Trump's culture wars are a bore - By Jennifer Rubin

[DonViejo]

President Trump knew how to ride to the White House on a wave of white resentment, evangelical victimhood and Fox News watchers’ obsession with foreigners. His fixation on cultural and racial pot-stirring has continued, of course, with a wink to neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, pandering to “values voters” (You can say “Merry Christmas”!), attacks on the hated media (Pull their license!) and most recently, the NFL kneeling brouhaha. After you have played this game for nine months, however, the audience … er … electorate may be getting bored.

The latest Marist Poll reports:

Marking a noteworthy shift in public opinion, a slim majority of Americans, 51%, now say professional sports leagues, such as the NFL, should not require their athletes to stand during the national anthem while 47% say they should. When this question was last reported in September 2016, public opinion tilted in the opposite direction. At that time, 52% of Americans thought players should be required to stand while 43% thought they should not be forced to do so.

That’s a pretty big shift in opinion. Now it may be that, in elevating the issue, Trump made people more aware of the underlying issue, police brutality toward African American males. (“A majority of Americans value the right of professional athletes to protest racial inequality by kneeling or locking arms during the performance of the national anthem before a game. 52% of residents nationally think the athletes did the right thing by carrying out this protest. 41% say they did the wrong thing.”) Alternatively, it may be that voters are tired of the issue and just want the whole thing to go away. The poll suggests it may be more of the latter that is taking place:

While a majority of Americans believe these protests should be allowed, they divide about whether or not these protests are respectful. 49% of Americans say these demonstrations are disrespectful to the freedoms the anthem represents while 46% believe it demonstrates the anthem’s freedoms. There has been little change on this question since a previous survey released last year. . . .

However, more than two in three Americans, 68%, believe President Donald Trump did the wrong thing when he criticized and called for the firing of NFL players who took a knee during the anthem. 28% think his response was correct. Residents divide about whether Vice President Mike Pence did the right thing, 47%, or wrong thing, 47%, when he walked out of an NFL game when some of the players kneeled in protest during the national anthem.

That might be interpreted as a “Mr. President, just leave it alone.”

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/wp/2017/10/26/trumps-culture-wars-are-a-bore/?utm_term=.a7db69d6cbd8&wpisrc=nl_popns&wpmm=1