There is an implicit assumption undergirding American political debate: The Republican Party is the party of “normal” Americans, and the party with its finger on the pulse of basic middle-American common sense.
That this political mythos has taken root is down to reasons so familiar that we need only glide over them: Republicans carry rural and small-town America, said to be repositories of sturdy, homespun values, while the Democratic Party thrives in the louche cities (and does, in fact, lend its succor to marginalized populations); Fox News and other right-wing propaganda outlets are adept at taking the most out-there member of the—say, the Berkeley City Council—who manages to go viral with some kooky statement, after which that supposed luminary gets cast as the chair of the Democratic National Committee; and, crucially, Republicans are just better at acting like they speak for middle America, which fools a lot of the media. I’ve lost count of all the GOP Ivy Leaguers cosplaying as factory foremen or cornpone-munching good ol’ boys.
Donald Trump has been reasonably skilled at pulling off this act at times—at least while campaigning. “Build the wall” and “drain the swamp” were both just effective enough in 2016. But once the campaign is over and governing becomes the task? No; never. If you look closely and can wrestle your way through his lies and mountains of invective and nonsense, you can see that almost no major policy initiative of his has had broad support. Policing the border is about the only one. That’s it. Nothing else—deportations, tax cuts, federal worker layoffs and furloughs, deep cuts to government programs, attacks on academic freedom—is popular. Nothing.
This reality has taken the commentariat by surprise over these last few months. Here, I think, is why: I think a lot of pundits, trying to imagine the thoughts and emotional responses of the “normal” Americans they may never have met, assume that people just reflexively fall for tough talk. That tough talk and common sense are the same thing. But they aren’t.
It’s important to understand this, especially this week, because Trump is apparently about to take this country down two very dark and, I suspect, deeply unpopular paths. The first is his thuggishly over-the-top response to the shootings of those two National Guard officers in Washington. The second is this regime-change war we’re evidently about to embark upon against Venezuela.
These are not bold moves that reflect sturdy middle-American common sense. They are desperate acts of a desperate and unpopular man who is surrounded, in his life and news-consumption habits, by a retinue of flunkies—many of them billionaires or Botox junkies or both—who wouldn’t know middle-American common sense if it smacked them in the face.
The shootings were tragic. Everyone agrees on that much. It’s hard to fathom what could have made Rahmanullah Lakanwal commit an act like this after apparently risking his life for a decade to help the CIA. Since he’s still alive, we’ll presumably learn his motivations in time. Not that they change the underlying nature of his criminal act: He did what he did, and he should face justice. Again, on this much—everyone agrees.
Everyone does not agree, however, that Trump should use this tragedy as an excuse to stop the asylum process in this country cold and to, as he put it, “permanently pause” migration from “Third World countries.” Also not issuing visas to anyone from Afghanistan. Really? Anyone? Because of the actions of one person? Regardless of Lakanwal’s actions, we’re talking about Afghans who put their own lives at risk assisting U.S. forces in Afghanistan.
This isn’t what the United States has been at its best, and it isn’t what common-sense Americans believe. A Pew poll from June on various aspects of immigration policy found respondents at best split on some Trump policies—for example, the most pro-Trump result was a statistically meaningless 50-49 approval for using state and local law enforcement “to aid federal deportation efforts.” But most policies were underwater. Trump’s asylum rules, which were already tightened before these shootings, came in at 60 percent disapproval.
In sum, Trump will use these shootings as an excuse to make an already draconian and unpopular set of policies even more so.
With regard to Venezuela: Do we really think your average American believes that it’s worth the potential loss of American lives to change the president of that country? Victor Maduro is a crook and a tyrant who obviously stole last year’s election. The world’s coalition of democracies, of which I guess we’re still a member, should be doing everything it can within international law to remove him.
That doesn’t include taking actions that only bolster Maduro’s position, like sinking boats without offering a shred of proof that they’re trafficking narcotics, as Trump claims. And it sure doesn’t include the adolescent bloodlust of the “Secretary of War,” whose reported order to kill two men who’d survived the initial attack amounts to murder, one expert told The Washington Post, since the United States is not officially at war with these alleged narco-traffickers (Hegseth denied the order over the weekend).
It seems pretty clear what’s motivating Trump here. Venezuela is sitting on the world’s largest oil reserves, more even than Saudi Arabia. But its exports are miniscule, because of mismanagement, corruption, and sanctions. Trump is surely thinking that if a friendly presidency can be installed there and the oil starts to flow, prices come down, and he’s a hero.
Maybe. But that doesn’t happen overnight. According to this Atlantic Council report, oil production in Iraq didn’t get back up to pre-war levels until 2011—eight years after we invaded. We are not, in all likelihood, looking at a similar scale of invasion here, so it may not take eight years. But it won’t be two, either. It may not happen during Trump’s presidency.
But that’s just the economics. There’s also morality to think about it, and the moral question is, is it up to the United States of America to decide who should be running another country? Maybe, in certain highly specific situations, like an immediate and severe humanitarian crisis—the slaughter of an ethnic minority, say—the United States, acting in concert with other nations, is justified to step in to try to stop the killing.
But that’s about it. We have a long and squalid history of making such decisions for other countries. American public opinion mostly supported all that during the Cold War, but these days? George W. Bush and company convinced Americans to back the Iraq War by scaring people into believing that Saddam Hussein was six months away from having nuclear weapons and that he had something to do with the September 11 attacks. But we’re not living in the shadow of any 9-11’s today. A recent CBS News poll put opposition to military action against Venezuela at 70 to 30. Only 24 percent—that’s not even all of MAGA world—thought Trump has clearly explained his position.
There are moral cases to be made against Trump’s post-shooting immigration crackdown and his potential war, and people should make them. But liberals, who tend to love making moral cases, shouldn’t forget that there are practical, common-sense cases to be made against them, too. We as a nation do not want to lock our doors to people seeking protection from political repression; that isn’t who we are. And as for regime change—we’ve tried that. It tends not to work out very well.
In both cases, Trump is emphatically not doing what Americans want. He is doing what his tight coterie of extreme ideologues wants, and what makes him look tough to the sycophants he surrounds himself with at Mar-a-Lago. The conventional wisdom that reigns in that plasticized hellscape has nothing to do with American common sense, which means judgment and prudence—two qualities that require a dollop or two of empathy as surely as they require resolve.
