Everyone got the significance of Donald Trump expelling Jorge Ramos from his presser the other day, right? The obviously intentional symbolism of Trump ejecting a Mexican guy from his domain, telling him to “go back to [where you came from]”?

Well have you thought about the symbolism of how he eventually let him back in and talk to him, after time had passed and he was willing to wait his turn and go through proper channels?

Or the significance of how a lot of the media didn’t even bother trying to ding him for that because they said “yeah, fair enough, that guy was arrogantly breaking the rules and that’s a reasonable response”.

I’m thinking Trump’s accepted a significant hit among hispanics, his messaging at this point - and honestly GOP messaging on race-adjacent issues in general - isn’t trying to win them. Only state that’s going to flip on overland hispanic votes this cycle is Colorado anyway (Florida’s a different demographic beast).

What it’s targeted at is places like my homeland, the “collar counties” around Philadelphia that determine which way the state swings. Places full of nice, comfortable, suburban whites who vote that identity and those interests, chief among them that they can keep thinking of themselves as nice (and ideally not have to think of themselves as white).

Their concern with immigration and racial policy isn’t with its effects but with its aesthetics - they recoil from deportation and interdiction only insofar as the attached adjectives are “malicious and hateful”, but if Trump can sell the exact same policy as “tough but fair”…

And it’s not like that’ll make him win them over with the issue, but it means he won’t lose them on it. He gets painted as “far-right” but it’s basically just immigration (which gives you a sense what our painters think counts in politics) and in any other respects he’s exactly the moderate-liberal Republicanism that kind of voter loves. Seriously, dude’s like a Aaron Sorkin wet dream, not even so much a Rockefeller as a Lindsay Republican.