"In his oddly charmed political life, Trump has benefited mightily from what political scientist Brian Klaas calls the 'banality of crazy'..."

"...as the body politic has grown increasingly numb to Trump’s fire hose of malice.... It must feel almost providential to Trump that his rise to power has also coincided with the downfall of much of the traditional fact-based media, as well as the emergence of just the sort of alternative-reality information silos that he needed to shape his narrative and platform his bluster, bombast and fakery. So now, despite (waves hand) all this, Trump is about to clinch the GOP nomination for the third time, and most national polls show him leading President Biden.... Has anyone ever been this lucky?"

Writes Charles Sykes, in "Donald Trump, the luckiest politician who ever lived" (WaPo).

You could just as well ask has anyone ever been this unlucky. Trump's antagonists have come at him so many times. That's why he's had so many opportunities to be lucky. Who would want all the trouble that's come his way? 

Is it wrong for President Trump to use the White House Rose Garden to deliver what turned into a campaign speech?

Yesterday's speech was similar to his long, extemporaneous rally speeches — except it didn't have the exuberant energy and humor. I wrote about it in the previous post — reacting to Charlie Sykes's trashing of the event — and at one point I said, "The main objection is that he's in the Rose Garden setting, and he's making the case against his political opponent." After publishing, I had the question I've put in the post title.

There is something called the Rose Garden strategy. From the Political Dictionary:

A Rose Garden campaign is when an incumbent president takes advantage of the power and prestige of his office to help him run for re-election. The phrase originally referred to a president staying on the grounds of the White House to campaign as opposed to traveling throughout the country....

The term “Rose Garden campaign” was first used by then-candidate Jimmy Carter in 1976. At the time, Carter was challenging the incumbent president Gerald Ford. Carter complained that Ford was using a “Rose Garden strategy” to get himself free publicity, staying in the public eye by signing bills and making pronouncements....

That implies doing presidential work in a way that implicitly makes the case for reelection, not using the Rose Garden as a platform for campaign speeches.

On a metaphorical level, a Rose Garden strategy refers to any time the incumbent president distributes political favors or largesse as part of his re-election strategy. This can mean offering economic packages to certain key states....

Obviously, that's a worse problem than choosing your backyard as the location for overtly political speeches!

The Political Dictionary cites a NYT article from May 2019, "Why Trump Can't Get Enough of the Rose Garden":

"The president of the United States, ladies and gentlemen, was in full Mad King mode, rambling, confused, disjointed, parading his grievances..."

"... with barely a wave from afar at coherence. It was as if a hive of buzzwords exploded in his head: statues, boats, vandalism, socialism, suburbs. It is hard to write this display without using the word 'impaired.' Because it wasn’t just the disjointed word salad. It was the delivery. Trump was somnolent, as if he’d pulled an all-nighter watching Fox & Friends or maybe his VCR tapes of Shark Week. Imagine the covfefe tweet come to life. The Rose Garden event was ostensibly about China, but quickly disintegrated into something between one of his improvisational stump performances, a stream of broken consciousness, and a rambling oppo dump. Perhaps the president really misses campaign rallies. Or maybe he just got confused. Someone on his staff gave him a summary of horrible things that he might someday be able to craft into a campaign attack on Joe Biden . . . and so he just stood there and read the whole thing...."

Writes Charles Sykes at The Bulwark. The full video of Trump's press conference is embedded over there. I could embed it here, but instead, I'll link to the transcript — a much faster, easier way to check Sykes's characterizations. It seems to me Trump has a way of speaking, and it's idiosyncratic but enjoyably listenable if you get into its groove but weird and chaotic if you resist. That's nothing new.

Let me pick something out of the transcript for discussion. Well, the first thing he says may explain the somnolence — it was hot (over 90°): "Too hot, but it’s pretty warm." Right off, that's crazy, no? What's with "but"? It's hot, but it's warm! I get a "Walrus and the Carpenter" vibe, you know:

The sun was shining on the sea,
Shining with all his might:
He did his very best to make
The billows smooth and bright--
And this was odd, because it was
The middle of the night.

That's not word salad. That's genius!

I've got to pick out something else. That was too easy. Here's the part where he transitions from talking about China — the lead-off topic — to Joe Biden. That is, it becomes a campaign speech with a forced-to-be-polite captive audience, broiling in the hot-but-warm sun:

"Wisconsin’s decade-long partisan war will once again be on display Friday, as right-wing protesters prepare to mass outside the State Capitol in Madison to assail Mr. Evers and the restrictions he put in place to curb the spread of the virus...."

"Thousands of people have indicated on Facebook that they will attend, making it potentially the largest gathering so far in a nationwide series of protests against stay-at-home restrictions.... 'This seems to have become a proxy war for the state Republican Party and it does have a zombie Tea Party feel to it,' said Charlie Sykes, a longtime conservative talk radio host in Milwaukee who left the airwaves at the end of 2016 and has since turned against Trump-era Republicans. 'This will energize them to think that they’re back on the offensive. They didn’t miss a beat from losing that Supreme Court election and this all seems about mobilizing and firing up the base.'... The organizers of the Madison rally and the two others held last weekend have gone to great lengths to describe themselves and their events as nonpolitical, despite ample evidence that the state’s Republican leadership is intricately involved. They are also trying to prevent the gatherings from becoming a platform for other conservative causes, or from appearing like de facto Trump campaign rallies....  'All indications are that these are manufactured protests,' [Madison Mayor Satya] Rhodes-Conway said. 'They are seeking attention. I think they are getting more attention than they deserve.'"

The NYT reports.

Madison's David Blaska writes:

This just in from the good folks at the New York Times: ‘Reopen Wisconsin’ is FAKE!

Ersatz. Astroturf. Piltdown Man. Hitler’s Diary. Jussie Smollet. No one really thinks America should begin to reopen from the novel coronavirus lockdown! Why, it’s only good common sense that Chicago and Detroit should open a full month before Wisconsin’s North Woods — May 26 for Wisconsin; April 30 for Illinois and Michigan....

Here’s how you know higher powers are NOT behind Friday’s Reopen Wisconsin rally: the dumfuks — a minority of a minority to be certain — will cater to the news media’s biases. They will hoist battle flags, show off their firearms, display placards of Tony in an SS uniform, and eschew face masks. A well financed and managed rally would stay on message. This one will not....

Donald Trump didn't bother to understand Wisconsin, and Wisconsin seems to mind.

Maybe you think we're a frumpy pathetic rustbelt backwater and we'd be happy that you showed up at all and acted like you cared.

But it's not that way at all. The WSJ's Kimberley A. Strassel does a great job of summing up Wisconsin GOP politics for outsiders:

Wisconsin has been in continuous political warfare for six years. Over that time, Republicans lived through Gov. Scott Walker’s epic battle for his Act 10 public-sector bargaining reform; judicial races; a Senate recall effort; a gubernatorial recall effort; a political assault in a vicious John Doe probe; another election cycle; campaign-finance reform; an overhaul of the state’s ethics body; a right-to-work law; and prevailing-wage reform. To name a few.

The state is also proudly home to the speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, and a governor (Scott Walker) who ran for his party's presidential nomination. The result is a conservative electorate that is highly informed, highly energized and highly involved. The fights so far have given voters an acute appreciation of the conservative principles at stake, and a pride in defeating union and liberal priorities. They have radar sensitive to “fake” Republicans, and many aren’t keen on what they are hearing from Mr. Trump.

Wisconsin’s recent political battles also resulted in a dramatic shift in the state’s communications culture.... Four “talkers” in particular— Charlie Sykes, Vicki McKenna, Jerry Bader and Mark Belling—exercise enormous influence, and cover nearly every inch of the state media market....

Mr. Trump stumbled onto three of the four biggest shows on Monday, seemingly unaware that all the hosts are part of the “Never Trump” movement. Mr. Sykes likened Mr. Trump to a “12-year-old bully” and insisted he was no conservative. Ms. McKenna was similarly rough, though Mr. Trump did himself no favors by hanging up on her.

He’s also won no votes by lambasting both Mr. Walker and Paul Ryan. Mr. Trump might have been looking at Mr. Walker’s statewide approval numbers (in the 40s) and figured that hitting Mr. Walker’s tax cuts was smart politics. But the governor’s approval with Republicans is significantly higher—likely in the 70% to 80% range.

Mr. Ryan also is widely liked and admired among Republicans in the state, in particular because he still actively engages in state battles. He regularly goes on talk radio; he has openly supported Walker reforms; he helps out state legislative candidates. Mr. Cruz, by contrast to Mr. Trump, clearly was well briefed on the broader environment. His praise of Messrs. Walker and Ryan earns him strong applause at events, and he’s grasped the power of the state radio....

Cruz (and his people) seem to do much better at grasping complexity and dealing with it. I have no reason to believe either Trump or Cruz cares much about Wisconsin other than as just one more state to appease and gratify, but the 2 men are revealing quite a lot about their mental capacity and competence. To govern, you have to maintain your stamina and attention to all sorts of elaborate problems that are not intrinsically emotionally rewarding, like caring about Wisconsin.

"I’m a little surprised that talk show hosts would be supporting somebody. You’d think there’d be a certain impartiality."

Said Donald Trump as he encountered Wisconsin talk radio.

Trump did a show with Charlie Sykes yesterday not knowing that Sykes was a #NeverTrump guy until Sykes came right out and told him "I'm a #NeverTrump guy."

And Vicki McKenna said to him "You’re in Wisconsin, where it’s a different state, sir, than you might be used to." And:

“Look, if you’re going tobe the presidential candidate, you have to find a way to unify a whole bunch of people right now who are at each others’ throats,” McKenna told Trump. “And we feel it viscerally here because we went through the (protest) occupation in 2011 and a recall election in 2012. That’s the landscape you’re facing here when you’ve got Republicans acting like ‘recallers’ to other Republicans.”

Does Trump have the focus to understand Wisconsin? The linked article is by Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's Craig Gilbert, who stresses "[t]he stand-alone nature of Wisconsin’s primary, where the national spotlight, more than a week of on-the-ground campaigning, a statewide anti-Trump ad blitz and a politically engaged, high-turnout electorate make for a volatile environment" and the "Upper Midwest culture where Trump’s flamboyant style of personal combat isn’t easily embraced."

If the front-runner can prevail in those conditions, it would be a huge blow to the “Stop Trump” movement. But if Trump loses, opponents will crow about his failure to win the kind of white, blue-collar “Rust Belt” state he claims he can wrest from the Democrats in November.

Donald Trump in Wisconsin — doing the Charlie Sykes show.

Audio.

1. He didn't even know that picture of Heidi Cruz he retweeted was supposed to be a particularly bad picture of her.

2. Sykes replays that ad with women reading old Trump quotes about women. Trump's response is about all the women he's hired and put in high positions. Look at his actions. And he was "a celebrity," going on Howard Stern and such, not thinking about how it would sound if he were to run for office.

3. Trump has said Wisconsin is doing terribly. Won't that make Scott Walker look bad? Trump says he got the info from TIME Magazine.

4. Isn't Trump's claim to be a conservative just "a giant fraud"? Trump says he's a strong conservative, but trade might be an exception. When it comes to trade, he's for "smart trade."

5. What would happen to the price of goods if Trump imposed the tariff he's threatened? Trump says it will never happen. You just need a threat to get a good deal. Sykes asks how's that going to work if you just revealed it's a bluff? Sykes chuckles at what he clearly thinks is a gotcha. Trump ignores it.

6. If you can't unite Republicans, how can you unite the country? How can you beat Hillary? Well, he will beat Hillary, Trump asserts. And he's a businessman, and that's what this country needs. We're getting ripped off! Sykes breaks in: How are you going to work with Congress? How will you get along with Paul Ryan? I'm not surprised that Trump simply says he'll get along.

7. Sykes: "Mr. Trump, before you called into my show, did you know I'm a #NeverTrump guy?" Trump: "That I didn't know." Sykes splutters a bit, perhaps slightly wounded that Trump didn't care enough to find out about him. Trump makes a good interpersonal move, stating that he knows Sykes is "an intelligent guy" and "You know what's going on." And that's a segue back to an issue... NATO. Which is kind of amusingly backhanded, because Sykes wanted to talk about himself. But why is Sykes's #NeverTrumpishness significant to Trump? Trump goes on many shows and probably rarely is the interviewer a supporter. What does "NeverTrump" add to the standard opposition? It's not as if his other hostile interviewers are in a not-now-but-possibly-later frame of mind. They're all presumptively NeverTrumpers. How can it faze him?

8. Sykes gets back to the issue he began with, Trump's retweet of the photos of Heidi and Melania. Sykes couches it is some kind of statement about not beginning the show with the standard Wisconsin hospitality, but he immediately moves to badgering Trump about apologizing. Does Trump ever apologize? Sykes wants to know. Unsurprisingly, Trump brushes past the abstraction of whether he ever apologizes and goes on again about how Cruz owes him an apology for that ad with the GQ picture of Melania and there's a repetition of all the business that began the show: That ad was independent of the Cruz campaign (Sykes), but Cruz knew all about it (Trump). Sykes advises Trump about the people of Wisconsin: The people of Wisconsin would like to hear him say the candidates shouldn't be talking about each other's wives. Trump says that's great. He agrees... but Cruz started it. Sykes reacts to the "he started it" with: "We're not on a playground." Trump agrees, and: "My views are not playground views. My views are that our country is losing on every front...." And there he is back on the issues. He rattles off his issues — NATO, the Second Amendment — and the clock has run out and Sykes can only get in the thanks for coming on the show.

Rush Limbaugh takes on TNR's "Unelectable Whiteness of Scott Walker" and (in the process) says my name.

I was already listening to that section of the podcast of today's show when Meade — prompted by this rhhardin comment ("Althouse got a mention and quote on Rush at 14:15 eastern" — let me know Rush said my name today. So I just missed the weird experience of listening to a show and suddenly hearing my name. Instead I had the somewhat more unsettling experience of listening waiting for my name to come up, and I think my immediate response was something like "uh oh." Because much as I like what I write to get lifted up by one form of media or another, whenever something is grabbed and used, it's used for someone else's purposes.

So Rush was talking about how Scott Walker is a great model for what the GOP needs to do to win, which is to stand on conservative principle and ignore the advice to move to the middle. And:

Look at the new New Republic cover, smearing Scott Walker for his "toxic strain of racial politics."

I live in Wisconsin, and I've been following Scott Walker since the 2010 election here, and I have no idea what the "toxic strain of racial politics" refers to. But congratulations to TNR for its eye-catching and weird sexualization of Walker: "Scott Walker Is So Hot Right Now" and for having the nerve to sub-head with "too bad" as you smear him with the accusation of "toxic strain of racial politics." That "too bad" belongs in the annals of self-refuting statements. Anyone can within one second perceive that The New Republic isn't the slightest bit sad that there's this dirt to throw at Walker... this invented dirt for all I can tell.

If you look at the TNR website right now, you won't see this cover. It's still displaying last week's cover. I subscribe to the magazine, and this new issue just popped into my iPad.

ADDED: I can't link to the article, but I can read it on my iPad. It's titled — creepily — "The Unelectable Whiteness of Scott Walker." Sub-head: "A Journey Through the Poisonous World That Produced a Republican Star." It's written by Alec MacGillis.

AND: I have now read the long article, and the closest thing to anything racial coming directly from Scott Walker is his support over the years for voter ID laws. Much of the article is about the demographics of Milwaukee and the suburban counties around it, including the history — going back into the early 20th century — of how black people migrated to the city and did not — as white people did — relocate into the suburbs.

Milwaukee is an extreme example of this historical pattern, but Scott Walker didn't make this happen, and given that Scott Walker built his political career in the Milwaukee area, it's actually impressive that TNR could not find racial incidents and slips to pin on him.

The article also focuses on 2 talk radio hosts — Mark Belling and Charlie Sykes — who have big audiences in Milwaukee. TNR has little direct racial material on them, but it forefronts the one truly ugly thing it has: Belling mocking a specific black person, Milwaukee Congresswoman Gwen Moore. Mostly, TNR accuses Belling and Sykes of indulging in dog-whistle politics about crime and dependence on welfare.

I suspect that Alec MacGillis wrote a more balanced and sane draft but that TNR editors punched it up, trying to make it racial so they could justify that ridiculous sub-heading on the cover and the title and sub-head at the article. The Unelectable Whiteness of Scott Walker! Terrible. MacGillis provides some material about Scott Walker's early life, mostly about how he's the son of a Baptist preacher who took religion and politics very seriously from an early age. Some of that is sympathetic, though it's dotted with quotes from individuals who have reason to want to block Walker's ascent.

ALSO: Linking here, Instapundit says:

When Chris Hughes relaunched TNR, he promised that TNR would go “deeper than the headlines in a timely, unbiased fashion.” Nah. Just more Democratic operatives with bylines.

AND: I wonder if TNR meant to send out the iPad app version before the material is up on its website. I think it's damned strange that I was able to show you that cover 2 hours ago, and it's still not up on the website, and that I could read the whole long article and give you my subjective understanding of what is in it before you can check the text. Do you think it's lack of website/app coordination at TNR, which would be inept, or do you think they want subscribers to get a special advantage, a sneak peak, which would be naive in a world with bloggers?

UPDATE: It's 6 hours since I posted this, and neither the cover nor the article are up at the TNR website. 

UPDATE 2: TNR put the article up Sunday evening: here.

Gov. Scott Walker on how the Romney campaign should use Paul Ryan.

On the radio today, Charlie Sykes talked about how Paul Ryan would be good at explaining what Romney's 47% percent comment was supposed to say — that there's a "tipping point" in the economy. Sykes also speculates that Romney's campaign people are somehow holding Ryan back. Walker responds (at 10:10 in the audio at the link):

"They not only need to use him out on the trail more effectively, they need to have more of him rub off on Mitt, because I think Mitt thinks that way but he's got to be able to articulate that. I think he's got a compelling message, but he's got to get out an tell it, and I think too many people are restraining him from telling it."

"I felt most of the comments that people posted [on Althouse] were fair and were constructive and fair criticisms. After all, I did put myself out there."

Says Adam Schabow, whom we talked about here and here, and who calls this blog "a conservative but reasonably fair, good-natured website."

(The quote, at the first link, begins at about 3 minutes.)

Schabow is the guy with the YouTube series "Video a Day Until the Walker Recall," — which included a song called "The War Against Milwaukee and Madison —  and who, on recall election night, emoted lengthily on camera, saying things like: "The end of the U.S.A. as we know it just happened... democracy died tonight." [UPDATE: Sorry, I misread my own old post. Another guy said the "democracy died" quote. Schabow's election night video was sad, but different.]

I think we were pretty nice to Schabow. Is "lambasted" fair? In the new video, he goes on to talk about the radio talk-show guy Charlie Sykes directing people to his video and some truly mean homophobic-style comments that he got because of that. Thanks for not connecting my blog to that kind of thing.

How many assistant district attorneys in the office that is investigating Scott Walker signed petitions to recall Scott Walker?

At least 19, according to Media Trackers. And 23 support staff.

Via Charlie Sykes, who says: "This would be the same Democrat Milwaukee County DA's office that has been conducting a nearly two year long 'secret' John Doe investigation of Republican Governor Scott Walker. The probe has been dogged by criticism of possible partisan bias, its selective prosecution, and frequent leaks."