In Trump's estimation, a variety of foreign forces was responsible for the lot of the silent but angry majority: illegal immigrant labor, Chinese trade practices, America's allies who should be expected to pay for the privileges of the U.S.-led world order, Europeans that sacrifice Western culture upon the altar of multiculturalism, etc. Trump wasn't abandoning this white identity politics last week; he was reaffirming fealty to it.
Freeman's second contrarian is a predictable one. The cartoonist Scott Adams has found a second career in reflexively ascribing brilliance and foresight to every presidential synapse. On Thursday of last week, Trump reacted on Twitter to an ongoing terrorist attack in Spain by alluding to the utterly apocryphal story of General John Pershing's crimes of war. The storyone Trump knows is false because it was attacked as false when he used to tell it on the campaign trailalleges that the American war hero discouraged Islamist terrorism in the Philippines by burying Muslims with the bodies of pigs so they might find no peace in the afterlife.
You might not be surprised to learn that Adams thinks this is yet anothermasterful example of public persuasion. You see, Trump is communicating his toughness on terrorism. By lying, he will compel media to fact-check him, amplifying his persuasive persuasion.
Trump has persuaded himself right into history as the most unpopular president at this point in his presidency in the history of modern polling. There's no honest way to claim a week that resulted in the broadest critical reaction among Trump's Republican allies since the release of the infamous "Access Hollywood" tape was a great week for the president. Even if Trump spent a week skipping through a minefield, though, that doesn't mean his opponents' fortunes were advanced.
An online poll commissioned by Axios found that a "remarkable" 40 percent of adults signed on to Trump's assertion that both demonstrators on the left and the right were responsible for the violence in events in Charlottesville. They see members of the academy defend political violence, even as liberals pen hallucinatory love letters to themselves congratulating their movement on its restraint. They've watched with apprehension as an agitated mob tears down a statue of a nondescript Confederate soldier in North Carolina as though it were a likeness of Felix Dzerzhinsky.
They watch as liberal commentators call for an end to the veneration of figures like Washington and Jefferson, just as Trump said they would and (have been doing for years), even as coastal elites insist that no one advocates such things. On Monday, Baltimore awoke to see a 200-year-old monument to Christopher Columbus destroyed by a vandal with a sledgehammer. They know that this is not some isolated event but an extension of the madness they've seen take hold of the country, even amid lectures about how connecting these dots is woefully unenlightened.
"The people asking these questions (over and over and over) are not racist," wrote Senator Ben Sasse. "Rather they're perplexed by the elite indifference to their fair questions." Liberals dismiss these sentiments at their peril. Despite a Republican president's unpopularity and the dysfunction of his party in Congress, Democrats have so far been unable to capitalize on the environment. Even by its own modest standards for success, the Democratic National Committee's fundraising has been bleak. On Thursday, Cook Political Report shifted the race for Senate in four Democrat-held states in the GOP's direction.
Attributing Donald Trump's wink and nod in the direction of white supremacy last week to strategic genius is simply deluded. That does not, however, suggest that Democrats are benefiting from Trump's recklessness. Liberals have given the public no assurances that they can govern from the center, or that they even see that as a desirable enterprise. And yet, Democrats still appear convinced they are the default beneficiaries when Trump falls on his face, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.
Commentary by Noah Rothman, associate editor at Commentary Magazine. Follow him on Twitter @NoahCRothman.
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Trump's stumbles don't automatically benefit Democrats - CNBC