Trump’s job approval plummets after his tone-deaf responses

It was not a good week for Le Grand Orange. He was starting to rise in the polls before his responses to last week’s tragedies.

He made some grave errors: asking everyone to “have a good time” in the wake of tragedy, failing to tone down his rhetoric, failure to condemn extremist rhetoric in general, and continuing to blow his anti-Semitic dog whistles after the synagogue tragedy.

Once again, I’ll point out that all of the following terms are the neo-Nazi code words for “Jews”: Soros, deep state, Hollywood, globalist. Those are always just surrogates for the J-word in white nationalist internet pamphleteering. (George Soros himself is just a very feeble old man who donates to progressive causes, and almost never has any relationship to the things he’s accused of. For example, there is no reason of any kind to connect him to the infamous caravan. This is another case exactly like “Obama was born in Kenya” of pure scaremongering with no basis in reality.) The other common terms that are starting to fall into this “synonyms for Jews” category are “fake media” and “drain the swamp.” (“Drain the swamp” basically translates to “purge the Jews” on wackadoodle web sites.)

In fairness, I should point out that I haven’t seen any persuasive evidence that Trump is really anti-Semitic. I really doubt that Trump knows precisely what he’s communicating to the neo-Nazis because that would require a subtlety and depth of understand far beyond his capabilities. But he does know that the far-right nuts love this stuff, and he is pandering to them because their cheers at his rallies stoke his ego, and he wants their votes. (His Soros/Caravan narrative is the Obama/Kenya meme repeated again with a new cast. Trump may or may not have known those things were false when he said them, but the truth would not be a relevant consideration for him, not would the implicit racism. He only cares that those things bring him cheers and votes.)