Thread by @whstancil

For years now, Democrats have been politically handicapped by a series of myths about Trump that have taken hold of the party, making it almost impossible for the party to fully exploit his weakness and unpopularity.

Trump is unpopular. He has been unpopular since the day he became president. This has never budged.

The things that Americans don’t like about Trump are obvious:
-He’s flagrantly, cartoonishly incompetent and stupid
-He behaves abhorrently, like a child
-He’s deeply corrupt

Because they have misread the results of the 2016 and 2018 elections, Democrats have largely convinced themsleves that these things - the sources of Trump’s overwhelming unpopularity and his greatest political liabilities - are off limits as political attacks.

Instead, they have focused on much more esoteric, less direct lines of attack, usually centered around policy. He wants to change health care laws. He’s too rich. He’s just another Republican. He’s leaving people behind, economically.

The reality is that these attacks are complicated, need a lot of explanation, aren’t always convincing, and simply do not have the immediate purchase that pointing out his obvious gross incompetence and flagrant criminality does.

People KNOW the president shouldn’t a grotesque clown pardoning his mob associates, tweeting out obscenities in misspelled tweets, unable to complete a sentence about policy. This is intuitive and obvious.

But Dems have convinced themselves it can’t be used to attack Trump.

Democrats have developed a long series of unconvincing rationales for this. They say “everyone knows” and that it’s “priced in.”

Can anyone think of a single other context in which politicians ignored their opponents’ greatest liabilities because “everyone knows” them?

Democrats also say that these attacks didn’t work in 2016, while a kitchen-table message worked in 2018. But looking at the topline result of individual elections explains nothing. The only reasonable explanation for Trump’s eternal unpopularity is his personal failings.

Meanwhile, while Democrats have struggled to come up with a complicated message that avoids attacking Trump personally, a series of other figures have garnered real fame and political support simply by confronting Trump. The appetite for it is immense.

That’s why people like James Comey have been able to command so much attention. Ludicrously, Michael Avennatti became a national celebrity this way.

Most ominously of all, Mike Bloomberg is currently running for president using the same tactic, and could well win.

So my appeal to Democrats is to stop complicating things. Most Americans - certainly enough to win an election - hate that their president is incompetent, criminal oaf.

You don’t need some carefully tuned message to point it out. Just say out loud what most people already know!

If the Democrats aren’t careful, they’re going to end up squandering the opportunity to run against the weakest, most damaged, most scandal-ridden, most self-evidently unfit president in modern history, by treating him exactly like he’s Marco Rubio, Mitt Romney, or Jeb Bush.

It’s easy to imagine a future four years from now, when Democrats are running a tough race against some Republican who isn’t consumed by scandal or visibly unfit for office, and trying to remember why they so studiously avoided bringing those things up when Trump was president.