Democrats, Start Aiming for the Gut

Democrats, Start Aiming for the Gut
What strikes me most about Trump, though, is how easily he still could become more popular — fast — if he just behaved like a normal leader for a month: if he reached out to Democrats on health care, taxes or infrastructure; stopped insulting every newsperson who writes critically about him; stopped lying; stopped tweeting inanities;
and actually apologized for some of his most egregious actions and asked for forgiveness.
That is, Trump’s core base of support — those people who he says would stick by him even if he shot someone “in the middle of Fifth Avenue” — are people who have heard and appreciated all his nativist dog whistles: from his slur
that Barack Obama was not born in America to his focus on voter suppression to his restricting transgender people in the military to his reversing affirmative action and imposing immigration restrictions.
• The Muslim world does have a problem with pluralism — gender pluralism, religious pluralism and intellectual pluralism — and suggesting
that terrorism has nothing to do with that fact is naïve; countering violent extremism means constructively engaging with Muslim leaders on this issue.
I was talking the other day to a wise executive friend
and he recalled for me something his favorite boss liked to say: When people rise to the top of an organization and get power, they usually do one of two things: “They either swell or they grow.”
Donald Trump has swollen.
• We can’t take in every immigrant who wants to come here; we need, metaphorically speaking, a high wall
that assures Americans we can control our border with a big gate that lets as many people in legally as we can effectively absorb as citizens.