We cannot tell time with only the minute hand of a clock, so it stands to reason that we mustn't look at anything in politics just one issue at a time - without context.
When moron-in-chief Donald Trump took to tweetstorming Sunday and Monday about four minority, liberal congresswomen whom he said should "go back" where they came from (no, he didn't say s---hole countries, but he knew most of us would remember his old and now-famous line), he wasn't just being a bigot. He was being a strategist - at least by his standards.
He was running for re-election on a weekend after he lost his bid to have a citizenship question put on the 2020 Census and after his July Fourth military parade was roundly panned. He was running for re-election after his much-touted massive ICE raids fizzled. He was running for re-election in a country where, despite rosy jobs and stock market numbers, most Americans think the economy only works for the top 1 percenters.
Most of all, of course, he was - and is - running for re-election under the spectre of the upcoming Mueller testimony - at a time when head-to-head polls last week found him nine percentage points behind Joe Biden, seven points behind Bernie Sanders, five points behind Elizabeth Warren and one point behind Kamala Harris.
Just as much as Trump's tweets were blowing the dog whistle to his 35-ish percent share of fanboys and fangirls and trying feebly to stoke the wedge he thinks - wrongly - will divide the Democratic Party, he also was screeching: "Look over here" to the media and the rest of us.
Let's pull these strings separately.
Hugh Hewitt, a conservative radio pundit, in the Washington Post on Saturday wrote: " 'A punch in the gut' is how one GOP strategist, speaking to Axios, described President Trump's decision to throw in the towel on the 2020 Census litigation. There is no sugarcoating it: The president folded. It's a big loss ... ."
Bloomberg.com, hardly a liberal stronghold, said the Fourth of July celebration of Trump had "so many things wrong with it" that it was actually impossible to rank them.
Despite Fox News reporting "ICE deportation raids underway," NPR six hours later reported, "No sign" of Trump's large-scale immigration enforcement operation. The New York Times wrote "plans for the operation were changed at the last minute" after news reports "tipped off immigrant communities about what to expect." Wait. It was Trump who announced the Sunday raids in 10 specific cities.
The Hill, increasingly right-leaning, recently published an op-ed titled, "Rosy economic data belies a harsh reality for many Americans." The piece by Eugene Ludwig, founder and CEO of Promontory Financial Group, a global risk management and regulatory compliance consulting firm, says: "Yes, the market is up, and unemployment is the lowest it's been in nearly 50 years. But education, health care and, in many places, housing are much more expensive than they once were, even as wage growth has fallen flat." Americans, Ludwig states, exist "on the knife's edge" where 40 percent of would struggle to come up with $400 in the face of an emergency.
None of those things were good news for Trump. But the one thing our president fears even more than making his tax forms public is the looming national binge-watching of former special counsel Robert Mueller testifying in public next week about the findings of his two-year Russia probe.
As a reminder, here are highlights from Mueller's most recent public comments: Russia "launched a concerted attack on our political system." And: "If we had confidence that the President clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so. We did not, however, make a determination as to whether the President did commit a crime" because Department of Justice policy states a president "cannot be charged with a federal crime while he is in office."
Thus we come back to the bigoted dog whistles.
Without naming them, Trump attacked four first-term Democratic congresswomen - Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib - for standing against his cruel border policies. He said they should "go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came." They are all American citizens. Three of them were born in America, but no one thinks Trump meant they should go back to New York, Massachusetts, Minnesota and Michigan.
Then there was South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, who on Fox News advised Trump to "aim higher" - at the women's policies rather than making personal attacks. But then Graham, too, made a personal attack: "We all know that AOC and this crowd are a bunch of communists. They hate Israel. They hate our own country."
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, despite a recent quarrel with the four, quickly rose to their defense, calling Trump's comments "xenophobic" and saying his signature slogan about American greatness "has always been about making America white again."
There is a silver lining to the political context of these events - aside from all but assuring Democratic unity. Public opinion surveys since Trump became president show a solid shift against his bigotry. As a matter of fact, support for immigration has surged.
Keep talking and tweeting, Pres.