How to lose friends and alienate people |
After two deadly shootings in confrontations between Donald Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and the activists obstructing them, Minneapolis was starting to remind people of Kent State. By “people” we mean progressive baby boomers, inclined to make the Vietnam War the measure of all things. For them, the massacre of four student protesters by a nervous detachment of Ohio national guardsmen in 1970 alerted parents to the war’s inhumanity. It started the groundswell against Richard Nixon that would force him to exit the war three years later – and the White House the year after that.
The analogy is a bad one. Trump’s position differs a lot from Nixon’s.
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It’s stronger politically. Trump’s war on the open-borders policy he inherited from Joe Biden has more support than the Asian quagmire Nixon inherited from Lyndon Johnson. Americans had scant interest in fighting communism in Indochina, telling Gallup as early as February 1966 that they would prefer “having the UN try to work out a solution,” by 78 percent to 7. Expelling illegal migrants, by contrast, is popular in America and (increasingly) around the world. According to a recent Harvard poll, 54 percent of Americans favor “deporting immigrants who are here illegally,” a number that rises to 80........