For Republicans lost inside the Trump fun house, a message: Run on his biggest victory.
In mid-June, the country stopped what it was doing to transfix for days over the spectacle of children separated from their parents in Texas. You can argue about the policy merits, but like a curved mirror it had one effect: Everyone involved looked smaller.
Four weeks later, the news cycle pumped out days of disorienting political optics around the mysterious press conference Mr. Trump conducted after his private meeting with Vladimir Putin. A week later, Mr. Trump said he would invite Mr. Putin to Washington amid the election. Then he said he wouldn’t, until next year.
In recent days, Mr. Trump has erected more mirrors for Republicans to navigate. On Sunday, he tweeted he would shut down the government before the election. Privately, he says he won’t.
.. Steve Bannon is demanding that Republicans run on every jot or tweeted tittle in the Trump agenda. But only Donald Trump himself could run for re-election on all this stuff simultaneously. For Republican candidates in competitive races—meaning the races in which 2 or 3 percentage points in the wrong direction means they lose the election and control of the House—the way forward requires simplicity and clarity, not a thousand points of rage.
A message to Republicans lost in the Trump fun house: Run on something solid. Run on something you understand. Join yourself at the hip with the greatest accomplishment of Donald Trump’s presidency. Run on America’s booming economy. (Footnote: For put-off GOP voters who need more reason to show up, the next 30 years of the Gorsuch-Kavanaugh court was why they signed on for this ride in 2016.)
Democrats have finally figured out how to turn Trump’s tweets into their own weapon.
The Almanac of American Politics details Sen. Gillibrand’s eye-rolling flip-flops—famous in New York political circles—from upstate House conservative to progressive Senate saint, described in an apparently forgotten New York Times account.
.. With Democrats themselves admitting they have no coherent message that could win a presidential election, the opposition strategy has been built around Mr. Trump’s personality, his alleged collusion with Russia to disable Hillary Clinton, and now the return of the same accusations of sexual harassment that did not cause him to lose the election.
.. Democrats may finally have hit upon the Achilles’ heel that will fell or weaken this president: his tweets.
The tweets have worried Republicans and Trump supporters since they started. Mr. Trump rejects this criticism. He said, with a tweet, that they energize his base. But Roy Moore just lost in Alabama.
.. The biggest nonpolitical story for months has been sexual abuse, starting with Harvey Weinstein. It was only a matter of time before the politicians would figure out how to manipulate harassment for their own purposes.
.. Then on Monday, the day before the Alabama election, came the following: Three women repeated sexual harassment accusations they’d made against Mr. Trump during the campaign; the congressional Democratic Women’s Working Group called for an investigation of the charges; and Sen. Gillibrand called on the president to resign.
.. They have discovered how to make his tweets their weapon.
.. Mr. Trump’s Tuesday-morning tweet suddenly elevated a B-level New York senator, and the media instantly recycled the Trump sexual-harassment details. Doug Jones defeated Roy Moore by just 1.5%, and the Republicans’ Senate majority fell to 51. By day’s end, Sen. Gillibrand was soliciting funds via email for her 2018 election. They figured out how to make the Trump side lose. It’s the president’s move now. Checkmate awaits.
Taxes: What Would Jesus Do?
What would Jesus do? He had a thought: “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” My biblical translation is that Jesus set the terms of the debate between the claims of the state and the spiritual and daily life of the people.
Selfie Politics
Trump, in fact, tweets as the Everyman of America’s new politics: Embrace Me!
For Democrats, political identity is by now well-established as a function of one’s race, gender or sexual self-definition. Refined further, a Democrat is a “person of color” or a “woman” or a “transgender” person.
.. We are in the era of selfie politics. In Donald Trump, we have a selfie president. After the Virginia gubernatorial loss, the first nine words of Mr. Trump’s tweet from Asia were: “Ed Gillespie worked hard but did not embrace me . . .”