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CNN)President Donald Trump is doubling down on a strategy he believes worked to his advantage four years ago: seizing on divisive culture wars and using race-baiting rhetoric as he seeks to fire up his base to give him a second term in office. His GOP allies on Capitol Hill are looking on with alarm.
Uncertain how to respond to a President who has long favored incendiary remarks and targets any Republican who shows even the slightest signs of disloyalty, many in his party are aghast as Trump's poll numbers plummet and large numbers of Americans disapprove of his handling of the twin crises that have dominated this election year.
A number of top Republicans told CNN that Trump needs to change course quickly -- even as they readily acknowledge he has never been prone to take such advice.
"He's good with the base," Senate Majority Whip John Thune, a South Dakota Republican, said Wednesday. "But all of the people who are going to decide in November are the people in the middle, and I think they want the President at a time like this ... to strike a more empathetic tone."
Thune later added: "It'll probably require not only a message that deals with substantive policy, but I think a message that conveys perhaps a different tone."
Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican and close ally of Trump's, said that the President's reelection ultimately depends on how the economy is performing in October. But he added: "It's been a couple bad weeks, and structurally we got to up our game."
Graham added: "I just think sort of the cultural wars, the Democrats are on the wrong side of that. But at the end of the day, I think a little more message discipline would help."
That wasn't the case on Tuesday in Arizona where Trump's tendency to lean into and amplify racist tropes was on full display at a Students for Trump event in Phoenix. Every time the phrase "Black Lives Matter" was mentioned, for instance, it was met by a chorus of boos from the riled-up crowd. The President egged on the group into shouting the term "kung flu" to describe the coronavirus and spent a good portion of his speech attacking the removal of statues of Confederate figures by suggesting that the practice was the front end of a slow march toward totalitarianism.
"Words matter, whether it's my words or the President's words or your words," Sen. Lisa Murkowski, an Alaska Republican, said Wednesday, just a few weeks after she said she's "struggling" to back Trump's reelection bid.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/24/poli...8AkMEiaWs+RXvwxsLSaInJsWi&bt_ts=1593080600771
Uncertain how to respond to a President who has long favored incendiary remarks and targets any Republican who shows even the slightest signs of disloyalty, many in his party are aghast as Trump's poll numbers plummet and large numbers of Americans disapprove of his handling of the twin crises that have dominated this election year.
A number of top Republicans told CNN that Trump needs to change course quickly -- even as they readily acknowledge he has never been prone to take such advice.
"He's good with the base," Senate Majority Whip John Thune, a South Dakota Republican, said Wednesday. "But all of the people who are going to decide in November are the people in the middle, and I think they want the President at a time like this ... to strike a more empathetic tone."
Thune later added: "It'll probably require not only a message that deals with substantive policy, but I think a message that conveys perhaps a different tone."
Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican and close ally of Trump's, said that the President's reelection ultimately depends on how the economy is performing in October. But he added: "It's been a couple bad weeks, and structurally we got to up our game."
Graham added: "I just think sort of the cultural wars, the Democrats are on the wrong side of that. But at the end of the day, I think a little more message discipline would help."
That wasn't the case on Tuesday in Arizona where Trump's tendency to lean into and amplify racist tropes was on full display at a Students for Trump event in Phoenix. Every time the phrase "Black Lives Matter" was mentioned, for instance, it was met by a chorus of boos from the riled-up crowd. The President egged on the group into shouting the term "kung flu" to describe the coronavirus and spent a good portion of his speech attacking the removal of statues of Confederate figures by suggesting that the practice was the front end of a slow march toward totalitarianism.
"Words matter, whether it's my words or the President's words or your words," Sen. Lisa Murkowski, an Alaska Republican, said Wednesday, just a few weeks after she said she's "struggling" to back Trump's reelection bid.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/24/poli...8AkMEiaWs+RXvwxsLSaInJsWi&bt_ts=1593080600771
