"The deplorables now have a president."
So said to me the amiable and feisty woman who supports Donald Trump and sits regularly on the front row of the LifeQuest of Arkansas class on politics for active retirees I lead every Wednesday morning.
When I quoted her to begin the class last week, another woman walked out. I know that because a man posted on social media hours later that an elderly woman unknown to him came up to him on a parking lot and asked for a ride, which he granted. He said she complained that I had just called Trump supporters "deplorables" and that she would not sit through such effrontery.
As usual, I am innocent, mostly. I merely was quoting the Trump supporter down front who had made the statement as a quip, and only in a timely reference to the previously undetected "presidential" demeanor exhibited by Trump in his speech to a joint congressional session the night before.
I merely was seeking to set the stage for a discussion of Trump's uncommonly reserved, and generally conventional, and thus effective, performance.
Perhaps the offended woman will come back. Perhaps the man from social media can pick her up.
Meantime, let's collect thoughts about Trump's teleprompter-reading success Tuesday night.
First, his softened and conventional demeanor represented smart politics, well-executed. Trump has more than succeeded, but overdone it, in regurgitating nationalist Steve Bannon's red-meat rhetoric to lock down his mean and angry outsider base.
But his appeal among Republican-leaning white suburbanites has declined because of his alienating behavior, to the point that Republicans worry about holding a few white suburban congressional seats in the coming midterms. A preposterous second-place president needs, at some point, to try to expand, not merely hold, his support.
Second, Trump as yet has no credibility when he speaks. His words mean nothing.
He has demonstrated that he is apt by megalomania and narcissism to say anything in the moment, and that what he says in that moment is apt to be forgotten or belied in his next breath, depending on audience and mood.
His conventional and normalized performance Tuesday night does not itself amount to a pivot to a new manner for a new phase of his presidency. He will need to restrain himself with consistency over a reasonable period to demonstrate a real pivot. He will need to synthesize the red-meat shouting of Bannon and the moderating whispers of Ivanka and her husband.
Those of us who hope for the sake of the country that Trump is not clinically insane are left with but one option, which is to root for him not to be.
Third, a real opportunity exists for Trump--preposterous and second-place though he be--to forge a political realignment that would lift Republicans over Democrats generally. Americans' short memories, love of redemption and thirst for a new politics work in his favor.
He could do that by making a true pivot. He could blend deftly the red-meat nationalism and populism of Bannon with the soft moderation of Ivanka and husband, solidifying the support of white people of both the working-class and suburban varieties.
Meantime, a successful economy with a booming stock market and a big infrastructure rebuilding program, combined with a reasonably safe nation and a toughness against misbehaving undocumented immigrants balanced with acceptance of long-term behaving ones ... all of that could erode, if just a little, Democratic advantages among young voters, union voters and maybe even a few blacks and Hispanics.
Trump also could use just a tad of tolerance of homosexuals, which perhaps is in his Manhattan nature and would offset his early tactical, cynical and Jeff Sessions-directed intolerance of transgender persons.
Finally, none of the above matters unless Trump survives two jams that bedevil and risk the failure of his presidency.
One is designing a replacement for Obamacare, which Trump discovered last week to be ... well, hard.
The replacement must continue current levels of care. It must reduce costs. It must take a practical form that reasonable Republicans can enact over the protests of their Tea Party infestation that insists on outright repeal and simple reliance on the free market, meaning heartlessness and chaos.
The other is this Russia business. There is enough there--in terms of known and questionable connections and dubious denials--to warrant, indeed command, further independent investigation.
It may come to nothing more than non-criminal and ill-advised chumminess. But we must find out.
The Trump presidency's fate will necessarily be held in abeyance while we do.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 03/05/2017