Why hate and lies are failing

By Greg Sargent
Opinion writer
October 31 at 9:43 AM

... the story Trump has told about the economy — and the country — just isn’t resonating ... That narrative is that immigration and globalization pose major threats to the well-being of Americans, and Trump is now acting on those threats, via stepped-up deportations from the interior, efforts to slash legal immigration and refugee flows, and trade wars. That, plus his tax cut, has created the supposed “Trump boom,” in stark contrast with the economy under Barack Obama, which is uniformly depicted as a pre-Trumpian hellscape ...

... Trump and Republicans have distilled down Trumpism’s core narratives into a series of ludicrous and menacing cartoons for the GOP base’s consumption ...

... Trump has directed bread-and-circuses belligerence at euro-weenie elites and China. He has employed endless lies and hate-mongering to hype the migrant “caravan” into a national emergency, and will send in troops as props to dramatize the point. Republicans are running ads absurdly depicting immigrants as criminals and invaders alongside many other ones that indulge in naked race-baiting. Trump is vowing an end to birthright citizenship, confirming the ethno-nationalist underpinnings of Trumpism and further fanning the xenophobic flames.

But Trump’s political team recognizes that all this risks a backlash among more-educated white voters ...

... Trump is promising a huge middle-class tax cut that isn’t going to happen, to obscure the truly regressive nature of the actual Trump/GOP tax cut, which lavished a huge windfall on the wealthy and corporations and as such is deeply unpopular ...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2018/10/31/trumps-hate-and-lies-are-failing-two-new-studies-show-why/?utm_term=.f91e0c2ebec4