30 Aug 2016 8:59 pm
Trump and Limbaugh admit that GOP voters want racial resentment, not policy
It should have been the last episode of the The Rush Limbaugh Show — the big reveal with the “surprise” ending everyone saw coming.
On Monday, Rush explained why he didn’t consider Trump’s decision to de-emphasize deportations in his immigration “policy” a flip-flop.
“This is going to enrage you,” he told a caller, who was enraged by Trump’s perceived flip.
“You know, I could choose a path here to try to mollify you, but — I never took [Trump] seriously on this.”
You mean it’s all a big con?
Trump made firm vows to deport 11 million undocumented immigrants a key rallying cry of his campaign as he bashed his Republican competitors for embracing “amnesty.”
And now he’s just backing away from those sacred vows like they’re contractors trying to collect the cash he owes them?
Not really, he’s only pretending to “soften” on the issue, as The Plum Line‘s Greg Sargent points out, or “harden” — depending on the audience.
So Trump’s new “policy” is mass deportations without talking about “mass deportations.”
The same policy, changed words.
That should be a relief to Limbaugh, who seemed to take Trump very seriously on this subject late last year, as Allahpundit points out on the Hot Air blog.
But he’s already given up the game — it isn’t about policy at all.
It’s about channeling frustrations that you nurture by avoiding actual policies.
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The GOP isn’t selling policy. It’s selling resentment, resentment that racializes spending and labor unions as things that only help “them” to justify cutting taxes and obligations for the rich and their corporations.
If you can get the mass of voters to worry about brown people more than anything, they’ll ignore the guys at the top drinking our milkshake in the form of all the income gains of the last century.
The GOP primary turned out to be a contest of who could best become the personification of the GOP base’s resentment.
Trump won.