President Trump, as he himself will tell you in a heartbeat, wasn’t supposed to win. Pundit after pundit predicted time and again that his comments would doom him, that his rhetoric was too virulent, that his tone was too aggressive. But he built a following among Republican primary voters that carried him (however bumpily) to the nomination and then, using the same rhetoric of danger and fear, leveraged partisan loyalty to squeak past Hillary Clinton by enough votes in enough places and prove everyone wrong. Trump can’t win the presidency? He just did, running the same race at the end as he had at the beginning.
There was a lesson Trump took from that, clearly: The pundits are wrong, and villainizing immigrants from Mexico and the Middle East works. He internalized the importance of holding the same core base of support that was with him early on and, however overtly, has maintained a focus on offering the same rhetoric that earned their love in the first place.
From that perspective, it’s not a surprise that Trump’s first Oval Office address to the country focused on stoking visceral fear of people crossing America’s southern border. Sure, there was, as expected, the sort of misleading data on the flow of drugs from Mexico, failing to note that (as his administration admits) the majority of those drugs and that heroin comes through existing checkpoints. Sure, he argued that the revised NAFTA agreement that hasn’t yet been ratified would somehow mean Mexico will pay for the wall, which it doesn’t. But that’s not really what he wanted Americans to focus on.
View the complete January 8 article by Philip Bump on The Washington Post website here.