NOV. 14, 2018
By Eric Levitz
... Trump’s “core base of supporters” might “delight in him taking on fights” — but then, they’d probably delight in him yanking out their teeth to pocket the gold fillings. Few outside the president’s base find his cantankerous tweets compelling — and his base, by itself, isn’t anywhere near big enough to keep him in the White House ...
Conventional wisdom, pre-2016, held that an effective way to destroy a politician was to paint him or her as corrupt and scandal-plagued. In fact, this line of attack was considered so powerful, the GOP would often fabricate scandals with which to taint their opponents. And nothing that happened in 2016 contradicted the idea that associating one’s rival with corruption and scandal is an effective political tactic: Through relentless, negative messaging, the GOP convinced a majority of the public that Hillary Clinton’s use of private email server — and (fictional) role in abetting “Benghazi” — reflected the candidate’s personal dishonesty and corruption. Meanwhile, Clinton’s attacks on Trump helped render the GOP nominee the most unpopular major party candidate in the history of opinion polling by November 8, 2016.
... Trump has provided his opponents with a cornucopia of first-rate corruption scandals, which the Democratic House majority will spend the next two years exposing and promoting. There is little basis for believing that the 2020 Democratic nominee should strive to “ignore” this material — and forgo full-throated attacks on the incumbent president — so as to prevent Trump’s unhinged counterattacks from dominating cable news coverage ...
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/11/2020-election-democrats-shouldnt-try-to-ignore-trump.html
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