MEDIA RIGHT-WINGERS THINK TRUMP CAN SAVE HIS CAMPAIGN WITH OVERHEATED RHETORIC HE'S ALREADY USING

Michael Goodwin of the New York Post, a reliable Republican hack, tells us that President Trump can save his campaign if he just makes a few adjustments.

To get four more years, his campaign needs good luck, a more disciplined candidate and a better message.

"A more disciplined candidate"! Oh yeah, that'll happen (sarcasm emoji).

To get back on track, honing and delivering an appealing message is essential. It must center around giving disaffected supporters and other fence-sitters an affirmative reason to give the president a second look.

... a framework that is strong and smart is required for the president to re-energize his campaign, and a friend recently sent along just such a Big Idea. It is the right response to the ­destruction of statues and the anarchic chaos erupting around the country.

The author is Thomas Klingenstein, chairman of the Claremont Institute....

His proposal is that the platform and rhetoric should revolve around the promise to “Preserve the American way of life.”

Writing in Claremont’s “The American Mind,” Klingenstein summarizes the dominant postwar culture as one where most people “believed we were the shining city on the hill, marked out to show the rest of the world that people can govern themselves. We saw ourselves as one people with a single culture, which was directed by a creed (expressed most notably in the Declaration), supported by the Judeo-Christian ethos, all flavored by our particular history.”

He says that creed is now ­under assault by “multiculturalism,” which sees society “not as a community of rights-bearing individuals with a shared understanding of a national good, but as a collection of cultural identity groups, ranked in order of victimhood.”

Having described the opposing forces, he suggests compromise is not possible: “Multiculturalism involves a way of life that cannot exist peacefully with the American way of life any more than could Communism or the antebellum South.”

That's right -- Goodwin thinks the way to win over "fence-sitters" is with sour jeremiads denouncing those who seek a just and multi-racial society -- in other words, the same angry message Republicans have been feeding us for decades. And denouncing multiculturalism is supposed to work for Trump at a time when 44% of Americans have a "very favorable" opinion of Black Lives Matter and another 22% have a "somewhat favorable" opinion, according to that new New York Times/Siena poll.

Oh, and if you're even thinking of voting for a Democrat, for any office, you're voting for pure evil, according to Klingenstein.

A vote for a Democrat at any level must be seen as a vote for the multicultural project to destroy America.

Yup -- a vote for any Democrat at any level will hand America over to the evil multiculturalists! That message is certain to win over fence-sitters.

It's not clear why Goodwin (or Rush Limbaugh) thinks Trump's use of this rhetoric would be a game-changer, because it sounds like rhetoric Trump is already using. Here's an account of Trump's appearance before a group of young supporters in Phoenix yesterday:

Trump declared the students in the audience as the cultural defenders of not only his movement but also of American values as a whole, portraying Democrats as intolerant and “totalitarian.” He applauded the student activists in the crowd “who stand up for America and refuse to kneel to the radical left,” bashing the mainstream media and accusing “vicious” Democrats of stifling dissent....

The president condemned the removal of monuments for slave owners and Confederate leaders as a destruction of American history. He called the audience “smarter” than Democrats, who he said require “absolute conformity.”

“They hate our history, they hate our values, and they hate everything we prize as Americans,” the president said. “Our country didn’t grow great with them. It grew great with you and your thought process and your ideology. The left-wing mob is trying to demolish our heritage, so they can replace it with a new oppressive regime that they alone control." ...

“If you give power to people that demolish monuments and attack churches and seize city streets and set fire to buildings, then nothing is sacred and nothing is safe,” Trump said....

“This is the choice of two futures,” he said. “The left’s vision of disunity and discord, or our vision of equal opportunity and equal justice.”

American carnage! Yeah, that'll turn around Trump's campaign.