President Trump on Tuesday night gave the first of a series of speeches intended to alleviate Americans’ concerns about the cost of living, but spent most of the time mocking the term “affordability” and insisting that Americans were doing better than they had ever done before....The attacks on Omar and other immigrants were vile:
Mr. Trump was supposed to focus entirely on the economy, but he often ignored the script flashing before him and returned over and over again to his favorite targets.
He attacked transgender Americans, repeatedly blamed Mr. Biden for inflation and illegal immigration — “he’s a sleepy son-of-a-bitch who destroyed our country,” he said — and roused the crowd by demanding that Representative Ilhan Omar, the Minnesota Democrat, leave the country.
... When Mr. Trump introduced [Treasury Secretary Scott] Bessent, he did not talk about Mr. Bessent’s economic initiatives, but instead said, to applause, “He is in charge of the investigation of Somalia and the billions of dollars they have robbed” from Minnesota.
“If they don’t go to jail, Scott Bessent is toast!” he later told the Treasury secretary, laughing....
He raised the possibility — without evidence — that Mr. Biden signed the appointments of members of the Federal Reserve board with an autopen, suggesting that he may argue that they are not legally in their posts.
“I’m hearing that the autopen could have signed maybe all four, but maybe a couple of them. We’ll take two,” he said to muted applause.
He earned raucous cheers from his supporters as he spoke of “reverse migration” and trumpeted what he called a “permanent pause” on immigration from “hellholes like Afghanistan, Haiti, Somalia and many other countries.”Trump's team sent him out to reassure voters about the economy. They prepared a speech for him on the economy. Trump said a lot of things that weren't in his advisers' script -- but they were in his script, the one he keeps in his head, the one that's endeared him to his base for a decade. The question is whether this approach will still work for him when so many Americans are either long-term Trump-haters or occasional supporters who are becoming disillusioned.
Soon after, a member of the crowd yelled out a crude term that Mr. Trump used during his first administration to disparage Haiti and some nations in Africa. The president laughed.
“I didn’t say ‘shithole,’ you did!” Mr. Trump replied with a grin....
During his xenophobic tirade, Mr. Trump made little distinction between unauthorized migrants and those who followed all the correct procedures to enter the country and eventually become American citizens. He described Somali immigrants as lazy, murderous and “garbage,” and said the home countries of many immigrants were “filthy, dirty, disgusting.”
He singled out Representative Ilhan Omar, Democrat of Minnesota, referring to her hijab as “the little turban.” He again called for her to be deported, and the crowd responded by chanting, “Send her back.”
Whether or not the flimflam still works, I think we should recognize that it is flimflam. Trump isn't just a guy with dementia and diminished impulse control shouting racist insults when he's supposed to be talking about grocery prices. He's a guy who's long had an intuitive understanding of how to use scapegoating and bigotry to win over millions of voters. He knows that his people, at least, will fall for all these distractions, and many of them will conclude that he's still a good president even if he's not doing anything to make it easier to pay their bills, because he hates the people they hate.
In mid-November, when the government shutdown was ending, I said that Trump's poll numbers had probably bottomed out, at least for the time being, and would probably rise soon. Sadly, I was right. At the time, Trump's net job approval was -16.1% in Nate Silver's polling average; he's at -12.2% now. Trump was at -13.4% at Real Clear Polling then; he's at -8.9% now. Trump is probably just shoring up his base, but I think many people believe the base would flee him next, and that's not happening. It might happen when healthcare sticker shock kicks in, when companies begin passing more tariff costs on to consumers, and when we're in a ground war in Venezuela, but it's not happening yet.
Trump's current uptick in the polls might not help his party -- his numbers are better but they're still bad, and Democrats are winning or overperforming in elections that don't feature Trump on the ballot. Yesterday, a Democrat won a Georgia state legislative race in a district Trump won in 2024 by 13 points. A Democrat also won the race to become Miami's mayor for the first time in 30 years.
But Trump is shoring up support for ... himself, which is what matters to him. He's distracting economically struggling base voters with hate, and he's telling those voters that the people responsible for those economic struggles are the people they hate. It will make them like him more than any dry policy speech would, and he knows that. (Actually doing something about affordability would, I guess, be out of the question.)
Trump may be in a state of physical and mental decline, but he's forgotten more about being a bullshit artist than most of us have ever known, and he still retains a great deal of ability to apply that bullshitting superpower.
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