Commentary
I’ve watched in dumbfounded amazement over the past few months as the Democrat nominees competing to take on Donald Trump next year for the White House have enthusiastically embraced one surefire electoral loser after another:
- Gun control/gun bans
- Third trimester abortion
- Open borders
- Free healthcare and college for illegals
- Gender madness
- Climate change hysteria
- Impeachment
- Endlessly talking about the supposed “White Supremacy Threat”
About that last one, #8:
You may have noticed over the past few weeks prominent Democrats and DNC media outlets suddenly began using the phrase ‘white supremacy’ frequently and especially when discussing President Donald Trump and his supporters.
After spending years carefully establishing that whatever the political Left in the United States deems to be ‘hate speech’ has no first amendment protections and can then be freely and liberally suppressed, they were always going to point at their political opposition in this country and label them “white supremacists” whose speech is always racist and therefore needs to be silenced.
This was always about winning elections by default after deplatforming their political opponents.
This is also an attempt to “freeze” traditional Democratic voters from crossing over to vote for Trump.
Such people are being told right now “If you are thinking about crossing over to vote for Trump in the next election, you are thinking about becoming one of them—one 0f those awful white supremacists! You can’t possibly be thinking about becoming one of those awful white supremacists, right?!”
Trump received just enough crossover votes in 2016 to win the crucial blue wall states. This allowed him to win the electoral college and the presidency while losing the popular vote.
Democrats appear to have written off all the former members of their party in the working class who have crossed over to join Trump’s base. The current dilemma they face is keeping Trump from peeling off any more defectors and convincing them to cross over and vote for him in 2020.
Much to the horror of the Democratic party leadership, Trump is currently making real overtures to blacks and other minorities whose votes the Democrats have taken for granted, and there are signs it’s working.
Trump is asking uncomfortable questions about places like Baltimore, questions that the Democratic power machines that have run these big urban cities for decades have no good answers to.
The biggest fear the Democrats have is that Trump will successfully convince Democrats to bolt across the aisle.
We’re Getting ‘White Supremacy’ Now Because Nothing Else Has Worked
Instead of dropping, Trump’s poll numbers have been going up. They’ve thrown everything but the kitchen sink at this guy over the past 2 ½ years. He’s eaten it all, and he’s still coming at them with a snarl. How can his poll numbers possibly be going up?!
In fact, the mainstream media is being forced into the reluctant admission that Trump’s approval ratings are exactly where Barack Obama’s were at this point during Obama’s first term.
Recall that Barack Obama had fawning press coverage for his entire eight years in office, but especially during that first term. The mainstream media was practically a member of the Obama White House’s PR team.
Meanwhile, ever since Trump won that 2016 race with Hillary Clinton in a shocking upset, he’s faced a mainstream media using scorched-earth, Sherman-Marching-Through-Georgia tactics against him nonstop. Some media watchdogs place the negative coverage of Trump since his inauguration at 90% or more.
They’d hoped to have Trump’s approval numbers down to historic lows by now. Instead he’s matching Obama handily, a situation some of these media reporters can’t quite bring themselves to believe they are looking at.
In fact, Trump’s actual approval numbers are likely much higher than what these pollsters are claiming.
So it’s clear to me at this point why Democrats are currently at DEFCON 1 on their scale of hysterical panic right now, and it’s causing them to quickly launch ill-conceived countermeasures such as the “white supremacy” gambit we’re currently watching unfold.
Democrats have hit upon what they hope is a strategy that will render Trump and his supporters so radioactive that potential crossover voters will be scared away.
The strategy is to endlessly claim that the president is a “white supremacist” and anybody who supports him and plans to vote for him in 2020 must by necessity also be a “white supremacist.”
I don’t believe this strategy is going to work because the election is still 16 months away, and this level of hysterical name-calling cannot be effectively sustained for such a long period of time.
Democrats using the megaphone of their allies in the media may get some initial positive results from employing this tactic, but I doubt such results can be maintained in the long term. When the results diminish, as they invariably will, there will be a temptation to merely yell the accusations louder and more stridently. I don’t believe the Democratic leadership or the media allies are going to be able to resist this temptation.
Calling half the country racist is not a viable political strategy, and the longer it takes the Democratic party to realize this, the more damage they are going to do to themselves.
When your strategy is to call half of the country something that it is not, and you’re stuck in this one-note talking point for months, what will happen is that reasonable people will tune you out and stop paying attention to you altogether.
Brian Cates is a political pundit and writer based in South Texas and the author of “Nobody Asked for My Opinion … But Here It Is Anyway!”
