You blame Democrats, I blame the people who voted for this and are shocked he did what he said he was going to do.

Mass deportation? Tariffs? Dismantling the government? Hate? All things he campaigned on. He is doing exactly what his voters were told he was going to do. Dems are going to win those votes? Unlikely, they’re not going to run a candidate that appeals to their values, which aren’t going to change.

> “He’s not hurting the people he needs to be”: a Trump voter says the quiet part out loud A Trump voter hurt by the shutdown reveals the real reason the president attracts hardcore supporters.

> The president’s particular brand of identity politics — the racist attacks on blacks and Latinos, the Muslim ban, his cruel treatment of women — similarly depends on negative rather than positive appeals. Antoine Banks, a political psychologist at the University of Maryland, wrote a book on the connection between anger as an emotion and racial politics. When politicians gin up anger, an emotion that necessarily has a negative target, voters tend to think about the world in more racial (and racist) terms. Trump makes his voters angry, he centers that anger on hated targets, and that makes them want to take his side.

> This is what makes Trumpism work. This is the dark heart of our political moment. Even people who are tremendously vulnerable themselves, like Crystal Minton, support Trump because of his capacity to inflict pain on others they detest. The cruelty, as the Atlantic’s Adam Serwer says, is the point.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/8/18173678/tr...

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/07/us/florida-government-shu...