RUTHFULLY YOURS

McCarthyism accusations are the last refuge of old Commies. As a dog returns to its vomit, old lefties reach for the security blanket of that ancient slur which is used to tar anyone who questions the left.

Once upon a time, Ron Radosh disavowed the left and its accusations of McCarthyism. But he now accuses a growing list of conservatives from David Horowitz to Stephen Bannon to Rich Higgins to Stephen Miller to a fellow named Daniel Greenfield of that primal sin of the left: McCarthyism.

McCarthyism is everywhere and in everyone. Except Ron Radosh, who was once accused of McCarthyism for breaking with the left, but has learned nothing from the experience.

That has always been the great irony of McCarthyism. It’s the lefties who were really guilty of the mindset that the slur represents. But it’s a particular irony now as posters pop up depicting President Trump in a Russian fur hat with a sickle and hammer. And Democrats accuse him of taking orders from Moscow. The lefties who claimed to be the victims of McCarthyism have become its perpetrators.

Rep. Ted Lieu accuses President Trump of taking orders from Vladimir Putin and walks around wearing a ‘Trump-Putin ‘16’ cap. Rep. Maxine Waters rants mindlessly about the “Kremlin Klan” on MSNBC. Rep. Quigley claimed on CNN that “when you meet with any Russians”, you’re meeting with Putin.

And Ron Radosh has nothing to say about this runaway leftist McCarthyism come to life.

Instead he has contributed to it by repeatedly trying to associate Stephen Bannon with Vladimir Lenin. Even as he accuses Trump supporters of McCarthyism, he also charges Bannon with Leninism.

There’s an illustration of Vladimir peering over Bannon’s shoulder while President Trump applauds in the article where Radosh first made the bizarre claim that Bannon, the former Breitbart boss and Trump strategist, had told him he was a Leninist. The claim was implausible and there was no evidence of it, but suddenly he was the talk of Morning Joe and showing up in the New Yorker. There were positive mentions in the New York Times. And even the Guardian and the New Statesman seemed forgiving.

It’s amazing what a little “McCarthyism” will do for your career.

That was Radosh’s first Daily Beast article. And also the last one that anyone paid attention to. In February, a desperate Radosh tried to dust off his Lenin smear by accusing Bannon of a “shout-out to a left-wing terror group”. By that he meant that Bannon had quoted Bob Dylan. “It doesn’t take a weatherman to see which way the wind blows.”

Radosh had actually created the kind of cartoonish McCarthyism that leftists imagined it to be in which quoting Dylan means that “Bannon is consciously revealing that he sees the Tea Party as the equivalent of a new revolutionary movement, that will play the same role as did the Weather Underground.”

McCarthy wept. So did Kafka and Orwell.

There’s a sad, comic absurdity in Radosh trying to stuff his old anti-Communism into Never Trumper garb and then peddle it to the media left. There’s only so many times you can accuse Bannon of being a secret Leninist. Once will get you discussed on Morning Joe. Twice is just tacky. And even a left that will swallow nearly any accusation about Trump has to roll its eyes at the Bannon-Dylan conspiracy.

Radosh’s dilemma is the classic problem of the Never Trumper. Beyond the cocktail party circuit, the only people who will listen are on the left. And his plight is especially sad. How do you sell Never Trump anti-Communism to the media left that hates Trump, but celebrates Communism?

In fewer than seven days after the Charlottesville violence last weekend, statuary and other symbols of the American Confederacy are disappearing. Others are being vandalized—someone in Washington on Tuesday, perhaps a Middlebury history major, even spray-painted an expletive on the memorial to Abraham Lincoln.

Standing at the center of this tumult is President Trump, who in a succession of statements and tweets since Saturday has tried to make himself understood on the status of Confederate statues and the people who wish to preserve them. Suffice to say, it hasn’t gone well.

The practical political lesson is that there are good reasons why U.S. Presidents and the people who work for them try to choose their words carefully when commenting on public events. Myriad political forces—some active, some dormant—sit beneath America’s political life, and what a President says can put those forces powerfully, even dangerously, in motion.

Absent Mr. Trump’s comments, it is doubtful that the counter-Confederate movement would have extended to the attempted renaming in Austin of Robert E. Lee Road or that New York Governor Andrew Cuomo would be demanding, as a “stand against intolerance and racism,” that the U.S. Army rename two streets at Fort Hamilton in southwest Brooklyn commemorating Lee and Stonewall Jackson.

In our view cities can properly decide whether they wish to take down Confederate symbols, many of which arose in the Jim Crow years of white supremacy in the early 20th Century. But erasing a nation’s history is a bad idea. Mr. Trump is being ridiculed for suggesting that George Washington or Thomas Jefferson could be next because they were slaveholders.

We’re glad to have the clarifications on the false equivalence between Confederate generals and the Founding Fathers, but we hope these clarifiers will be around when campus demonstrators or even historians start demanding that the Founders’ legacies be repudiated because they owned slaves.

“Racist” is a powerful accusation to make against anyone, but it is heard today in an ever-widening set of circumstances, not just against Confederate generals. It might be useful if more people understood the role race has played in American history, as well as that history’s effort to get past discrimination based on race.

It might begin with Jefferson and Washington, who wrote the language and built the institutions of the bedrock American belief that “all men are created equal” and possess inalienable rights. Those words planted the seeds of freedom for the slaves, an idea that advanced through the awful Civil War and, not without setbacks, for a century after, culminating in the Civil Rights Act of 1965.

That is a long and difficult history of progress, one that deserves to be known in its complexity, rather than not known or forgotten. Robert E. Lee spent the rest of his life after the Civil War, notably as president of what became Washington and Lee University, trying to heal the wounds between north and south.

That’s at least one legacy of Lee we can all celebrate because we can’t see much purpose beyond political symbolism in reopening the Civil War 152 years later. It won’t educate an inner-city child trapped in a rotten school, it won’t create more economic opportunity, and it won’t lead to more racial tolerance.

I’m a descendant of a soldier who served under Gen. Robert E. Lee and a resident of the Richmond metro area, where one can take very few paces without bumping into a reminder of the Confederate past. Yet I can’t work up much enthusiasm about Civil War monuments.

My lackadaisical attitude has nothing to do with race or heritage and is quite widespread. Most people are far too busy worrying about losing their house, finding a job, making payroll and wondering why their dog’s tongue is turning blue to spend much time contemplating statues of guys who lost a war 152 years ago.

Carting away Baltimore’s Lee and Jackson statues in the wee hours, Aug. 16. Photo: Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

The violence in Charlottesville last weekend is deeply distressing. In this neck of the woods it’s commonly held that thugs who run down people with cars should go to the crocodile pit (after a fair trial, of course). But it’s hard not to cringe over the way a growing list of American locales are responding to the rise of the dead confederates.

In Baltimore, four monuments were purged Tuesday night in a scene reminiscent of the nocturnal vamoose of the Baltimore Colts to Indianapolis in 1984. (By contrast, three of the statues were parked at a wastewater treatment plant.) You didn’t have to be a soldier, or even a rebel, to get the hook: A statue of Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, the Marylander who wrote the Dred decision and served on the U.S. Supreme Court until his death in 1864, was hauled off, along with a statue dedicated to Confederate women. Lexington, Ky., plans its own official purge, while a Confederate statue in Durham, N.C., was toppled Monday and kicked by protesters after it bit the dust.

Where will it stop? President Trump was widely mocked for saying Tuesday: “I wonder is it George Washington next week, and is it Thomas Jefferson the week after?” He didn’t have to wait that long. The next day, a Chicago pastor demanded the removal of a Washington statue from a city park. Last October activists gathered outside New York’s American Museum of Natural History to demand the removal of a statue of “racist” Teddy Roosevelt. The Rough Rider still stands, but Gov. Andrew Cuomo tweeted Wednesday that “Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson will be removed from the [City University] hall of great Americans because New York stands against racism.” CONTINUE AT SITE

My first job, in 1972, was with a small weekly in Richmond, Virginia. Like my fellow writer/editors, I was a proud veteran of the sixties campus wars, and our left-of-center politics were strongly represented throughout the paper; which is to say, we were far from a neat ideological fit with the deeply conservative town Richmond still was back then. I joked with my friends up north that, the morning after Richard Nixon’s landslide victory in November, I could actually see my McGovern vote in the paper. The politics weren’t all that I disliked about Richmond. It was sleepy, ghastly hot in the summer, and in general far from what I then thought of as “the action.”

But there was one thing that I loved about the place: it was steeped in history. On Clay Street, just a few blocks from our office on Broad, was the Confederate White House. Not far off loomed the magnificent, Jefferson-designed state capitol. Over on Franklin, the Jefferson Hotel boasted the staircase said to be the model for the one in Gone With the Wind. But above all there was Monument Avenue, with its imposing statues of the generals whose prowess had sustained hope in this capital of a doomed nation a century earlier: Stonewall Jackson, J.E.B. Stuart, Robert E. Lee.

As a Northerner and a lefty, I’d grown up thinking of the South as the bad guys. Nonetheless, there was an undeniable grandeur to these stone figures, and I felt it every day driving past them on my way home. They were men of surpassing courage and nobility, rightly enshrined in national myth: “There stands Jackson like a Stone Wall.” And the image of Lee, wearily arriving at Appomattox aboard Traveller, having resisted calls from diehards that he continue the fight, saving the nation from yet more bloodshed. I wasn’t the only one who felt this way. One of my colleagues, Richmond-born and recently graduated from Harvard (and now a left-wing commentator of some note), would tear up every time he heard “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.”

As a Red Diaper baby, I came from a different tradition. My parents never saw Gone With the Wind—they were outside the theater, picketing. But I, too, felt the pull of that history, in all its messiness and grandeur. It was our history, as Americans.

Maybe that’s all over now. Maybe, as my colleague Kay Hymowitz once observed, for kids today American history runs from the oppression of the Indians to the oppression of blacks to the oppression of women, with nothing ennobling in between. Not long ago, talking with several people in their twenties, I was startled to learn that, until the movie came out, none of them had heard of Dunkirk. How, then, could we expect them to know about figures like Richard Kirkland, “the Angel of Marye’s Heights,” the Confederate soldier who, during the abattoir that was Fredericksburg, emerged from the safety of the commanding Southern lines to tend to dying Union soldiers on the killing field below?

Our history is rife with moral complexity. My wife and children exist only as a result of two near-misses. One ancestor, on her mother’s side, whose descendants would include several prominent abolitionists, nearly drowned after falling overboard on The Mayflower, while her great-grandfather on her father’s side, at 12, was nearly shot down from a rooftop in Fort Smith, Arkansas, by an occupying Union soldier after shouting “Long live Jeff Davis!”

All of which is a preamble to saying that, in his exchange with the churlish and ignorant press corps in the aftermath of Charlottesville, Donald Trump got it right when he said: “This week it’s Robert E. Lee. I noticed that Stonewall Jackson is coming down. I wonder is it George Washington next week and is it Thomas Jefferson the week after? You know, you really do have to ask yourself, where does it stop?” He may not have been the ideal messenger—with his combative style, manic egotism, and casual relationship with facts, he never is—but he laid out a case that for months has cried out to be made, and he did it so clearly that the refusal of the media and the elites of both parties, not just to credit it, but even to acknowledge it, speaks volumes. Though Trump has never quite defined what his notion of making America great again actually means, preserving that which needs no fixing—including the history that is our common legacy—is a key part of it.

After the clashes in Charlottesville, a mania against Confederate monuments has swept the country. Local leaders in various states have decided to remove statues and monuments, while at least one black pastor in Chicago has called for excising even George Washington’s name from public parks, and Anonymous has planned to remove 11 statues on Friday.

One plausible response is to defend the statues. Another would be to encourage the movement to go further.

Activists who cry for the removal of Confederate statues do so on the grounds that these leaders were racist, that they hurt people based on the color of their skin or their national origin. If those are the criteria, however, why stop with the Confederacy?

Racism has a long and varied history, and certainly these social justice warriors wouldn’t want to defend racists, even if they were important inventors, politicians, or scientists, right?

Here are 10 people whose statues should be removed, if the Left insists on that sort of thing.
1. Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924).
Woodrow Wilson statue in Rapid City, South Dakota. Photo courtesy of Presidents USA. http://www.presidentsusa.net/wilsonrapidcity.html

Woodrow Wilson, America’s 28th president, wasn’t just a racist. As president of Princeton University, he discouraged blacks from applying for admission. His book series History of the American People defended Ku Klux Klan lynchings in the late 1860s.

When Wilson was president, his war department drafted black soldiers, and while it paid them the same as whites, it kept them in all-black units with white officers. When black soldiers protested, Wilson told them “segregation is not a humiliation but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you gentlemen.”

The pro-KKK film The Birth of a Nation became the first film screened in the White House under Wilson’s presidency. Under Wilson, racial segregation was implemented in the federal government, at the Post Office, and in the military.

In 2015, the University of Texas removed a statue of Wilson, along with one of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, from campus. Statues of Wilson remain, however. Many stand across Europe, a prominent one stands in Rapid City, S.D., and his presidential library and museum gives prominence to his birthplace in Staunton, Va.

2. Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922).
Bell Statue in front of the Brantford Bell Telephone Building. Photo credit: the city of Brantford, Ontario.

Alexander Graham Bell deserves recognition for inventing the telephone, but he was also a horrible racist. Bell served as honorary president of the Second International Eugenics Conference in New York in 1921, and led the eugenics movement during that period.

Based on the naturalistic worldview of Charles Darwin, many scientists in the early 20th century adopted the idea that human beings needed to continue to evolve — that natural selection involved choosing the strong over the weak, and that therefore human society should promote the existence of strong people at the expense of the “less fit.”

Eugenics leaders saw evolutionary fitness in explicitly racial terms.

Bell made a hobby out of breeding livestock, and this gained him an appointment to biologist David Starr Jordan’s Committee on Eugenics, which extended the principles of breeding to humans. From 1912 to 1918, Bell was the chairman of the board of scientific advisers to the Eugenics Record Office. Such organizations advocated for laws to establish compulsory sterilization for people who, in Bell’s words, were a “defective variety of the human race.”

To make matters worse, California’s compulsory sterilization law (one of the results of Bell’s advocacy) was used as a model for that of Nazi Germany.

The most famous and impressive monuments to Bell are in Canada. A statue depicting Bell in the style of the Lincoln memorial stands by the Bell Telephone Building in Brantford, Ontario. The Alexander Graham Bell National Historic Site rests in Baddeck, Nova Scotia. Alexander Graham Bell Memorial Park has a monument to telecommunications.

In the U.S., the Alexander Graham Bell Laboratory stands in the Washington, D.C. suburb of Georgetown. The laboratory was created by Bell himself for the research and development of telecommunications technology.

Jim Talent was the Republican Senator from Missouri (2002-2007) He lost the next election to Democrat Claire McCaskill. He is a Fellow at the Heritage Foundation.

Andy McCarthy has written an estimable column outlining the legal aspects of federal “domestic terrorism” laws. One of Andy’s points is that acts of violence in the context of protests are overwhelmingly state rather than federal crimes; another is that state officials’ response to the violence so far has been largely rhetorical. What’s worse, for the most part, is that the rhetoric has merely made use of the violence to make political points.

He’s right. I’ll go further and say that words, no matter how strong, are no longer enough, if they ever were, to stop this growing trend. What is needed is action, both legislative and executive, from state authorities.

I wrote about this several months ago in the context of violence on campus. Now the problem is spreading to city parks and neighborhoods. What needs to happen, broadly, is this:

First, state laws must single out violence and disorderly conduct in the context of mass expression for special and certain punishment, and the punishment must be meaningful to the kind of people who do this sort of thing. That means jail time. If existing laws are not strong enough to do the job, state legislatures should make them stronger, and everyone should know that the laws have been strengthened.

The problem has grown so great that nothing less than incarceration will be sufficient to stop it. The message must be that if you are involved in a protest and you break the law, you will go to jail, and not just overnight. You will cool your heels in the county jail for a minimum of a month or two until you learn to respect the rights of other people.

That principle must apply to any kind of violence or disorder. Even crimes that in other contexts would appear minor, such as blocking access to a street or building, must result in real jail time. The whole point is to nip unlawful conduct in the bud before it blossoms into violence against people or destruction of property.

It doesn’t matter where the offenders are on the political spectrum or what they are protesting. It’s not up to them to decide whether their ends justify violent or criminal means. It’s up to the rest of us, through the responsible public officials, to insist they keep their conduct lawful and peaceful.

Second, the laws must be strictly enforced. This is where governors must be strong leaders.

Too many mayors have been lenient for fear that they will suffer political consequences if they enforce the law against members of politically favored groups. Given what I’ve seen from our current crop of mayors, I don’t expect that to change.

Governors represent a larger constituency, the vast majority of which is weary of people who deliberately stir up violence and disorder. Further, cities are political subdivisions of the states; states are ultimately responsible for how the cities are governed, and as far as I know, all the state constitutions give their governors full authority to preserve civil order when local officials won’t.

So governors must thoroughly prepare their responses before the crises come and must act decisively when the crises happen. I wrote about the steps that should be taken in the context of violence on campus, but the same principles apply here:

[Governors] should make it a personal priority to: ensure that state law enforcement personnel are properly trained and equipped; prepare a bipartisan list of competent and fair special prosecutors who can be swiftly appointed should the need arise; establish close connections with their college administrators and local authorities; and — when they see trouble brewing at one of their universities — publicly warn that speech will be protected and violence will be punished.

I’ll add only that states should spend whatever is necessary to make sure they have large numbers of well-trained and -equipped personnel ready, whether from the state police or their National Guards.

One advantage of this approach is that it will identify and neutralize the loose bands of anarchists and other troublemakers who are roving around the country causing this violence. McCarthy is right that we should be concerned, from a constitutional standpoint, about excessive federal involvement in monitoring or infiltrating these groups. But that isn’t necessary. Once state authorities arrest and incarcerate these individuals, their names, faces, and fingerprints will be on the books, and subsequent violations can and should be punished more harshly, including with felony imprisonment when warranted.

Progressives used to pressure U.S. corporations to cut back on outsourcing and on the tactic of building their products abroad to take advantage of inexpensive foreign workers.

During the 2012 election, President Obama attacked Mitt Romney as a potential illiberal “outsourcer-in-chief” for investing in companies that went overseas in search of cheap labor.

Yet most of the computers and smartphones sold by Silicon Valley companies are still being built abroad — to mostly silence from progressive watchdogs.

In the case of the cobalt mining that is necessary for the production of lithium-ion batteries in electric cars, thousands of child laborers in southern Africa are worked to exhaustion.

In the 1960s, campuses boycotted grapes to support Cesar Chavez’s unionization of farm workers. Yet it is unlikely that there will be any effort to boycott tech companies that use lithium-ion batteries produced from African-mined cobalt.

Progressives demand higher taxes on the wealthy. They traditionally argue that tax gimmicks and loopholes are threats to the republic.

Yet few seem to care that West Coast conglomerates such as Amazon, Apple, Google, and Starbucks filtered hundreds of billions in global profits through tax havens such as Bermuda, shorting the United States billions of dollars in income taxes.

The progressive movement took hold in the late 19th century to “trust-bust,” or break up corporations that had cornered the markets in banking, oil, steel, and railroads. Such supposedly foul play had inordinately enriched “robber baron” buccaneers such as John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Mellon, Andrew Carnegie, and J. P. Morgan.

Yet today, the riches of multibillionaires dwarf the wealth of their 19th-century predecessors. Most West Coast corporate wealth was accumulated by good old-fashioned American efforts to achieve monopolies and stifle competition.

Facebook, with 2 billion monthly global users, has now effectively cornered social media.

Google has monopolized internet searches — and modulates users’ search results to accommodate its own business profiteering.

Amazon is America’s new octopus. Its growing tentacles incorporate not just online sales but also media and food retailing.

Yet there are no modern-day progressive muckrakers in the spirit of Upton Sinclair, Frank Norris, and Lincoln Steffens, warning of the dangers of techie monopolies or the astronomical accumulation of wealth. Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook are worth nearly $1 trillion each.

Apparently, as long as violent leftists label their victims “fascists,” they are free to set fires, smash windows and beat civilians bloody. No police officer will stop them. They have carte blanche to physically assault anyone they disapprove of, including Charles Murray, Heather Mac Donald, Ben Shapiro, me and Milo Yiannopoulos, as well as anyone who wanted to hear us speak.

Even far-left liberals like Evergreen State professor Bret Weinstein will be stripped of police protection solely because the mob called him a “racist.”

If the liberal shock troops deem local Republicans “Nazis” — because some of them support the duly elected Republican president — Portland will cancel the annual Rose Festival parade rather than allow any Trump supporters to march.

They’re all “fascists”! Ipso facto, the people cracking their skulls and smashing store windows are “anti-fascists,” or as they call themselves, “antifa.”

We have no way of knowing if the speakers at the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally last weekend were “Nazis,” “white supremacists” or passionate Civil War buffs, inasmuch as they weren’t allowed to speak. The Democratic governor shut the event down, despite a court order to let it proceed.

We have only visuals presented to us by the activist media, showing some participants with Nazi paraphernalia. But for all we know, the Nazi photos are as unrepresentative of the rally as that photo of the drowned Syrian child is of Europe’s migrant crisis. Was it 1 percent Nazi or 99 percent Nazi?

As the “Unite the Right” crowd was dispersing, they were forced by the police into the path of the peace-loving, rock-throwing, fire-spraying antifa. A far-left reporter for The New York Times, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, tweeted live from the event: “The hard left seemed as hate-filled as alt-right. I saw club-wielding ‘antifa’ beating white nationalists being led out of the park.”

That’s when protestor James Fields sped his car into a crowd of the counter-protesters, then immediately hit reverse, injuring dozens of people, and killing one woman, Heather Heyer.

This has been universally labeled “terrorism,” but we still don’t know whether Fields hit the gas accidentally, was in fear for his life or if he rammed the group intentionally and maliciously.

With any luck, we’ll unravel Fields’ motives faster than it took the Obama administration to discern the motives of a Muslim shouting “Allahu Akbar!” while gunning down soldiers at Fort Hood. (Six years.)

But so far, all we know is that Fields said he was “upset about black people” and wanted to kill as many as possible. On his Facebook page, he displayed a “White Power” poster and “liked” three organizations deemed “white separatist hate groups” by the Southern Poverty Law Center. A subsequent search of his home turned up bomb-making materials, ballistic vests, rifles, ammunition and a personal journal of combat tactics.

Just seven months into Donald Trump’s administration we are already bombarded with political angling and speculations about the 2020 presidential race. No one knows in the next three years what can happen to a volatile Trump presidency or his psychotic enemies, but for now such pronouncements of doom seem amnesiac if not absurd. https://amgreatness.com/2017/08/14/anti-trump-bourbons-learning-forgetting-nothing-time-2020/

Things are supposedly not going well politically with Donald Trump lately, after a series of administration firings, internecine White House warring, and controversial tweets. A Gallup Poll has him at only a 34 percent positive rating, and losing some support even among Republicans (down to 79 percent)—although contrarily a recent Rasmussen survey shows him improving to the mid-forties in popularity. Nonetheless, we are warned that even if Trump is lucky enough not to be impeached, if he is not removed under the 25th Amendment or the Emoluments Clause, if he does not resign in shame, even if he has the stamina to continue under such chaos, even if he seeks reelection and thus even more punishment, he simply cannot win in 2020.

In answer to such assumed expertise, one could answer with Talleyrand’s purported quip about our modern-day Bourbons that “They had learned nothing and forgotten nothing.”

Namely, Trump’s enraged critics still do not grasp that he is a reflection of, not a catalyst for, widespread anger and unhappiness with globalization, interventionist foreign policy, Orwellian political correctness, identity politics, tribalism, open borders, and a Deep State that lectures and condemns but never lives the consequences of its own sermonizing.

In particular, the current conundrum and prognostications ignore several constants.

Do Americans Really Believe that Pollsters and the Media Have Reformed?

One, despite the recent Gallup poll, most polls still show Trump’s at about a 40 percent approval rating—nearly the same level of support as shortly before the November 2016 election. That purported dismal level of support is pronounced to be near fatal, when in fact it is not.

Since a) pollsters likely have not much changed their methodology since 2016, and since b) it is fair so assume that the media and those who poll for them continue to despise Trump, and since c) Trump’s exasperating eccentricities continue to make his supporters cautious about voicing their support (even to anonymous pollsters and political surveyors), we can conclude that his actual support could be about 45-47 percent—or close to the percentage of the popular vote he won in 2016.

Given that Trump’s base in the key swing states of the Midwest (the so-called Democratic “blue wall”) has not weakened, there is no real reason yet to think Trump could not win the Electoral College again in 2020 in the same fashion as 2016. In 2004 and 2012, we were told respectively that an unpopular George W. Bush and a sinking Barack Obama might lose reelection; instead they both were re-elected largely with the same election calculus and an even stronger base of support that carried them to victory four years earlier.

Do Americans Really Believe the Messenger Nullifies the Message?

As in 2016, many of those who voted for Trump would prefer that he curb his tweets, clean up his language, sleep eight instead of five hours, and follow all the conventional-wisdom admonitions offered about his misbehavior. But that said, nearly half of the country is probably still willing to overlook his eccentricities for several reasons.

Trump now has a presidential record of eight months. Despite the media’s neglect of it, one can sense changes by just getting out and traveling the country. Even in rural central California, one can feel that it really is true that there is a 76 percent drop in illegal immigration, and immigration law is being taken seriously as never before.