It’s difficult to believe that U.S. President Donald Trump was playing 3D chess when he tweeted out last Sunday that several radical, first-term Democrat Congresswomen (now known as the Squad) should go back to their home countries. The POTUS apparently forgot that when your opponents are fighting among themselves, you should get out of the way.
Unfortunately, the ill-advised tweets gave more more incentive for the anti-Trump media (a.k.a. the media), the Democrats, and the Never Trumpers to continue to brand him as a racist. Trump, who is obviously not a detail guy, attempted to clarify things with a subsequent series of tweets, but that will never counter the dominant media narrative.
Plus, in politics, when you’re explaining, you’re already losing.
During vacation season, the average American is probably not paying attention, however. The average anti-Trump American probably just thinks that Trump is saying racist things again.
It is fair to say that the members of the Squad (only one of whom was born outside the U.S.) loathe America, love socialism, and seem fundamentally ungrateful for the success that our country has bestowed on them. Moreover, two of them are accused anti-Semites, and one faces allegations of both immigration fraud and tax fraud. So there is a lot to criticize without using the highly charged “go back” terminology.
A Self-Inflicted Mistake
New York Post columnist Michael Goodwin, who seems to have the ear of the president, summed up the situation quite well in a column published yesterday:
“President Trump has given the hanging party a first-rate piece of rope to use against him.His tweet will not live in infamy, but his cringe-worthy ‘go back’ language rhymes with many of his earlier self-inflicted mistakes. The pattern was established during the 2016 campaign and he has been faithful to it many times since taking office.
“It always seems to happen when things are going pretty well. So it was Sunday, with Democrats engulfed in a vicious civil war and Trump’s poll numbers rising against the 2020 candidates as the public begins to realize how far left they are going.
“Indeed, things were so relatively tranquil that the media’s perpetual outrage machine was out of grist. Then suddenly, Trump fired at his opponents and shot himself in the foot.
“Instantly, the political world goes crazy, the media is over the moon with its new ammunition against the president they loathe and tempers immediately reach the boiling point…
“While I don’t believe his tweet reflected racial intent, enough reasonable people believe it did and so a cleanup is in order. The best course would be for him to signal regret, to acknowledge it was a tweet too far. People of goodwill — the vast majority of Americans — will not see it as a surrender to the mob. Quite the contrary. It will let them close the books on the incident, which is good for the president and the country…
“Naturally, even that would not satisfy the radicals and their media handmaidens. But Trump should take that path now because presidents have an obligation to speak to the nation as a whole, especially in times of rancor, and because he needs a reservoir of goodwill to weather next year’s brutal campaign…In short, Trump has everything to gain and nothing to lose by doing what he can to hush the hysteria. Besides, eating a little crow now is better than having to swallow the whole bird later.”
New Polling Data
Big League Politics highlighted a YouGov poll that indicated that 88 percent of Republicans either thought the “go back” Tweet was either great, good, or okay. Keep in mind that Trump needs independents and Democrats to win reelection, however. Among the former cohort, 51 percent concluded that the tweet was terrible or bad, while 71 percent of the latter deemed it terrible.
Big League Politics separately claimed that Trump is advancing the MAGA movement with his social media activity. “President Trump was roundly derided by globalists and media figures from both sides of the aisle for calling out Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) via Twitter, though his genius is proven by a poll released by Axios revealing Ocasio-Cortez’s divisive rhetoric and brainless commentary is destroying the Democrats’ image.”
[Featured image credit: kalhh/Pixabay]