Re-reading this piece by @jbouie and it's remarkable how few pundits and talking heads ever answered his implicit question -- that is, why does nobody ever ask Trump and the GOP to tack to the center? Why is it only ever the Democrats?
nytimes.com/2019/07/08/opi…
nytimes.com/2019/07/08/opi…
@jbouie Because unless I'm very much mistaken, those sorts of columns ("This is why Trump should raise the minimum wage," "This is why he should expand access to healthcare") never got written. Trump's intransigence, his sheer bullheaded blindness to moderation, is simply assumed.
@jbouie But Trump isn't an ideologue, at least not about things unrelated to the establishment of a white ethno-state. There's no reason to think that he's uninterested in scooping up undecided voters or retaking the House. Quite the opposite, actually.
@jbouie Which is why I suspect that pundits have missed a real opportunity to coax Trump to the center, even if only marginally. And they missed it for one simple reason: overwhelming contempt for the man. He's a force of nature, and you don't reason with a force of nature, right?
@jbouie The blame falls especially on conservative pundits, since they're the ones who under any other GOP admin would be making the case. Federalist/FOX type people have professional incentives to toe the line, and of course many are true believers (though they can all read polls).
@jbouie But for Never Trumpers, it's about contempt, which is not a good reason. Instead, they make their argument on purely moralistic lines, e.g. "Fellow conservatives, is this really what's become of the Party of Reagan?" Which unsurprisingly has proved ineffective.
@jbouie It's one of the strange ways that the media's liberal bias manifests itself: to wit, since only liberals and the Democratic Party are reasonable right now, they're the only ones worth appealing to. And so a thousand David Brooks columns are launched.
@jbouie But if you ease up on the anti-Trump contempt *just a smidge* and recall that these are political actors who want to get reelected, you'll see that there's a massive wasted opportunity here. Money on the table.
