Mean Girls

I did a satire on reaction to Trump's "Go back where you came from" tweets, but now for some serious observations:

i) I'm struck by how the "news" media and the political establishment constantly play into Trump's hands. He's a provocateur and they always take the bait. That empowers him. That enables him to control the news cycle and frame the issues. His enemies are totally reactionary. They freak out over his sometimes outrageous tweets, which is just what he wants. That allows him to change the story line and manipulate his opponents. 

ii) I'm struck by how they suffer from a moth-like attraction to the bright lights of political theater, to Trump's tweets and optics (e.g. tanks in DC for Independence Day) rather than his policies. The constant freakout over what he says rather than what he does (at a substantive level).

iii) He seems to have good political instincts. What Peter Hitchens called "low animal cunning". He picks a fight with widely unpopular Democrats in the "AOC squad" (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib). They're only popular among elite white Twitter Democrats. That's a win for him. 

iv) I think it's probably a mistake to parse Trump's words. I don't mean this particular tweet but in general. As one pundit famously said, "Take Trump seriously, not literally."

It's my impression that Trump doesn't use language to convey information but for leverage. To incite a reaction, then use that for competitive advantage. To put it technically, Trump cares more about the performative function of language than the propositional function of language.

v) Trump has a habit of saying what a lot of people privately think but are afraid to say in public. That's a large part of his success with his constituency. 

vi) At the risk of oversimplification, there are immigrants who come to America because they like what America stands for as well as what it has to offer. There are things about American culture they admire, in contrast to what they left behind. They come here with the intention of becoming integrated into American culture and society.

However, you also have immigrants (as well as native-born Americans) who despise American values and wish to make it more like the countries they left behind. There's such a thing as a self-hating American.

To take a comparison, there are Muslims born in the UK who radicalize. They are profoundly alienated from the country they were born into. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib are good examples. Consider some of the stories about them at Michael Spencer's Jihad Watch. 

To take another comparison, consider Democrats who move from blue states to red states to escape the high taxation and overregulation, but continue to vote for Democrats. They turn the red state into a purple state or red state with blue cities. They reproduce the problems they were fleeing from.