Blue Rose Research, the firm led by Democratic establishment darling David Shor, produced a memo earlier this month digging into the effectiveness of various messages related to Trump’s takeover of Washington, D.C. The firm advised that messaging around Trump’s “rising authoritarianism” was “highly unconvincing,” while messages that say Trump wants to “distract” from his damaging tariffs or horrifying Medicaid cuts were more effective. Meanwhile, Republican messaging about how Trump is clamping down on gang violence tested through the roof.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) was asked Sunday on CNN what the party’s plan is to fight the president sending troops into Chicago. He only offered that Trump has no authority to do this, and that he supports the men and women working in law enforcement. He also, as the Blue Rose memo suggested is effective, cast the federal takeover as a “distraction” from Trump’s unpopular policies. Jeffries didn’t seem too worked up about any of this, delivering his talking points with a complacency that certainly did not bely that the United States is currently experiencing a militarized dismantling of representative democracy.
Seriously. You’d think that after 2016 when the signal stabilized and people who ignored this messaging were consistently wildly popular in elections, and people who listened to it got beat like a rented mule year after year, they’d see the pattern. There aren’t a lot of fields of big league human endeavor where you can be this stupidly unsuccessful for this long and people still take you seriously and keep paying you vast sums of money to learn your wisdom.
I suspect there’s a certain amount of deliberate sabotage involved. How much of it is that, and how much is pure homegrown white-collar stupidity, it’s impossible to say, although I would speculate they’re both heavily involved.
I’m starting to wonder if these consultants aren’t double agents or something.
Yeah. I don’t really know politics well enough to know how realistic it is. I do know that most of them exist in a weird white-collar corruption ecosystem which really doesn’t give a shit about parties D or R, working people, America’s standing in the world and success or failure, any of that stuff. They just work for who pays them, and for the most part, who pays them is the rich sociopaths who are completely fine with putting all the poors in camps.
I feel like a certain amount of it is also deliberate partisan sabotage by people who care specifically about R instead of D, but I think mostly it’s just the bipartisan Washington consensus that Bernie Sanders is a loony old guy and Hilary Clinton / George W / Mitt Romney / Hakeem Jeffries / all those indistinguishable dickheads are the future of this country, because they’re going to continue to enable all of “us” to get filthy rich without really having to work for it.