Donald Trump desperately tries and fails to keep his base intact

| 10:30 am EST January 29, 2019
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How badly is it going for Donald Trump when it comes to trying to hang onto his far-right extremist base? Fox News and Ann Coulter both made fun of Trump over the weekend after he caved on his government shutdown and border wall with nothing in return. This has prompted Trump to go to some desperate new measures to keep his base intact, but it’s not working.

For instance, Donald Trump posted this on Monday: “Numerous states introducing Bible Literacy classes, giving students the option of studying the Bible. Starting to make a turn back? Great!” This is a clear attempt at pandering to the conservative evangelical extremists in his base, who believe that the Bible should be taught in public schools, regardless of the separation of church and state spelled out in the Constitution.

But this tweet barely made a dent in the news cycle on Monday, which was largely dominated by Donald Trump’s worsening criminal scandals, and – more importantly when it comes to his base – the fact that he caved on his border wall. Trump spent the 2016 election convincing racists everywhere that building a wall was the key to validating their desire to blame their own failings in life on immigrants. Now that Trump has given up on the wall, his base isn’t going to stick around just because he’s suddenly pandering to their religious fanaticism.

Donald Trump keeps insisting that he’ll shut the government down again in three weeks, and/or declare a state of emergency, if Congress fails to give him funding for his wall at that time. But a number of Republicans in Congress made clear during the latter stages of the last shutdown that they didn’t have the stomach to keep it going, so they’re not going to let Trump shut things down again. Trump is reduced to making hollow threats. That’ll backfire in three weeks when he caves yet again.