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 \u201cgo back to [where you came from]\u201d?
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\u2019t even bother trying to ding him for that because they said \u201cyeah, fair enough, that guy was arrogantly breaking the rules and that\u2019s a reasonable response\u201d.
I\u2019m thinking Trump\u2019s accepted a significant hit among hispanics, his messaging at this point - and honestly GOP messaging on race-adjacent issues in general - isn\u2019t trying to win them. Only state that\u2019s going to flip on overland hispanic votes this cycle is Colorado anyway (Florida\u2019s a different demographic beast).
What it\u2019s targeted at is places like my homeland, the \u201ccollar counties\u201d 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\u2019t with its effects but with its aesthetics - they recoil from deportation and interdiction only insofar as the attached adjectives are \u201cmalicious and hateful\u201d, but if Trump can sell the exact same policy as \u201ctough but fair\u201d\u2026
And it\u2019s not like that\u2019ll make him win them over with the issue, but it means he won\u2019t lose them on it. He gets painted as \u201cfar-right\u201d but it\u2019s basically just immigration (which gives you a sense what our painters think counts in politics) and in any other respects he\u2019s exactly the moderate-liberal Republicanism that kind of voter loves. Seriously, dude\u2019s like a Aaron Sorkin wet dream, not even so much a Rockefeller as a Lindsay Republican.
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