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Take Tuesday night in Arizona when he told a crowd in Phoenix this: "I was a good student. I always hear about the elite. You know, the elite. They're elite? I went to better schools than they did. I was a better student than they were."

For the public, Trump's intelligence is a bit more of an open question -- and becoming more open with each passing day in the White House.

Which is interesting. But not nearly as interesting as how rapidly the number of people who think Trump is smart has dropped since November 2016. In a November 22 Quinnipiac poll -- two weeks to the day after the election -- 74% said Trump was "intelligent" while just 21% said he was not.

That number has steadily declined over Trump's first 7 months in office. By March it had dipped into the high 50s and its continued to fall steadily.

Why does it matter?

It might not!

After all, being "intelligent" is not a prerequisite of being President. And intelligence -- who has it and who doesn't -- is a very, very subjective measure. (Do street smarts count as being "intelligent"? Or is it a pure IQ measure? Something in between? Neither?)

And, some of the question about how smart Trump winds up being a proxy for whether or not you like him. Nine in 10 Republicans say Trump is intelligent while just 25% of Democrats say the same. Fifty-five percent of independents say Trump is intelligent.

Still, the numbers -- and the rapid drop in them -- are interesting and telling. Take, for example, the fact that 42% of Democrats said Trump was intelligent in January and only 25% say that now. Or that 70% of independents called Trump "intelligent" in January, but only 55% say so now.

It's impossible to offer a foolproof conclusion that explains those dips.

But, it is absolutely true that in the wake of the 2016 election that even those who disliked Trump also viewed him as a master reader and manipulator of the American public. The default assumption was that he had been -- and would continue to be -- playing three-dimensional chess, and that Democrats would need to up their game to match him,.

Again, being the smartest person in the country -- whether or not Trump is -- isn't how you get elected president. (Sorry, Stephen Hawking!)

But that doesn't make figuring out why Trump's numbers on the "intelligence" question any less fascinating.

See the rest here:
Is Donald Trump smart? - CNN International

In doing so, we have to examine the history of Alabama and see how white supremacy tracks across time and culminates with Trump.

The original capital of the Confederacy was in Montgomery, Ala. Of course, the South lost and Reconstruction commenced. But Alabama was divided between the anti-secession populists of the north and the counties in the south, as the Journal of Negro History pointed out in a 1949 article titled Populism and Disfranchisement in Alabama. After two elections for governors in which the populists did surprisingly well, coming within striking distance of winning, the flaming racist Democrats (that was the party of racists then) called a constitutional convention in 1901 with the express purpose of using the threat of the black vote Negro domination was a phrase used to make sure that the populists never had a chance again.

This to me was the most striking passage from the article:

The Democratic State Executive Committee met in Montgomery on April 19 for the purpose of getting reports from the field and to brief candidates for delegates to the proposed convention. Emmet ONeal, later to become governor of the state, stated that the paramount purpose of the constitutional convention is to lay deep and strong and permanent in the fundamental law of the State the foundation of white supremacy forever in Alabama, and that we ought to go before the people on that issue and not suggest other questions on which we differ. Candidate Thomas J. Long, from Walker County, reminded his fellow candidates that the way to win the fight is to go to the mountain counties and talk white supremacy . I dont believe it is good policy to go up in the hills and tell them that Booker Washington or Councill or anybody else is allowed to vote because they are educated. The minute you do that every white man who is not educated is disfranchised on the same proposition.

Does this sound familiar? Its the racial anxiety, divide-and-conquer tactics perpetually used on poor whites to persuade them to vote against their economic interests and for some mythological racial interest: You may be poor, but at least youre not black. You should have advantage even over people more qualified than you. The lines are legion.

Almost 60 years after this constitutional convention, Alabama became ground zero for the civil rights movement. It is where Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat. It is the place where the soil was soaked on Bloody Sunday. It is where the four little girls were killed in the church bombing. It is where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his Letter From Birmingham Jail. It was the home of Bull Connor.

Alabama was the battlefield on which the war over race was fought, and to a disturbing degree, that remains the case.

After Congress finally passed a bill making Kings birthday a federal holiday in 1983, Alabama was one of three states to take the outrageous step of combining King Day with Robert E. Lee Day. Thats right: Alabama celebrates these two divergent historical figures on the same day.

The landmark 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision in which the Supreme Court gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act, passed to combat racial discrimination at the polls, was about Alabama.

Writing the majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts claimed that our country has changed, but in their dissenting opinion in the case, Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan pointed to recordings from an F.B.I. investigation that captured conversations between members of the state legislature and their political allies. They continued: Members of the state Senate derisively refer to African-Americans as Aborigines and talk openly of their aim to quash a particular gambling-related referendum because the referendum, if placed on the ballot, might increase African-American voter turnout.

In 2014, a voter ID law passed in 2011 went into effect in Alabama. The law required student, tribal or state-issued IDs including Alabama drivers licenses or nondriver ID cards issued by the Alabama Department of Motor Vehicles in order to vote.

The very next year, Alabama moved to close 31 drivers license offices, disproportionately in black areas. As The Birmingham News/AL.com columnist John Archibald pointed out at the time:

Every single county in which blacks make up more than 75 percent of registered voters will see their drivers license office closed. Every one.

Furthermore, CNNs KFile reported this week that former Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore, the leading candidate to fill the Senate seat vacated by Jeff Sessions, is a birther who has continuously questioned President Obamas citizenship, including doing so three months after then-Republican nominee Donald Trump conceded that Obama was born in the U.S. after pushing the racially charged birther conspiracy for years.

(Interestingly, Moore was not the candidate Trump supported in the primaries to fill the seat.)

Feelings about Obamas birth and religion are important because as Philip Klinkner, a Hamilton College professor, wrote in Vox before the election:

You can ask just one simple question to find out whether someone likes Donald Trump more than Hillary Clinton: Is Barack Obama a Muslim? If they are white and the answer is yes, 89 percent of the time that person will have a higher opinion of Trump than Clinton.

As AL.com reported roughly a month before the election:

Trump, according to the odds on ESPN-owned FiveThirtyEight.com, is polling strongest in Alabama compared to any other state in the U.S. The websites latest forecasts, updated on Monday, place Trumps odds of winning Alabama at 99.5 percent, which is better than all other deep red states: Mississippi (94.3 percent), Oklahoma (99.2 percent), Idaho (98.8 percent), Arkansas (97.9 percent) and West Virginia (98.9 percent).

Indeed, Trump did exceedingly well in the state, with Alabama being one of the top 10 states where he won by the biggest margins. After the election, AL.com called Trump the king of Alabama and pointed out:

The Republican president-elect, according to uncertified final numbers, defeated Democrat challenger Hillary Clinton by a 28.3 percent differential, the largest margin of victory in a presidential race held within the state since 1972.

The site added, Trumps overall vote totals in Alabama also set an all-time high.

Just this year, after New Orleans took down some Confederate monuments, Alabama passed a law prohibiting the removal of monuments in the state.

If you want to know why Trump resonates with his base, look no farther than Alabama. When you want to know to whom Trump is appealing with his unhinged racial rants, look no farther than Alabama.

As goes Alabama, so goes Trumps America.

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Donald Trump, 'King of Alabama'? - New York Times

Call it whiplash. Call it Campaign Trump versus Teleprompter Trump. Call it sizing up a room and playing to an specific audience.

The shifting presidential moods witnessed in a trio of speeches are providing more fuel for apersistent political question: Who is the real Donald Trump?

No one can be sure which version of the President will show up on any given day, whether in the Oval Office, on TV or on Twitter.

Trump on Thursday weighed into the debate himself, claiming that his jarring emotional shifts were evidence of rare political dexterity and talent.

"The Fake News is now complaining about my different types of back to back speeches. Well, there was Afghanistan (somber), the big Rally ... (enthusiastic, dynamic and fun) and the American Legion - V.A. (respectful and strong)," Trump wrote in a pair of tweets. "Too bad the Dems have no one who can change tones!"

As the President suggests, seeing him simply as a creature of moods tends to oversimplify the case. While the debate over which is the authentic Trump gets at his temperament, it fails to dig deep on his persona and political method.

Whether he's running hot, as at a campaign rally in Phoenix on Tuesday night or keeping his cool as commander-in-chief in his Afghanistan strategy speech on Monday or before the American Legion on Wednesday in Reno, Nevada, Trump is pushing many consistent themes and ideas, sometimes openly, sometimes more subtly.

These concepts -- including culture, race, history, patriotism and loyalty are beginning to emerge as a philosophical guide to his presidency.

In his Tuesday night campaign rally, Trump blasted the media and questioned reporters' patriotism, slammed Republican senators and misquoted his own remarks about the events in Charlottesville, Virginia, to debunk criticism of his conduct on a scarring national debate on race.

In Reno, Trump seemed to be in a more soothing mood.

"We are not defined by the color of our skin, the figure on our paycheck or the party of our politics," he said Wednesday. "We are defined by our shared humanity -- by our citizenship in this magnificent nation, and by the love that fills our hearts."

On the face of it, Trump appeared to be contradicting himself in the two speeches.

But later in the Reno event, Trump used language that can have different meanings to different audiences, again implicitly referred to the debate about race, culture and history, that was sparked when he drew equivalencies between white extremists in Charlottesville and protestors against their marches.

"History and culture -- so important," he told the veterans, cloaking his argument in a call to patriotism.

"You emphasize the need to preserve the nation's cultural, moral and patriotic values. You encourage the observation of patriotic holidays. You stress the need to enforce our laws, including our immigration laws."

Those are sentiments anybody could get behind. But coming from Trump's lips, things are not so simple.

In the context of Trump's campaign and previous rhetoric and controversial immigration policies, those words could also be read as a clear message to his political base. And the concept of history and culture may not equate with those of Americans who oppose him -- some of whom see such language as code words for a certain political stance on race.

For instance, condemning efforts to tear down Confederate monuments, the President has repeated warned that America's "culture" is under threat.

On Twitter last week, he wrote, "sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments." Those remarks offered comfort not just to loyal Trump base voters who are irked at the removal of monuments they see as symbols of southern culture, but may also have played into the arguments of white supremacist groups who use such artifacts as a rallying call.

Trump's message of inclusion in Reno was also undercut by the fact that a White House official Wednesday told CNN that all the paperwork was in place for him to pardon former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, who was convicted of contempt in a case related to racial profiling.

For Trump's critics, such a step would run counter to his message of racial unity but it would be consistent with his frequent desire to reach out to his political base on issues like undocumented migrants and immigration.

It would not the first time that the President has appeared to offer a conventional, unifying message but conveyed more subtle political signals when he has been in his calm, commander-in-chief mode.

In June, the President's speech in Warsaw was hailed by many US commentators as a return to the values and assurances that have underpinned the Western alliance for decades, following his campaign trail denunciations of NATO.

But many in Europe heard a quite different message, picking up on his language and stark question: "Do we have the desire and the courage to preserve our civilization in the face of those who would subvert and destroy it?" To critics, Trump was invoking a version of the West in line with his own nationalist views, advocating a white, Christian civilization with impenetrable borders that would be antithetical to the more secular, multicultural vision of many Europeans.

Trump has also been talking frequently about another core value -- loyalty -- in recent weeks.

"Loyalty to our nation demands loyalty to one another. Love for America requires love for all of its people," Trump said in his speech on Afghanistan policy on Monday night.

On Tuesday, in Phoenix, he hit the same theme: "We must rediscover the bonds of love and loyalty that bring us together as Americans, right?"

On the surface no one could argue with that. Yet Trump's conception of loyalty might give critics pause.

Throughout his seven-month-old presidency, Trump has shown himself fixated with loyalty -- and his perception that he is not getting enough of it.

After all, his request for loyalty from James Comey made the former FBI chief uncomfortable, and his refusal to offer it unconditionally to Trump, apparently led to his dismissal.

At a combustible performance at a Boy Scout jamboree in West Virginia in July, Trump said: "we could use some more loyalty, I will tell that you that."

CNN's Kaitlan Collins contributed to this report.

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Different speeches, different venues, but there's only one Donald Trump - CNN International

The survey, they write,

asked four questions that captured dimensions of white identity: the importance of white identity, how much whites are being discriminated against, the likelihood that whites are losing jobs to nonwhites, and the importance of whites working together to change laws unfair to whites. We combined those questions into a scale capturing the strength of white identity and found that it was strongly related to Republicans support for Donald Trump.

On the basis of that scale, the authors assembled the data illustrated by the accompanying chart, which shows that fewer than five percent of white Republicans who indicated that their racial identity was of little importance supported Trump. Among those who said their identity as whites was extremely important to them, Trumps support reached 81 percent.

A survey found white Republicans approval of Donald Trump rose in tandem with the intensity of their racial identification. The survey ranked white identity on a scale of 0 (not important) to 1 (very important).

PERCENTAGE INTENDING TO VOTE

FOR TRUMP IN 2016 PRIMARIES

Majority support

for Trump

White identity

is relatively

unimportant

White identity

is relatively

important

PERCENTAGE INTENDING TO VOTE FOR TRUMP IN 2016 PRIMARIES

Majority support

for Trump

White identity is relatively

unimportant

White identity is relatively

important

In a separate essay on the Posts Monkey Cage site in March 2016, Tesler and Sides explained that

Both white racial identity and beliefs that whites are treated unfairly are powerful predictors of support for Donald Trump in the Republican primaries.

Once Trump secured this white identifier base making him competitive in a multicandidate field he was positioned to expand his traction among traditional Republicans, including a decisive majority of those who backed Mitt Romney, John McCain and George W. Bush.

What are the views of white identifiers?

According to Jardina, these voters

are more likely to think that the growth of racial or ethnic groups in the United States that are not white is having a negative effect on American culture.

And they are

much more likely to rank illegal immigration the most important issue facing the U.S. today, relative to the budget deficit, health care, the economy, unemployment, outsourcing of jobs to other countries, abortion, same-sex marriage, education, gun control, the environment or terrorism.

Perhaps most important, Jardina found that white identifiers are

an aggrieved group. They are more likely to agree that American society owes white people a better chance in life than they currently have. And white identifiers would like many of the same benefits of identity politics that they believe other groups enjoy.

In other words, most though by no means all white identifiers appear to be driven as much by anger at their sense of lost status as by their animosity toward other groups, although these two feelings are clearly linked.

Tesler argued last November, after the election, that the

Trump effect combined with eight years of racialized politics under President Obama, means that racial attitudes are now more closely aligned with white Americans partisan preferences than they have been at any time in the history of polling.

Just over a decade ago, political scientists were discounting the significance of white identity in elections.

David O. Sears, a professor of political science and psychology at U.C.L.A., wrote in 2006 that

whites whiteness is usually likely to be no more noteworthy to them than is breathing the air around them. White group consciousness is therefore not likely to be a major force in whites political attitudes today.

In a 2005 paper, Cara Wong, a political scientist at the University of Illinois, and Grace E. Cho, who was a graduate student in politial science at the University of Michigan at the time, found that many whites identified with their race, but white racial identity is not politically salient.

Wong and Cho went on, however, to make what turned out to be a crucially important point: that since

white identity is indeed unstable but easily triggered, the danger is that a demagogue could influence the salience of these identities to promote negative outgroup attitudes, link racial identification more strongly to policy preferences, and exacerbate group conflict.

John Podhoretz, in an article on the Commentary website, referred to Trumps failure to condemn white supremacy and anti-Semitism on display in Charlottesville:

Our president responded by condemning violence on many sides and offering his best regards to the casualties. This was not a mistake on Trumps part. This was a deliberate communications choice. It has a discomfiting parallel with the now-forgotten moment one week after Trumps swearing in when his administration issued a statement on Holocaust remembrance that did not mention Jews.

Podhoretz recognizes Trumps adamant refusal to alienate his most dogged backers:

If theres one thing politicians can feel in their marrow, even a non-pol pol like Trump, its who is in their base and what it is that binds the base to them

and, even more important,

the nucleus the very heart of a base, the root of the root of support.

For years, Podhoretz writes, Trump operated below the radar, cultivating a constituency of disaffected Americans entirely on the margins of American life, politically and culturally and organizationally.

He did so, Podhoretz argues, by capitalizing on media and organizational tools disdained by the establishment: Alex Joness Infowars; the American Media supermarket tabloids, including The National Enquirer, Star and the Globe; the WWE professional wrestling network where Trump intermittently served as a kind of Special Guest Villain.

While Trumps initial base included many on the margins of society, the larger population of white identifiers has been a growing constituency within the Republican electorate, starting in the white South after the passage under President Lyndon Johnson of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Trump, Vavreck noted in an email, was the first successful presidential candidate willing to explicitly direct his campaign toward this disaffected white electorate.

This has been happening for a while, which is why Trump was able to leverage white identity in 2016, she wrote. Trump went where no other GOP primary candidate would go even though they all knew those voters were there.

In Identity Crisis, Sides, Tesler and Vavreck write that Trumps primary campaign

became a vehicle for a different kind of identity politics oriented around white Americans feelings of marginalization in an increasingly diverse America.

The three authors describe a rapidly growing sense of white victimhood. They cite surveys showing that among Republicans, the perception of discrimination against whites grew from 38 percent in 2011-12 to 47 percent in January 2016.

A February 2017 survey by the Public Religion Research Institute separately asked voters whether there is a lot of discrimination against various groups. 43 percent of Republicans said there is a lot of discrimination against whites, compared to 27 percent of Republicans who said that there is a lot of discrimination against blacks.

Trump, according to Sides, Tesler and Vavreck, was

unusual in how he talked about race. Candidates have traditionally used implicit racial appeals to win over voters without appearing overtly prejudiced. And, as much political science research has shown, these appeals have often succeeded in activating support among voters with less favorable views of racial minorities. But Trump talked about issues related to race and ethnicity in explicit terms.

Direct and indirect references to threats to white identity continue to shape Trumps rhetoric. In his ongoing drive to demonize the media, Trump declared during his rally in Phoenix on Tuesday that they are trying to take away our history and our heritage.

Shedding light on Trumps sustained backing among his supporters, a Public Policy Polling survey conducted from Aug. 18 to Aug. 21 found that Trumps approval rating did not diminish in the aftermath of the Charlottesville protests on Aug. 11 and 12, during which white nationalists marched wearing Nazi insignia and chanting anti-Semitic slogans. The poll reported that support for Trump held firm

probably because his supporters think that whites and Christians are the most oppressed groups of people in the country.

Trump has mobilized the white identity electorate, and in doing so has put the tenuous American commitment to racial and ethnic egalitarianism on the line. And Trump has been captured by the success of his own demagoguery. He surged ahead of his Republican competitors for the nomination when he threw matches on the kindling and now, under siege, his only strategy for survival is to pour gasoline on the flames.

No one doubts that it has been unsettling for many Americans to adapt to an increasingly interconnected world. Still, history has not been kind to those who have unequivocally yielded to racial grievance to our local agitators, the David Dukes and the Father Coughlins, as well as to the even more poisonous propagators of racial hatred overseas. As Trump abandons his campaign promises to end endless war, to provide beautiful health care, to protect Medicaid, to restore American industry, jobs and mines, to make Mexico pay for a border wall, he has kept his partially veiled promise to focus on white racial essentialism, to make race divisive again. He has gone where other politicians dared not venture and he has taken the Republican Party with him.

An earlier version of this column misstated the university affiliation of Grace E. Cho at the time she co-wrote a paper with Cara Wong; in 2005, she was a graduate student in political science at the University of Michigan, not a psychology professor at St. Olaf College.

Read the original:
Donald Trump's Identity Politics - New York Times

If we lived in a different world, the joke could begin in a familiar, guy-goes-into-a-bar way: "So the president walks into a convention center in Phoenix and "

But this is the Trump era. Only slices of White House life are just comic. Much more of what the president serves up to American voters, legislators, policymakers and the rest of the world routinely smacks of the tragicomic, at best.

The president's speech Tuesday night in Phoenix, is just the latest case in point. It had the requisite elements of vaudevillian propaganda (he accused CNN of not broadcasting his speeches as he spoke into a CNN camera broadcasting his speech); damaging cant (he misrepresented his statements following this month's neo-Nazi violence in Charlottesville, Va., to repackage himself as the morally sensitive leader he isn't); flagrant lies (he hasn't obtained a "historic increase" in military spending); and saber-rattling (he threatened to shut down the federal government unless Congress funds his Great Border Wall).

Trump's Phoenix rantathon also deployed personal broadsides against two members of his own party who are also Arizona's senators, John McCain and Jeff Flake. He slammed McCain for not supporting a Senate effort to repeal and replace Obamacare and he dismissed Flake as a nonentity ("Nobody knows who the hell he is").

Pounding on McCain and Flake lacks political decorum, of course, and the shabbiness of it is only enhanced by the fact that McCain is struggling with brain cancer. And Trump, who managed to secure five draft deferments during the Vietnam War, once questioned whether McCain, who spent more than five years in a Vietnamese prison, was a war hero.

But beyond Trump's seediness looms the larger issue of why he habitually attacks natural allies, even when contrary to his own self-interest.

Remember, Trump's trolling of McCain and Flake is far less perilous to his legislative agenda than taking on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. Yet our man is fearless. He's been trying to slap McConnell around so much of late that the two men stopped talking for weeks.

You'd expect Trump to do all that he can to reel in McConnell. The majority leader holds sway over various Senate committees that Trump needs for such things as re-engineering the tax code or keeping fallout under wraps from various investigations into links to Russia.

Yet Trump, after bungling his own role in the Obamacare debacle, found it simpler to blame McConnell than to take responsibility himself. He's been on the warpath with McConnell ever since, so focused on avoiding blame for a losing effort around one piece of legislation health care that he's willing to jeopardize the rest of his White House stay.

This, as it always does with Trump, follows a pattern. Back in the late 1980s, Trump was trying to build a mega-development on the west side of Manhattan. He blew the deal in part because he got into a needless public brawl with the mayor of New York at the time, Ed Koch.

Trump needed Koch's support to get zoning approval and tax abatements for the West Side Yards deal, a project that would have rivaled Rockefeller Center in scale and would have launched Trump into the top tier of New York developers. Plans for the property included a rocket-shaped skyscraper that would have been the world's tallest building.

But Trump antagonized local residents, planning boards and Koch, raising the ante every time he didn't get exactly what he wanted and publicly accusing Koch of "ludicrous and disgraceful behavior." Koch, noting that he thought Trump was being "piggy, piggy, piggy," warned the young developer not to try to "influence the process through intimidation."

Trump kept jousting, however, and the Yards project stagnated. Trump ultimately couldn't afford to carry the property while waiting out City Hall, and as his financial problems worsened in the early 1990s he was forced to sell it to Hong Kong developers.

Had Trump been patient and methodical, had he been interested in outcomes as much as he was interested in being seen as the winner at center stage, he might have done better with the Yards.

That's not who the president is, though.

He doesn't build strong teams, doesn't cultivate sophisticated partnerships and doesn't do his homework. Instead, he stays locked on fostering his own celebrity and guarding against any perceptions that he's not a "winner."

Trump the Developer was so focused on besting Ed Koch and doing things his way that he let a promising development slip from his grasp. Trump the President is so focused on besting Mitch McConnell that he runs the risk of alienating a legislative body that could otherwise help him craft a political legacy and protect him from folks like Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating Trumpworld's links to Russia.

Trump doesn't care about outcomes. He has his money and the whole world's bounteous attention. As long as he has those things, he's willing to forfeit more enduring accomplishments while he fosters the illusion of personal strength. By that standard, defeats feel like triumphs, achievements leave him cold and allies are a waste of time.

Bloomberg

Timothy L. O'Brien is the executive editor of Bloomberg Gadfly and Bloomberg View. His books include "TrumpNation: The Art of Being The Donald."

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Why Donald Trump stinks at bromances - Chicago Tribune