After Donald Trump started spewing wickedly unfounded conspiracy theories about the death of a former congressional staffer at the hands of now-MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, GOP Michigan Rep. Fred Upton had a message for White House chief of staff Mark Meadows.
“I said, ‘Maybe it sells in North Carolina, it doesn’t win Michigan,’” said Upton, the longest-serving member of the state's congressional delegation, according to The New York Times.
In a very Midwestern way, Upton was telling Meadows, a former North Carolina representative: You're a bunch of fools.
That sentiment was expressed repeatedly to the Times by GOP lawmakers from the Great Lakes State, where Trump just keeps shooting himself in the foot. As I noted a couple weeks back, Trump's effectively declared war on the must-get state, where the coronavirus has taken an especially brutal toll on the population and pushed the unemployment rate up to 23%—the second highest in the country.
Along with launching an attack on the state's female governor, Gretchen Whitmer, Trump has taken shots at a handful of the state's other women politicians, including its secretary of state, attorney general, U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib, and Rep. Debbie Dingell, who now holds the seat long held by her deceased husband, whom Trump also mocked posthumously.
Additionally, Trump has threatened to cut funding to the state for mailing out absentee voting ballot applications approved by voters in 2018. He also encouraged right-wing militia groups to "LIBERATE" the state from Whitmer's coronavirus stay-at-home orders. And while her approval ratings have remained in the 60s throughout the pandemic, every public poll taken in the swing state has shown Joe Biden besting Trump.
As former state Democratic chair Lon Johnson said of the posh Detroit suburbs, “You don’t win Oakland County by aligning yourself with men toting guns at the State Capitol and threatening to withhold federal funding in the time of a pandemic."
Nor do you win over African Americans, a demographic that's been disproportionately affected by the virus in the state and that the Trump campaign is supposedly trying to woo.
That's why GOP lawmakers like Lee Chatfield, the speaker of the state House, are urging Trump to be more cooperative with state leadership. “I want both the governor and the president to be successful and I’ve made that very clear to him,” Chatfield told the Times. Yet another gentle way of saying, Cut it out, stupid.