CPUd
01-20-2017, 05:30 PM
Trump's Uneasy Gamble
The 45th President’s inaugural address encapsulated the risky gamble the Republican Party is taking on his combative approach
Donald Trump’s combative and confrontational speech, unusual for an inaugural address, encapsulated the defining political gamble he is presenting to a Republican Party still uneasily settling into his harness.
Trump’s narrow victory last November pushed at every fault line in American politics, sharply dividing the country along lines of race, generation, education and geography. His inaugural address, centered on disdain for “the establishment” and political leadership, showed that he remains committed to a course that is more likely to deepen than narrow those divides––a dynamic underscored by the virtually unprecedented protests that erupted just beyond the inaugural parade route on Friday.
In his address, Trump offered a definition of his presidency that spoke directly to the anxieties of his uneasy electoral coalition centered on the non-college educated and non-urban whites that supported him in record numbers. But the speech may also strike those more optimistic about the direction of American life as too grim, divisive, insular, and backward looking.
By framing his presidency in such stark terms, Trump is committing the Republican Party to a high-stakes political bet: that he can squeeze more advantage out of that first group, which has been shrinking as a share of the electorate, than he will lose from the second, which includes the constituencies that have been growing most rapidly-Millennials, minorities and college-educated whites, particularly women.
“I don’t doubt that there’s a chunk of folks out there who will lap it up,” said Democratic pollster Guy Molyneux, who specializes in studying opinions among the white working class. “But it struck me as too negative, too harsh to really broaden the appeal.”
With few of the rhetorical flourishes common to these addresses, and only glancing gestures toward unity, Trump echoed his major campaign themes to present himself as the champion of “the forgotten men and women of our country” against elites at home and abroad that he said had produced an “American carnage” with “factories scattered like tombstones” and cities reeling under “crime and gangs and drugs that have stolen too many lives.”
Ronald Reagan’s “shining city on a hill” it was not.
...
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/01/trumps-uneasy-gamble/513998/
The 45th President’s inaugural address encapsulated the risky gamble the Republican Party is taking on his combative approach
Donald Trump’s combative and confrontational speech, unusual for an inaugural address, encapsulated the defining political gamble he is presenting to a Republican Party still uneasily settling into his harness.
Trump’s narrow victory last November pushed at every fault line in American politics, sharply dividing the country along lines of race, generation, education and geography. His inaugural address, centered on disdain for “the establishment” and political leadership, showed that he remains committed to a course that is more likely to deepen than narrow those divides––a dynamic underscored by the virtually unprecedented protests that erupted just beyond the inaugural parade route on Friday.
In his address, Trump offered a definition of his presidency that spoke directly to the anxieties of his uneasy electoral coalition centered on the non-college educated and non-urban whites that supported him in record numbers. But the speech may also strike those more optimistic about the direction of American life as too grim, divisive, insular, and backward looking.
By framing his presidency in such stark terms, Trump is committing the Republican Party to a high-stakes political bet: that he can squeeze more advantage out of that first group, which has been shrinking as a share of the electorate, than he will lose from the second, which includes the constituencies that have been growing most rapidly-Millennials, minorities and college-educated whites, particularly women.
“I don’t doubt that there’s a chunk of folks out there who will lap it up,” said Democratic pollster Guy Molyneux, who specializes in studying opinions among the white working class. “But it struck me as too negative, too harsh to really broaden the appeal.”
With few of the rhetorical flourishes common to these addresses, and only glancing gestures toward unity, Trump echoed his major campaign themes to present himself as the champion of “the forgotten men and women of our country” against elites at home and abroad that he said had produced an “American carnage” with “factories scattered like tombstones” and cities reeling under “crime and gangs and drugs that have stolen too many lives.”
Ronald Reagan’s “shining city on a hill” it was not.
...
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/01/trumps-uneasy-gamble/513998/