about religion. there were people saying this rings the irony bell coming from the thrice married president of the united states. evangelical white christians have become the absolute bedrock of the president s support. i mean, he s still looking at a 3/4 approval rating. many of those voters essentially view themselves in a struggle over the country s direction. they feel that they are on the losing side of kind of cultural and demographic change, and the president presents himself to them as in effect a human wall against all of the changes that they don t like, and i think the evidence is pretty clear over two and a half years that this is about anything in his personal history that they re willing to forgive. i mean, the problem is that what all the kind of coal he puts in the engine to mobilize that base has a real price that we re going to measure at the other end of the district in a place like southeast mecklenburg county outside of charlotte that had been the most republic
best person in the world for any job. ron, you are concurring? yeah. well you know when he said i alone can fix it, that really did crystallize a lot of his campaign message to his core supporters and continues to this day essentially the trump coalition or the voters most uneasy about the way america is evolving in the 21st century and democratically and culturally and economically and he presented himself as a human wall against all of those changes, to his supporters he is the one that is preventing this new america from displacing them in the ways that they fear. and that is why he comes back to personalizing these things in such grandiose terms. and nia, as you watch this today, sort of in the annals of rambling q&a from the president and we ve seen them there on the south lawn, how does this one shape up? this is a-plus rambling and a-plus word salad from this president. all over the place on any number
and a free association, but i actually thought it gave you a pretty concentrated version of how he intends to run in 2020. it really comes down to three words that he said at one point, i ll protect you. he was talking specifically about the second amendment at that point, but what the president did in that speech is what he does so often. he tells his core supporters that they are under siege, which is another phrase he used during the speech from an array of interests, from immigrants, elites, and i will protect you, i will hold back the changes you find threatening. and democrats are kind of the embodiment of all of that. he called them radical, socialist, and so forth. and that kind of argument that he is in effect, as i said yesterday, a human wall against the changes that his supporters view as threatening, i think, is the core of his argument, and it emerged amid all of the zigs and zags of that fidel castro-esque
great it was, how interesting it was. how great it was to be in the room. it wasn t that different from how he ran in 2016. if this is a preview how he will run in 2020, it s pretty much the same pitch he had in 2016, except now, of course, he will try to claim that they need him to stick around. they don t need him to come office to protect them from various forces in the country that are allegedly attacking the second amendment and other things. but they need him to stay there to continue to as ron said be a human wall. clearly, he was all about his base today. he certainly knew his audience there. we saw him hug the american flag as soon as he got out there. is this president really worried about losing his conservative base? should that be the least of his concerns? it s a really good question. not only the substance, the message, i will protect you, but
of them. he will protect them. he presents himself as a human wall against all of the changes that he portrays as threatening his audience. amidst other elements today, that strand ran through very mi how he envisions himself winning a second term. he wants to be the protector. he was also the attacker today. i want to play something else he told the crowd today. listen. right now, we have people in congress that hate our country. you know that. we can name every one of them if they want. they hate our country. say it. it s satisvery sad. when i sigh soee some of the statements being made, it s very sad. how did they do in their country? just ask them. how did they do?