The Art of Making the Right Enemies

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Ben Shapiro:

This week, Democrats elected former Obama Labor secretary Tom Perez to head the Democratic National Committee. In an act of obeisance to the Left’s insistence that President Trump be opposed by any means necessary, Perez appeared on national television with NBC’s Chuck Todd to declaim that Trump “hasn’t proposed anything but chaos and carnage, I mean, from Day One.” When Todd objected that Trump has proposed a massive infrastructure spending plan that Democrats would normally support, Perez ignored him and fired back, “We’ve seen no evidence, Chuck, of anything constructive from this president.”

This will be the Democrats’ strategy: Take down Trump.

Trump, meanwhile, has a strategy of his own: Attack his enemies.

Attacking enemies isn’t new. Politics has become the art of identifying yourself as the slayer of popular dragons. Naming your enemies is half the battle — label them properly, and you’re likely to win supporters to your side. During the Cold War, Republicans won presidential elections regularly because they identified the enemy: the threat of global Communism. Democrats declared that the true enemies of the republic were stodgy old moralists and militaristic bureaucrats. The American people agreed with the Republicans and gave them the White House over and over again. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Democrats continued to label Republicans the enemy, but Republicans could no longer point to the Soviet Union; their dragon had been slayed. The result: the Clinton presidency.

With the short hiatus of the Bush reelection in 2004, that’s been a winning strategy for Democrats. In 2004, Americans briefly agreed with Republicans that the chief threat to the country didn’t spring from repressive John Lithgow types seeking to stop the dancing, but from Islamic terrorists; on that basis, they kept George W. Bush around. But after the badly prosecuted war in Iraq, Americans quickly turned back to the Democratic narrative that America’s enemies could be found in our own back yard: those who wanted to take America back to the past, who opposed hope and change. Thus Obama.

Now, in the aftermath of President Trump’s surprise election, Democrats are sticking with the program. They say that the true enemy of America is Trump himself. That’s not an awful strategy. Trump currently rides low in the opinion polls: He has the lowest ratings of any modern president at this point, with an average of 43.7 percent. Attacking Trump could be big business for Democrats, given his unpopularity, his chaotic style, and his penchant for stepping into political minefields.

Then again, the strategy could backfire. Contrary to popular opinion, Bush didn’t need 9/11 and the Iraq War to remain popular — the week before 9/11, Bush’s approval rating was +12 percent, and the week before the Iraq War, Bush was at +20. He dropped only as the Iraq War continued and as it became clear that no stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction would be found. In other words, it takes some serious failures for a president to totally tank — for the president to become the enemy in the public mind.

Meanwhile, Trump has enemies, too.

Who are his enemies? 1) The media, who purvey “fake news”: A new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll shows that 53 percent of Americans think the media are “exaggerating the problems with the Trump administration because they are uncomfortable and threatened with the kind of change that Trump represents.” 2) China, which Trump says is stealing our jobs: 52 percent of Americans have an unfavorable opinion of China. 3) Globalists, a conspiratorial group he accuses of rigging the economy against workers: Polls show that most Americans agree with Trump’s economic plans. 4) The “establishment,” some shadowy cabal of insiders opposed to his administration: Polls show that 86 percent of Americans think “a small group in our nation’s capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost.”

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The demac-RATS are sore losers just like those rioting jerks at U.C. Berkeley so why dont they all just go and soak their heads in cement their getting so rediculous

Comfort is gained through the knowledge that the desperation of the Democrats is exposed by their weak attacks. Now they attack Sessions for having spoken to a Russian ambassador… one of 14 or so he has spoken with. The whole Russian theme becomes weaker and weaker as more and more of these thinly veiled partisan attacks.

The Democrats better hope they succeed for failure at this point will destroy them. More and more people are growing weary of the Sky-Is-Falling-Wolf-Wolf-Wolf Party making up one story after another and having them repeatedly blow up in their stupid, lying, anti-American faces.

This will be the Democrats’ strategy: Take down Trump.

What would you expect?

One of the Trump administration’s closest White House advisers has openly stated a goal of the deconstruction of the administrative apparatus of our Federal government. The Federal government is an administrative apparatus. That’s its function. Do you think a complex 21st Century technological nation the size of the United States can somehow function in an equally complex and increasingly dangerous world without a central nervous system?

This doesn’t seem like empty rhetoric. He’s filling department leadership positions with unqualified people in some cases openly hostile to the missions of the very organizations they’ve been appointed to lead—in some instances with people who have stated those organizations should be abolished.

He has openly and repeatedly attacked the credibility, competence, and integrity of our nation’s intelligence community, Department of Justice, and courts.

He has publicly declared the media to be an Enemy of the People.

He has repeatedly and inexplicably given Vladimir Putin benefit of the doubt regarding his intentions in eastern Europe and elsewhere, when it seems obvious that Putin is positioning himself strategically and tactically for a takeover of southeastern Ukraine. Did Crimea demonstrate nothing?

He’s done absolutely nothing to dispel growing concerns about his possible entanglements with Russian interests; instead, he has blocked efforts to clarify that situation by denying access to relevant records. Neither this nor the foregoing sits well, when there are strong indications that Russian intelligence services engaged in some serious meddling with the U.S. presidential election process—and are now doing the same damn thing in connection with various important European elections.

He attacked personally every opponent, both republican and democrat, by any means available, and then went on to exploit every politically useful accusation, rumor, and slander regarding his presidential election opponent available, with no regard whatsoever to their untruthfulness.

Trump has essentially declared war on the Democratic Party and everything it stands for. He angered and antagonized Democratic voters as a whole, and the various demographic groups they represent in particular. He played on divisiveness, and pandered to a reactionary right-wing populace movement’s negative impulses in return for power.

He won the presidency in this fashion, despite losing the popular election by nearly 3 million votes. Everyone then waited for that conciliatory moment, when he would step back toward the middle ground and become a president of the nation rather than a campaigner. But it didn’t happen.

So again, what would you expect? No reaction? From my perspective, Donald Trump looks a lot more like a serious threat than any sort of solution. He looks like a catalyst for chaos, not the means of addressing and dealing with problems. Democrats aren’t making him look that way. He’s been doing it himself.