Opinion: Trump is betting that the electoral college -- and the courts -- will save him
By Greg Sargent Greg Sargent Opinion writer covering national politics Email Bio Follow Opinion writer April 17 at 10:39 AM It’s a pathology of this presidency that continues to go under-examined: Donald Trump simply does not recognize that his role as president confers on him any institutional obligation toward the American people of any kind.
Trump’s disregard of the institutional obligations attendant to his role as president is the subject of a good piece by Peter Baker of the New York Times, who frames the point in a more restrained way. As Baker notes, Trump’s latest actions demonstrate that he’s dispensed with even the “pretense” of pretending to be “the leader of all the people,” and instead is functioning as only the leader of his people.
This idea — that Democrats can be bulldozed into doing his bidding even as he carries out an unchecked, destructive and lawless rampage — is itself a display of deep, seething contempt for the opposition party and its voters. His social media advertising is aimed disproportionately at older Americans who were the superstructure of his victory in the Electoral College in 2016.
An electoral college win is a win, of course, but what’s notable about all this is that, in Trump’s apparent view , it requires telegraphing to his base that he’s essentially not functioning as president for other groups. Trump would perhaps prefer to win a popular majority outright — and he still very well might — but it’s obvious the campaign sees an electoral college win amid a popular-vote loss as its most likely path to victory. As Joshua Green and Sahil Kapur report, such a win runs through incredibly juiced-up energy among non-college-educated whites in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan. Given Trump’s travails in those states, cranking up the anti-immigrant energy is the way to make it happen.
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