Is This the Trump Tipping Point?

I know. We’ve said we’ve been here a thousand times before. This time feels different.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/07/opinion/trump-mattis-polls.html

[I don't know who Jennifer Senior is, but Jennifer is not very senior.]

[Maybe X-II and I ought to become the seventeenth NYT columnist.]


...something right now really is different. I think.
...
Trump is flailing like an overturned turtle. 

[Or a disgruntled pelican?]
...
But now for the subterranean tremors that most beguile me — a suggestion that something deeper is afoot.

Trump, right now, is trying to stoke white fears about protests in the street. But he’s having little luck. On Wednesday, Lara Putnam, the chairman of the history department at the University of Pittsburgh, [Pitt grads do it deeper.] tweeted a modest but persuasive thread highlighting the easy victory by Summer Lee, a progressive African-American woman elected to the Pennsylvania statehouse in 2018, in the Democratic primary on Tuesday.

"...it seemed entirely plausible that there would be white backlash against her in this moment,” Putnam told me.
...
Instead, voters doubled down. Lee was already winning on Election Day — we now know this, based on mail-in ballots — and as the ballot counting continued, she pulled even further ahead. Her victory suggested that the white suburban women and retirees in her district were unswayed by Trump’s demonizing and dog-whistling.
...
On Saturday, Putnam and two of her colleagues wrote that the scale and geographic diversity of these demonstrations were without American precedent...As Barack Obama pointed out in his recent town hall, “a far more representative cross-section of America” is out protesting in the streets than in the 1960s.