(THE WEEK)
By David Faris
President Trump seems to believe he is president only of something called the Red States of America.
Since taking office, Trump has conducted campaign-like rallies in Iowa, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, and Florida. He carried all four states in 2016, and while Iowa, Pennsylvania, and Florida are all legitimate swing states, not one could be honestly described as blue. In fact, the only reasons Trump has even set foot in truly blue states since his inauguration was for military ceremonies in Virginia, Connecticut, and Maryland, to visit his New Jersey golf resort, to give a graduation speech at hard-right Liberty University in Virginia, and to meet with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull at a New York City military museum.
The idea of addressing or appealing to the wide swath of people who live in these blue states seems never to have occurred to our president. They are just golfover states to him.
There’s another striking thing about President Trump’s treks in office in comparison to the early days of Obama — he is not acting like the situation facing the country is nearly as serious as he says it is, and he is not doing much to press the agenda he and his allies claim is critical to a national turnaround. By July 2009, the indefatigable Obama had held multiple town hall meetings about health-care reform and given major addresses about his administration’s policy proposals, including on credit card reform and the stimulus bill. Whatever you think of his policies, it’s undeniable that Obama had a podcast wonk’s command of the details and obviously took them seriously. Trump has not done a single town hall. He has addressed audiences that are almost exclusively friendly by design, including the Conservative Political Action Conference and the National Rifle Association. His public remarks and tweets betray a policy knowledge wormhole large enough to steer the Starship Enterprise through.
Obama’s early months in office were consumed by efforts to press his policy agenda during the worst economic meltdown since the Great Depression. Now, it’s true that he did not embark on some national unity tour by putting wheels down repeatedly in Texas and Alabama. But he did set foot in hostile political territory on more than one occasion.
