Trump Is As Much Symptom As Cause
By 
I have a brief thread for the third anniversary of Trump calling for a “total and complete shutdown” of Muslims entering the United States, the repugnant racism that materially helped him capture the Republican nomination:
As @NateSilver538 has observed, the call for a Muslim ban came the day after the terrorist attack San Bernardino. Trump's poll numbers got substantially higher after he did it. https://t.co/Lqxy4gEZ3x pic.twitter.com/uvOIytq4oO
— Scott Lemieux (@LemieuxLGM) December 7, 2018
And, to underline the point, this concluded with 5 elite Republican lawyers pretending that the travel ban wasn't motivated by racial animus, with the Chief Justice blatantly misstating the holding of a discredited decision whose errors he replicated https://t.co/9Ltp0VHzkC
— Scott Lemieux (@LemieuxLGM) December 7, 2018
There’s just little meaningful daylight between Trump and Republican elites, and that’s in large measure because Trump’s racism is pretty much the only thing Republicans currently offer that can actually appeal to marginal voters.