I found this column in the LA Times worthy of attention. The main point is that in spite of the enormous screw-ups and mean-spiritedness that have characterized the Trump administration since even before Day One, his supporters and the rightwing media are seeing a very different story:
Trump jawboned U.S. companies to stop exporting jobs and persuaded some to promise new jobs at home. He formally withdrew from President Obama’s 12-country trade deal with Asia, the Trans-Pacific Partnership. He reaffirmed his intention to build a wall on the border with Mexico, banned refugee admissions from Syria and ordered “extreme vetting” for would-be refugees from other countries. He instructed federal agencies to minimize any effort to make Obamacare work. He removed obstacles to the Keystone XL and Dakota access pipelines, and ordered that they be built with American steel. And next week, he plans to nominate a new Supreme Court justice whose name, he’s said, will thrill conservatives.
[...]
All Trump’s Cabinet picks appear to be headed toward confirmation in the Senate, even though they suffered through rough hearings. That’s unusual; President Obama lost three nominees in his first months.
And at their policy summit in Philadelphia, the Republican leaders of Congress sang Trump’s praises, even though many of them differ with him on important issues from trade agreements to reining in the federal deficit.
[...]
Now that he’s in office, in other words, Trump is alienating yet more Democrats, but solidifying his hold on Republicans.
Obviously, we will and should keep hammering him, but I think it’s worth keeping in mind that by his own lights and those of his supporters, he’s doing a whiz-bang job.
The bigger picture is that Trump and his supporters, including the segment of the media that serves them, live in one world, while we and the segment of the media that supports us, live in another world. The more we criticize Trump for incompetence and dishonesty, the more evidence is seen “over there” that he is being effective and honest.
It’s almost as if we need to find a way to damn Trump with compliments. Example: the Indiana jobs deal saved a few American jobs, but almost simultaneously, even more Indiana jobs were moved to Mexico. If someone representing Mexican workers complimented Trump for “sparing” those Mexican jobs, perhaps that could get some traction. Or if someone Muslim-looking from Saudi Arabia praised Trump for protecting their entry to the US during this “difficult time”.
In general, I believe that Trump’s plan of attack is to do things that have symbolic importance for his followers and mediatize them up the wazoo: this will, in their eyes, prove his worthiness. And as we criticize those things, it only increases the media impact and makes Trump seem more worthy. But he’s not actually solving any major problem. These will only be media events. He will leave most of the original problem unresolved, and that means that there will always be ways for those who have profited by this fragmentary approach to governing to praise him for his “help”.
In any case, whether or not my “damn with praise” approach is useful, I think we must keep in mind that he is pleasing almost all of the people that he is trying to please, and probably will most of the time.