This Is Why You Love Donald TrumpLimbaugh is making an excellent point here. You can say that Trump is trying to avoid impeachment by committing impeachable acts on live television and hoping that the public will believe it can't possibly be wrongdoing if he's doing it openly and brazenly. You can say that he's giving in to his insatiable appetite for vengeance, which is clouding his judgment and causing him to incriminate himself.
RUSH: Something else happened today. This is the reason you love Trump. During that press gaggle when he’s on the way to Marine One, the helicopter, to catch a plane to head down to The Villages here in Florida, he said, “You know, it’s not just Ukraine. The Chinese should be looking into Joe Biden too! I mean, there’s $1.5 billion of funny money there.
“The Chinese government ought to be looking into the Bidens.” Of course, the Washington media and everybody said, “Grab me the vapors! Oh, my God. Oh, my God.” Now the headlines are, “Trump is recruiting the Chinese! Trump is so bad! He asked the Ukrainians to do his dirty work, and that’s not enough. Now he’s asking the ChiComs to do his dirty work!”
This president, the point is, will not be intimidated. Whatever it is that upsets them, he doubles down on it....
... this is the stuff he does that just coalesces his support with his voters and his base. This is the stuff he does that they love. This is the pushback. This is the real guy who says what he really thinks unfiltered, that makes Trump so approachable and likable to so many people.
But he's also playing to the base. He knows that if he does anything that makes his critics howl, he just has to do more of it and the base will cheer even louder.
In other words, this isn't just a high-risk strategy for surviving an investigation. This is campaigning. This is Trump running for reelection.
Which brings us to that godawful David Brooks column, the one titled "Why Trump Voters Stick With Him." In Brooks's imagined dialogue, a Trump-hating "Urban Guy" won't stop obsessing over the president's crimes while a Trump-voting "Flyover Man" repeatedly tries to turn the conversation back to Real Issues.
Urban Guy: I hope you read the rough transcript of that Trump phone call with the Ukrainian president. Trump clearly used public power to ask a foreign leader to dig up dirt on his political opponent. This is impeachable. I don’t see how you can deny the facts in front of your face.But it's Trump who's fixated now. He's not restoring high-paying jobs that were outsourced. He's not addressing the social breakdown of blue-collar communities. He's spent months looking ahead to 2020 and demanding that the executive branch prioritize efforts to discredit Joe Biden and the Mueller investigation. He's made that the focus of U.S. foreign policy as well. And when he's not talking about the Bidens or trying to rewrite the narrative of Russiagate, he's on the phone with Xi Jinping asking him what he thinks about Elizabeth Warren's electoral prospects.
Flyover Man: I haven’t really had time to look into it. There’s always some fight between Trump and the East Coast media. I guess I just try to stay focused on the big picture.
The big picture is this: We knew this guy was a snake when we signed up. But he was the only one who saw us. He was the only one who saw that the America we love is being transformed in front of our eyes. Good jobs for hard-working people were gone. Our communities in tatters. Our kids in trouble. I had one shot at change, so I made a deal with the devil, and you’d have made it, too.
... I have to deal with the actual realities of life.
One, mass immigration is changing my town, region and state. Two, the cultural liberalism you preach but don’t practice is leading to the breakdown of families up and down my block. Children out of wedlock. Young men with no dad when they’re young and no wife in their life when they’re grown. Third, an Ivy League elite running government and the economy for itself and shutting out those of us who actually make things with our hands. Fourth, China is replacing us.
U.G.: I’m happy to talk about these big problems.
F.M.: Like hell you are. The media fixates on scandals....
And we're the ones who aren't focused on the real problems of the heartland?
Democrats tried. They ran a midterm campaign focused on healthcare reform and other kitchen-table issues. They downplayed investigations for the first eight moths of the new congressional term, passing bill after bill in the House to deal with real problems; all of those bills were dissolved in the acid pool that is Mitch McConnell's Senate. The presidential candidates have big ideas about pressing issues. Elizabeth Warren generates more policy ideas in a month than the Trump White House has in nearly three years.
But we're the ones who don't care about the people. Right. Got it.
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