Fucktard Trump and Crybaby Clinton

Wall Street Journal - Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton Reveal Parties’ Shifting Coalitions. President’s appeal to blue-collar workers comes as his 2016 rival trumpets economic dynamism.

By Gerald F. Seib March 19, 2018 269 COMMENTS

Consider two scenes of recent days, which say much about the jumbled state of the two major American political parties:

In Scene One, President Donald Trump appears in the White House with nine metal workers, some of them carrying their hard hats, to impose stiff tariffs on imported steel and aluminum—tariffs that most mainline Republicans oppose but that he insists would reopen mills and bring back jobs.

In Scene Two, Hillary Clinton appears onstage in India, to discuss her losing 2016 presidential campaign, and declares that she won in “places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward,” while Mr. Trump prevailed “by looking backwards” and carrying “all that red in the middle” of the country.

If you take a step back from those two scenes, you have the Republican who won the presidential election going to bat for the guys in hard hats (and yes, eight of the nine workers in the White House that day were guys), who personify the kinds of blue-collar workers in Rust Belt America who once formed the backbone of the Democratic Party. And you have the Democrat who won the popular vote explaining that her party prevailed not among workers in that Rust Belt but among upwardly mobile voters in “places that represent two-thirds of America’s gross domestic product.”

Taken together, those two scenes portray the two parties somewhere between transition and identity crisis.

Mr. Trump spent much of his first year pursuing policies that pleased traditional Republicans: tax cuts and attacks on Obamacare and what his party calls its intrusions into the health-care marketplace. But now, in year two, when Mr. Trump is increasingly casting aside aides who would have him continue to hew to a fairly conventional version of GOP rule, his effort to redefine what it means to be a Republican is proceeding apace.

That is true in immigration policy, where decades of Republican odes to the economic virtues of immigration are being cast aside. But it’s especially true on trade, where tariffs on steel and aluminum are to be followed by new penalties on imports from China, and perhaps withdrawal from the North American Free Trade Agreement, a deal championed most notably by a former Republican president, George H.W. Bush. The party’s speaker of the House and its leader in the Senate are opposed to the tariffs, as are the Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable.

Indeed, Mr. Trump has found more support among some Rust Belt Democrats, including Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown.

For now, Mr. Trump’s GOP is an amalgam of social conservatives willing to look past the president’s own personal history; establishment types who have made their peace with him; and working-class voters who once would have been natural Democrats.

Ultimately, of course, this Trumpian version of the GOP may collapse because of its own internal contradictions: If tax cuts so slice into federal revenue that they force cuts in the Medicare and Medicaid programs so many Trump voters rely upon; if trade wars that prompt China and Mexico to close markets to the crops grown by farmers who supported Mr. Trump; if Trump-supporting workers in industries that use steel are hurt by those new tariffs that raise the prices for the material their plants use every day. Meanwhile, business interests will have to decide whether the tax-cut benefits they love outweigh misgivings about trade policies they fear.

Democrats, meanwhile, are evolving into a party dominated by higher-educated and upwardly mobile Americans on the coasts and in urban areas; millennials; suburban women; and minority groups and immigrants. That mix of constituencies will push the party toward the kinds of free-trade and immigration policies once espoused more by moderate Republicans than mainline Democrats.

And inevitably that new coalition, and its views on cultural issues such as gun rights, same-sex marriage and the environment, will pull Democrats further away from some of those traditionally Democratic blue-collar voters in middle America. Indeed, one Trump campaign volunteer in Ohio recalls that no issue was more effective in drawing blue-collar voters away from Democrats than climate change, which workers saw more as a threat to their income than a threat to the environment.

Democrats have to ask whether they can devise a message that somehow binds together their middle-American, lunch-bucket constituency with the new, bicoastal core of their party.

Republicans have to ask whether the new, Trumpian version of the party is, as Mrs. Clinton suggested, essentially backward-looking and destined to shrink over time as the economy changes. In that regard, here is a number that should really concern the GOP: In the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, only 19% of Americans aged 18 to 34 have a positive view of the Republican Party.

Write to Gerald F. Seib at jerry.seib@wsj.com