents always seem to lose congressional seats after about two years of exposure \u2014 and his reelection in 2020 supposedly hinge on whether Trump\u2019s popular message trumps the unpopular messenger (more on that below).<\/p>\n
If the economy grows at over 3 percent or even more from the last quarter of 2017 to November 2018, if unemployment dips below 4 percent, if the stock market holds at its record levels, if business, consumer, and corporate confidence keeps soaring, if illegal immigration continues to plummet, if construction and manufacturing stay on the upswing, if Trump\u2019s national-security team brings a new deterrence to foreign policy without a war with North Korea or Iran, and if energy production reaches ever-record levels, then voters will put up with a lot of Trump\u2019s downsides.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
And that \u201clot\u201d supposedly can include mercurial firings, continuous tweeting that results about every three weeks in a detour spat with some obnoxious nonentity, some ungracious comment about a rival, or an indiscretion that is perceived to be another embarrassing straw on Trump\u2019s sagging camel\u2019s back.<\/p>\n
Or Trump\u2019s message may overshadow the hemorrhaging from Robert Mueller\u2019s leaky \u201ccollusion\u201d charges. (The Javert investigation unfortunately will end only when the police are policed and Congress learns exactly what Mueller was or was not doing during his tenure in the Obama administration when the Clintons, with assumed exemption, finessed special-favor deals with foreign interests, including and especially Russian uranium concerns, and exactly what the complex relationships were between the self-righteous James Comey, the FBI and intelligence communities, the FISA courts, the unmasking and leaking of classified intercepts of private-citizen communications, and the Steele smear dossier.)<\/p>\n
Besides tensions between the Trump record and the Trump persona, what other factors will play out in the next two critical elections to decide Trump\u2019s fate?<\/p>\n
A lot depends on whether the Democratic party continues down its suicidal path of income redistribution and identity politics (embracing illegal immigration, sanctuary cities, Black Lives Matter, the Colin Kaepernick take-a-knee movement, the Antifa alliance, the new iconoclasm, and other polarizing issues that turn off two out of three Americans). Assassination chic \u2014 hanging, dismembering, blowing up, decapitating, or stabbing Trump \u2014 got old quickly. In their Pavlovian hatred of Trump, mainstream reporters have exposed their bias and nearly emasculated themselves as progressive political allies of the Democrats.<\/p>\n
Trump conceivably could be the first president to be elected twice without winning the popular vote. For now, he has overturned the conventional wisdom about the new demography. His die-hard opponents live in states that he probably would never have won anyway; his fervent supporters live in swing states where their votes count more.<\/p>\n
So far, Trump\u2019s base seems as firm as his opponents\u2019 base. Before 2016, the conventional wisdom was that Republican presidential candidates (who had not won 51 percent of the popular vote since 1988) were increasingly doomed, given that they supposedly had lost for good old battleground states such as Colorado, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, while they were fading in purple Florida, Ohio, and North Carolina.<\/p>\n
The conservative message purportedly did not resonate with the new demography-is-destiny voters and supposedly turned off the old working classes as being nothing more than a rich man\u2019s agenda. But while Democrats boasted about turning even more red states blue, Trump, termite-like, stealthily ate away the very foundations of the Democratic party. Its preachy environmentalism, ever-larger government, \u201cI got mine\u201d elitist snobbery, static economic growth, and polarizing identity politics fueled by supposed \u201cwhite privilege\u201d (shrilly blasted by those who enjoyed it, against those who did not) turned off the irredeemable and deplorable clingers.<\/p>\n
The spate of current sexual-harassment scandals should have weakened Trump, given the crude Access Hollywood sloppy talk and the 2016 campaign accusations. But, more likely, the wedge issue has been somewhat nullified by the exposure of a virtual army of sexual predators among Hollywood\u2019s progressives, Washington\u2019s mainstream liberal reporters, and prominent politicians. And the tsunami of scandals has perhaps also weakened the entire narrative of progressives as feminist defenders in the so-called Republican war on women.<\/p>\n
The Republican Never Trump movement is divided, because it is all but impossible to offer a coherent alternative to Trump\u2019s conservative agenda, which is 90 percent doctrinaire. Never Trump predictions \u2014 Trump would govern as a squishy liberal, or appoint David Souter\u2013like justices, or tank the economy, or discredit conservative ideology \u2014 have so far not panned out, at least if one follows what Trump has done rather than what he has said. In ironic fashion, Trump has learned politics more rapidly than his politically seasoned critics have learned to critique Trump. At year\u2019s end, comparing careers, Trump could reasonably claim that he is better off than his worst critics.<\/p>\n
Lastly, there are always the unplanned and unknown events that warp elections\u2014 an optional war that turns ugly, a 2008-like financial meltdown, some sort of scandal or indictment, or abject failure to pass either Obamacare repeal or tax reform.<\/p>\n
But for now, the odds are more likely that in 2018 the economy will continue on a historic upswing rather than fall into a recession. Before Trump, we were told that unemployment could not in peacetime dip below 4 percent, that 3 percent annual GDP growth was a relic of a bygone age, and that the Dow Jones Industrial Average could not much exceed 20,000. That may all be discredited wisdom in 2018, and Trump may well finally get credit for the near-historic upsurge.<\/p>\n
One final note: Mystery still surrounds the outlier Trump. Most concur that the upside of his message counters the downside of his personality. Supporters supposedly agree that his petty repartee and insistence on hammering back at even the most pathetic journalist or inane jock are both time wasted and proof of unfortunate narcissism and self-absorption. \u201cIf only Trump would not tweet\u201d or \u201cCan\u2019t he just shut up for a while?\u201d is the conventional wisdom among his reluctant supporters.<\/p>\n
But is the above orthodox diagnosis quite right?<\/p>\n
Voters may say that they find Trump puerile and repellent while in private enjoying that he is as petty as they are and hits back at those who long ago needed a smack. That disconnect could explain why polls are now less relevant and why those who voted for Trump can fudge and mislead about their politics more than Trump himself does. Trump\u2019s take-no-prisoners style may serve some people\u2019s vicarious need to push back against the progressive trajectory of the country, in a way that voting for a Cruz or a Rubio in the primary did not.<\/p>\n
We pundits talk about being \u201cpresidential\u201d and \u201celevating the office\u201d over the lowest common denominator of the mob. Perhaps. But what if after $20 trillion in debt, unwon wars in the Middle East, the 2008 meltdown, nuclear missiles 20 minutes from Portland and San Diego, and a country without borders and torn apart by race, the proverbial people do not want an aspirational president who leads only to more such lofty aspirations? What if they instead prefer someone who is in some sense unpresidential or at least anti-presidential, if being status quo \u201cpresidential\u201d got us where we are? Perhaps half the country wondered whether Bill Clinton\u2019s alleged assaults or George H. W. Bush\u2019s sneaky photo-gropes were part of being presidential and post-presidential? Or they asked whether Washington was any less immoral because it frequents the Four Seasons rather than the Motel Six? Stylistically or politically, what exactly would acting unpresidential these days consist of \u2014 politicizing the IRS, allowing the VA to decay, surveilling, unmasking, and leaking communications of U.S. citizens, or inviting into the White House misogynistic and profane rappers whose lyrics are about hating the police?<\/p>\n
If that analysis is even partly true, it may be that it was not just Trump\u2019s conservative populist message but also Trump himself, the unique populist loudmouth messenger, who won the Electoral College. Trump prevailed not only because he appealed to the concerns of flyover country, but also because he voiced these concerns in a way that no other Republican would have.<\/p>\n
In other words, the very manner in which Trump agonizes our elite is also precisely what may still energize half the country \u2014 the half that lives supposedly nowhere but in electoral terms is very much somewhere.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
by Victor Davis Hanson Originally published at the National Review. Read the original article here.\u00a0 Plenty of people in \u2018flyover\u2019 country like not only Trump\u2019s message \u2014 and actions \u2014 but also Trump, the loudmouth messenger. The political verdict seems out on Trump\u2019s current political future. His supporters have won four special congressional elections. Yet, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[1130,1123,1104,1099,1092,1091,1090,1],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-2Nz","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":9809,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/things-to-watch\/","url_meta":{"origin":10761,"position":0},"title":"Things to Watch?","author":"victorhanson","date":"February 6, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"The Corner The one and only. By Victor Davis Hanson\/\/ National Review Trump by intent has ignited the Left. But diverse criteria will determine to what degree it can do him damage: 1) Will his reforms kick-start the economy? If Trump reaches even 3 percent real GDP growth over a\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Trump"","block_context":{"text":"Trump","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/trump\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":10692,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-never-trump-construct\/","url_meta":{"origin":10761,"position":1},"title":"The \u2018Never Trump\u2019 Construct","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 26, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson\/\/ National Review \u00a0 The president\u2019s fiercest critics still do not grasp that Trump is a symptom, not the cause of the GOP\u2019s internal strife. For all the talk of a Civil War in the Republican party over Donald Trump, 90 percent of Republicans ended up voting\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Conservatives"","block_context":{"text":"Conservatives","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/conservatives\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":10945,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/a-year-of-achievement-the-case-for-the-trump-presidency\/","url_meta":{"origin":10761,"position":2},"title":"A Year of Achievement: the case for the Trump presidency","author":"victorhanson","date":"February 7, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review As President Trump finished his first full year in office, he could look back at an impressive record of achievement of a kind rarely attained by an incoming president \u2014 much less by one who arrived in office as a private-sector billionaire without either\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "NATO"","block_context":{"text":"NATO","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/nato\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":10909,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/trumps-midterm-known-unknowns\/","url_meta":{"origin":10761,"position":3},"title":"Trump\u2019s Midterm Known Unknowns","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 24, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson\/\/ National Review \u00a0 \u2018Shy\u2019 Trump voters, a booming economy, consumer confidence, looming investigations, anti-Trump frenzy \u2014 all add up to uncertainty in the 2018 elections. \u00a0 Conventional wisdom and media hopes are now combining to warn us of what is shaping up as a Trump wipeout\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "DOJ"","block_context":{"text":"DOJ","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/doj\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":10229,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-nightmares-and-the-realities-of-never-trump\/","url_meta":{"origin":10761,"position":4},"title":"The Nightmares and the Realities of Never Trump","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 30, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"By Victor Davis Hanson American Greatness Rarely in the last half-century have so many elite conservatives and intellectuals been so estranged both from a Republican administration and from those who voted for it\u2014neither have they become so animated in their antipathy and disgust for a sitting president. During the 2016\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "McMaster"","block_context":{"text":"McMaster","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/mcmaster\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":10527,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/10527-2\/","url_meta":{"origin":10761,"position":5},"title":"by Victor Davis Hanson\/\/ National\u2026","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 29, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson\/\/ National Review \u00a0 Partisan conflict is not new, nor is GOP internal dissent. 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