After the Tulsa rally turned into a fiasco, political pundits were quipping about the big brain on Brad Parscale. Parscale was summarily demoted and replaced, but none of that matters, because it’s the big brain on Donald Trump that is putting the kabash on his reelection — and nobody can stop him. The man lives in an echo chamber in a time warp in a dimension of his own.
His most recent contribution to his own destruction was this hyper confident tweet, if you missed it.
The “suburban housewife” will be voting for me. They want safety & are thrilled that I ended the long running program where low income housing would invade their neighborhood. Biden would reinstall it, in a bigger form, with Corey Booker in charge! @foxandfriends @MariaBartiromo
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 12, 2020
Trump doesn’t see a number of factors that leap right out at the rest of us:
- The label “suburban housewife” is antiquated because it is paternalistic, not to mention condescending — not to mention that women don’t marry houses;
- The racist dog whistle of the black man, Corey Booker, spearheading a black invasion of suburbia is so blatant as to be comical. It’s on a par with the “caravan” from the south;
- The repetition of Trump as the only thing standing between women and lack of safety is ludicrous, since if anybody is a sex offender and rapist, it’s him.
That said, suburban women got mad — and then they set out to get even. Daily Beast:
If you search “suburban housewives” on Facebook—between the pages dedicated to gossiping about the Real Housewives reality shows and one called “A group where we pretend to be suburban PTA housewives”—you will now find at least eight groups dedicated to overthrowing Trump. The group descriptions and membership varies, but the message is the same: Trump cannot count on suburban women to pull him over the line this November.
“Donald Trump used sexist language to describe us as ‘suburban housewives,’” one group description reads. “He also said that we’d be voting for him. He’s wrong.”
“A group of ‘suburban housewives’ whose vote Trump does NOT have—despite what he seems to think,” reads another.
Loni Yeary Gentry, a stay-at-home mother of three from Florence, Kentucky, started the group “Suburban Housewives Against Trump” on Wednesday afternoon. The objective, she said, was to create a space for other Trump critics in her conservative community to speak freely. When she went to bed that night, the group had just over 100 members. When she woke the next day, it had more than 300. At the time of publication, it had 6,000.
It would appear that Donald Trump has awakened a sleeping giant and filled it with a terrible resolve.
Indeed, a recent NPR/PBS poll found that 66 percent of suburban women said they disapproved of the job Trump is doing overall, and 58 percent said they “strongly” disapproved. According to The New York Times’ Nate Cohn, Trump trails Biden by 25 percentage points with female voters.
A short while ago Biden was up 18%, then it went to 20%, now one pollster has it at 25%. Trump’s paternalistic law and order message seems to not only be bouncing off, it is actively pissing off a lot of women.
But Mary Hayes, the founder of a Facebook group called “The Real Suburban Housewives for Biden/Harris,” pointed out a flaw in Trump’s logic: The suburbs are not dominated by the white women who so famously supported him in 2016. By trying to appeal to suburban housewives with racist comments, Hayes said, Trump is alienating a large part of the increasingly diverse group.
Ironically, Trump himself has identified his own problem. Remember when he said a female reporter was “not exactly Donna Reed?” No, none of the reporters are and none of the “suburban housewives” either. And that’s because Donna Reed, mopping the floor wearing pearls and heels, and having a cocktail ready for hubby, was a myth. She never existed. She’s another caricature of Trump’s, in a lexicon of conservative caricatures.
What Trump thought he was doing in 2016 and what he actually was doing were two different things. He thought he was connecting with conservative America — and to some extent he was, with the racist, sexist dog whistles. But his connection with his base is one of shared grievance, first and foremost. He was a small frustrated person, with a conman’s bluster, talking to equally frustrated people and inciting them. Trump found the vein of social sickness in America and mainlined it with hate. That’s how he got where he got. He had no positive platform to stand on, never has. Plus, his entire political identity and strategy lies in attacking his opponents — in lieu of policy, because he has none. All he had in 2016 was a call to fascism, in essence, by demonizing the other, and in 2020, in the post-George Floyd era, it’s unlikely he’s going to keep selling that particular song.
Trump looks to props and symbols, because image is all he’s got, and that’s the tell that he’s caricaturing conservative America. He has no depth or substance. So of course he would hoist a Bible and argue that displaying a Confederate flag is freedom of speech. He thinks these gestures will comfort conservatives and instead, he’s insulting a lot of them.
While other politicians indulge in nuance and leave the ugly part unsaid, Trump issues clarion calls to the baser elements of American culture. His base is base, literally. They are debased and that’s why they are hardcore Trumpers. As to anybody else, Trump is wildly out of touch.
His 2020 situation is not at all like 2016. He’s not running against a hated opponent. Plus, he’s running as the incumbent, not the iconoclast. And what an incumbent: an incumbent who didn’t build his wall, but put children in cages instead, an incumbent who is responsible for the death of over 170,000 Americans, an incumbent who has told over 20,000 lies, an incumbent who has been impeached, an incumbent who presides impotently while the economy tanks, 20 million Americans are out of work, and our allies desert us in the United Nations. Plus the death of George Floyd sparked off civil protests the likes of which have not been seen in this country in sixty years and he can’t deal with that either.
The political landscape has changed. There’s no room for a shock jock in 2020. America needs to stop these games and get a grip, and the sullenly transactional Republicans know it, although they can’t admit it publicly. And deep down, Trump knows it, too. What’s sad, is that he’s exhausted his bag of tricks, and all you’re going to see for the next 79 days is the likes of an over the hill borscht belt comedian desperately trying to engage the audience and get a laugh. It will be a pathetic interlude, but mercifully, it will be short.
I grew up in one of those suburbs. Women worked, ran businesses, and did things like mowing the lawn…before power mowers. He’s never lived in a suburb, or anywhere else that he actually has to interact with normal people.
He lives in a bubble and sees people in terms of caricature.
He is so out of touch with reality, that he can’t even foresee his intended consequences, let alone envisage the unintended ones.
He’s out of his depth playing tic tac toe.
He stubbed his toe again.
He’s going to stub a lot more than his toe as he continues to throw himself off a building. He shouldn’t have done that tweet. It exploded.
Others have said this before me but it bears repeating: this all could have worked like he wanted it to had he been more competent. The crucial missing piece is follow through. He knows to start things but no idea how to finish them.
That’s the scary part. If he ever would have “become presidential” which was the great Republican wet dream, after he got elected, then he probably would be getting reelected. But with COVID-19 and George Floyd, I don’t see how he can be reelected. And believe me, I do nothing but analyze all this, day and night.
As many blog posts of yours that I’ve read, why would I DISbelieve you, Ursula? Still, it seems to me that critical mistake of confusing Trump for Reagan says little about the GOP’s own judgment, doesn’t it? Their last credible chance at permanent Republican rule was under W. Now Trump is about to ruin their ideology’s rep for a generation minimum.
He is who he is. He’s not capable of changing.
He suggests things for others to make real.
Sure, P J, but they’re even dumber than he is.
I have always objected to the label “housewife”. It is denigrating and insulting.
It comes out of an era where women were definitely second class citizens. That is what Trump is ratifying and he’s too dumb to know it. Women want “safety.” And he has said in the past, “women want security.” Melania married him for security, he’s said as much. It’s thinking that is out of date. He just doesn’t know it, because he’s immature and never developed. He loves the 50’s because he still lives there.
By that logic I should be singing “Horse with no Name” and “Incense & Peppermints” all day long because I’m SURE I still love between 1968 and 1980. Good times
It goes back to the middle ages: it’s the woman who runs a household, the female equivalent of a husband.
Women don’t marry houses? Since when? That sounds like newfangled “woke” stuff. Me and Gomer and I didn’t know this. Actually, when I read that, aside from thinking of Jim Nabors, I also thought of that Lucy scene from the 50’s where she has to tell “cousin Tennessee Ernie Ford” that the “necessary” is INdoors and he just has such a funny reaction to how city folk do things. Great line, Ursula.
Uh, small point: “20 million Americans out of work”? Not to quibble, and of course I could be wrong, but is it possible I heard 32 million this week? Again, I heard it somewhere, and I could easily be mistaken and it hardly matters in the scheme of his utter incompetence, but I’m just asking.
It probably is the higher figure. Things in Trump world usually are worse than I know, so that would make sense.
It’s variable – some people have gone back to work, but a lot of jobs have disappeared.
I think you are so right about this: “he’s exhausted his bag of tricks, and all you’re going to see for the next 79 days is the likes of an over the hill borscht belt comedian desperately trying to engage the audience and get a laugh. It will be a pathetic interlude, but mercifully, it will be short.”
I’m getting a little tired of panickers on the left telling us in urgent tones that we have to “prepare” for a whole grab bag of sinister tricks, an elaborate, strategic plot to stay in office. No. He’s already telegraphed his almost empty bag of desperate ploys, in plenty of time to combat them. I get that it’s exciting to speculate on what would happen, for instance, if there are so many outstanding votes we don’t know who the winner is on election night. We’ll know. I predict this one will be called earlier than virtually any recent election. People on the left need to stop being such hysterics.
You make a good point about us not being hysterical about this. But here’s an even better one: we cannot assume this is in the bag. We have to fight and make sure that he’s resoundingly defeated. Then and only then will the election be called early and we can go about the business of rebuilding.
The ONLY positive thing about the “remember 2016” hysteria is that no one is sitting back on their laurels this time. Even as profound a cynic as Bill Palmer (who shares mine and Anastasia’s disgust for the defeatist talk of alleged evil master plans) has been saying our job from now until Election Day is to run up the score so high that Trump couldn’t possibly catch up. Antics like this Post Office business make that much easier to sell to voters, yes?
Since she is from Kentucky, I sincerely hope Ms. Gentry saves some of her talent to help oust the DUMPF’s chief enabler, that Moscow Toad McConnell.