Donald Trump Is Actually Good At "Politics"

 My main support for Joe Biden comes from the fact that Biden is good at politics. He's a natural people person, he has good instincts honed over a lifetime of public service and he's generally governing like a bog standard Democrat. My favorite Biden thing is when he's before a crowd and always seems surprised to see people and delighted, especially, that children are there. America's Goofy Grampa.

But I think we have to understand that Donald Trump is also good at his particular form of politics. It's a deeply weird form of politics, but the GOP is a deeply weird political party. 

This recent tidbit is instructive. 

Trump understands that the GOP's current abortion politics is deeply toxic. The assumption about "the Base" is that they will only turn out for True Believers. But Trump understands that's simply not true. Trump isn't a True Believer. He's a combination of echo chamber and amplifier. He has a salesman's good instinct for telling the customer/mark what they want to hear. He also amplifies those things that the Base feels aren't allowed to be said in public.

The caterwauling over "Cancel Culture" isn't about any particular act or speech. It's about the fact that you can't say the N-word or make Dumb Blonde jokes or call someone a f**. The rest is details. Trump understood that the Base wanted a champion who would shatter the norms around speech. The details never mattered. 

Trump has - I can say with 99.9% certainty - paid for abortions in his life. Of course he has. The fact that this doesn't matter to the "pro-life" movement is very telling. The irony, of course, is that Trump gave the anti-abortion zealots their consequence-proof majority on the Supreme Court. All the negative backlash the GOP is getting is because Trump pushed through Amy Comey Barrett. (If it was a 5-4 Court, Roberts likely preserves some form of Casey and Roe.) 

Still, Trump is a "winner" in their eyes. He gave them the judges. He also understood that cuts to Medicare and Social Security - as proposed by the Paul Ryan wing of the party - were toxic. In ways that are perhaps surprising from a malignant narcissist, Trump actually does understand certain things about his Base. They don't want their entitlements cut. They want to feel like it's still a White, Straight America. He plays to that. I don't think it plays beyond the Base anymore, but I felt that way in 2016 and we all know how that played out.