Steve M: Trump and his entourage think the baby camps are a winning move

Steve M.

Obviously Miller is a racist, and Trump has been a racist since before Miller was born. 

But I think they also believe that 2016 proves they're the greatest electoral geniuses in America. 

Beating the experts that year means to them that every time the experts say they're making a mistake they must be doing something right. 

Bad polling means that they're winning, because the polls said they were going to lose two years ago.

Of course, the polls actually weren't far off in 2016 -- the final Real Clear Politics average showed Clinton beating Trump by 3.2%, and she beat him in the popular vote by 2.1%. 

Just before the election, Nate Silver warned that Trump might win the Electoral College even as Clinton won the popular vote. 

Trump beat a candidate who wasn't a natural campaigner (or, like him, an experienced media performer) and who was hammered by the mainstream media as well as the right throughout the campaign, particularly on the subject of emails. 

Trump got favors from James Comey and Vladimir Putin. Trump got billions of dollars of free airtime from cable news outlets. 

Trump benefited from vote suppression in Republican states. 

And still he barely won.

Trump doesn't think 2016 was a fluke. 

Trump thinks it was a formula: Whenever you're polling badly, you're going to win. 

Whenever the media coverage is bad, it's good.

And Miller lives in an epistemically closed right-wing world where, yes, it probably does seem as if wailing Latin American children in cages poll at 90% approval, because it's probably been years since he had a conversation with anyone who doesn't approve of that sort of thing.