InstaPunk News Spotlight — 3/19/2019

This morning, the Spotlight is on an op-ed at the LA Times, linked from Facebook by Bill Gertz. Our purpose today isn’t to be mean but to flag an emergent phenomenon we’ll call backhanded Trump praise. Here’s a quote from the linked op-ed written by Scott Jennings and called Why do Republicans still back Trump?

Why do Republicans stick with Donald Trump?

It’s a question I’m asked again and again by Democrats, “Never Trumpers,” and journalists.  But the answer is simple.

Attitude and gratitude.

For years, Republican voters wanted someone — anyone — to come along and do two things: stick it to the Clintons and punch back against the media-Democratic Party alliance that fires on every Republican brave enough to stick a head out of the foxhole.If you attended any GOP fundraiser or grassroots event between 2000 and 2016 — and I went to hundreds — you heard this sentiment over and over. And over. And over...

Trump isn’t a politician but he alone in a crowded primary field realized how much Republican politics had changed. Darrell Hammond, the best Trump actor ever cast, summed it up best: the president is a “genius empath.”

Not a politician. Sound familiar? It should. That’s the Gospel According to Everyone but me. It’s important for them — pro and con both — to pretend that Trump is acting purely on instinct backed by luck. No matter what, he has to be looked down on. Even conservative Gertz’s intro presumably recorded his own favorite line from the piece: “We didn’t hire a barbarian to sing soprano in the choir; we hired him to beat back the savages.”

The thrust of the article would seem to be that the anti—Trumpers in the mainstream media are seriously misinterpreting Trump’s appeal and staying power, which means he is in better shape for re-election than the conventional wisdom might have it.

This much is true enough that I won’t disagree with it here. What I dislike in the piece is both the tone and quality of Jennings’s analysis. I’ll cover these by focusing on a few words and phrases that may seem harmless but are significant in context.

Still. As in “Why do Republicans still back Trump?” As if backing Trump were some phase (or fit) that should really be over by now. In a reasonable world, of course. It’s the first and most important question being asked here, and the answer is about to be provided by a former Republican Advisor to George W. Bush. Would that be the same Bush who participated in the gang-shag of Trump otherwise known as the Funeral of the Sainted Senator John McCain? And can we trust that Advisor to view the current scene looking to the future rather than dwelling on the past? No. More about this later.

Attitude and Gratitude. Cute rhyme. Accurate assessment? No. (I suppose he could have chosen “Callow and Shallow” without having to change too much of the article, but that might have required an unwelcome look in the mirror.) These are hardly words of unalloyed praise for Trump or his backers. Vocabulary.com gives us a useful definition of Attitude: “Somewhere between a belief, a stance, a mood, and a pose.” The Business Dictionary calls it “A predisposition or a tendency to respond positively or negatively towards a certain idea, object, person, or situation.” A pose, a predisposition to react a certain way. It comes with a fleet of negative connotations you can look up on your own. Callow might be one, though. Bluster covering up for inexperience or emotional immaturity.

Gratitude is a subtler usage but important nonetheless. It is certainly no synonym of Thankfulness (although “Spanks and Thanks” would have been punchier, and probably closer to the mark). You can see the difference by comparing the adjectives “grateful” and “thankful.” We tend to be grateful for specific things. “You saved my life. I’m grateful.” We tend to be thankful rather than grateful for the big things in life, states of being as it were — family, health, peace, prosperity. We also tend to draw distinctions between gratitude and thankfulness. We say that we feel gratitude to someone for some service in the past, but not thankful that he just moved into the spare room over the garage. Gratitude can be permanent but it can also be sharply confined in its scope. The fans of the Philadelphia Eagles will always feel gratitude to Nick Foles for winning the Super Bowl, and he will always be welcome if and when he returns to Philly, but he is not a staple of their bedtime prayers. All of this is an attempt to be as precise as possible about the assertion that Gratitude is simply too small, too shallow a word (deliberately so) to describe what Trump’s supporters feel about him, which is deep, abiding thankfulness — that he arrived on the scene, that he won, that he has kept most of his campaign promises already, and that he is still fighting the monster evil we know as the “Swamp.”

If you think I’m reading too much into mere words, just read the article with the above definitions in mind. Jennings harps so much on the idea of Trump as Republican payback for the Clintons, Obama, and most of all the Clintons that it’s easy to believe he regards this as the whole reason for being of a Trump election victory. For which Republican voters understandably show Gratitude. They may re-elect him on that count if no other.

Oddly, Jennings makes very short work of Trump’s actual accomplishments in the White House, summing them up as “Trump has basically governed the way you’d expect a GOP president to govern. He cut taxes, rolled back Obama’s regulatory regime and appointed bushels of young conservative judges to go with two rock-star Supreme Court picks.” Really? Trump has, in just two years time, accomplished more for the conservative agenda than any Republican President since Calvin Coolidge. In the process he has made Jennings’s old boss George W. look like the UniParty foil he mostly was. Why what Republicans feel is beyond gratitude. Trump is indeed a figure to them of “deliverance” (even though Jennings’s one use of this word is laughably incorrect; he means the much less exalted word “delivery.”)

Barbarian. Give me a break. In whose terms? From whose perspective? On whose express or natural authority? He’s a rich white, Christian, Ivy-League billionaire. Compare him to anyone in that demographic and he is still not in the bottom quartile. He’s been to more black tie events, traveled to more exotic places, hobnobbed with more of the other rich and famous than any of his superior-sounding rivals. He does not drink, he does not fondle pre-pubescent girls, he does not rape campaign workers, he does not use (unlike all of Hollywood and most of the Democrat Party membership) F-bombs, C-words, or MF-nukes in public, he does not use the power of his office to have the IRS persecute his political enemies or have SWAT arrest them with weapons drawn. Unlike Andrew Jackson, the barbarian to whom he is most commonly compared, he has not turned the White House into a stinking den full of of booze, whores, and manure. Barbarian. He stands guilty of not having attended Harvard, Yale, or Princeton. Period.

Not a Politician. Oh yes he most certainly is a politician. The best one. Did Jennings understand at all the meaning of Hammond’s descriptor “genius empath”? If not, he certainly also fails to understand the statement most often attributed to the supposedly greatest politician in our time, Bill Clinton: “I feel your pain.” That’s what the great politicians do. They feel that pain and then act to relieve it in the smartest, swiftest, least expensive way they know. Which, surprisingly enough, can at times be brutal, unpopular with pundits and know-it-all’s generally, and likely to generate ferocious, even violent responses from the opposition.

It is the fact that Jennings and all the others in the political class who insist on looking down on Donald Trump cannot see that he is a political genius unique in our history that dooms their every attempt at analysis and makes their conclusions inevitably laughable.

In my not so humble opinion.