WASHINGTON – The most corrosive aspect of Donald Trump’s presidency is its rousing success in making our politics ridiculous.
The political class (yes, including columnists) is obsessed with his most unnerving statements, especially on Twitter. These are analyzed as if they were tablets from heaven or the learned pronouncements of a wise elder.
Various kinds of strategic genius are ascribed to Trump. He’s getting us to focus on this because he doesn’t want us to focus on that. He’s shifting attention away from a Republican health care bill that breaks a litany of his campaign vows. Maybe he posted that video of his imagined wrestling match with the CNN logo because he realized that in attacking MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough, he strayed from his central, anti-CNN message.
No matter how idiotic one of his tweets might be, there will always be commentators who see it as a shrewd way to charm his “base.” Although Trump’s core supporters constitute a static or even shrinking minority, the punditry often endows them with a hallowed status enjoyed by no other demographic.
Anyone who doesn’t “get” Trump’s appeal is said to live in a “bubble.” That means that a substantial majority of Americans are bubble dwellers, since Trump’s disapproval ratings have been hovering between 54 and 60 percent in Gallup’s most recent surveys.