Trump's base isn't big enough to lean on now

President Trump’s "base strategy," by which he cossets his supporters while pissing off all others, is serving the Democrats well.

Unlike most politicians (and surely most presidents), Trump treats his base as an end in itself and not a beginning. He also goes out of his way to avoid adding to it.

John Kennedy, who knew a thing or two about winning elections, had a rule about not making others angry enough to devote time and energy to pursue his destruction. Trump, in contrast, seems to revel in goading opponents into frenzies of unbridled rage.

His long train of tweets, taunts, smirks; indifference to racists, descriptions of fascists as being "great people," and slights to war heroes and/or their survivors; these have all helped create an army of people willing to sell their first born to give him a drubbing. And last Tuesday, they gave him (in the form of his unfortunate surrogates) a historic beat-down in the state of Virginia that almost doubled the percentage by which he had lost it last year.

All this, of course, was completely uncalled for. Had he reversed course and unexpectedly given a gracious address at his inaugural, the women’s march a day later would have lost its momentum. Recruitment and fund-raising would have been lessened, and the "resistance" might not have appeared. Instead, he delivered what was correctly described by our 43rd president as a lot of ‘weird shit’ to an unsettled electorate, which served all the more to arouse its suspicions. And things quickly went downhill from there.