Mike Pence and Stephen Miller are playing an ugly game

…the fake walk-back from Pence and Miller is nonetheless revealing — both of the dangers that Trumpworld recognizes in wielding racism and white nationalism too explicitly as a political strategy and of how they’re trying to manage those dangers while also pushing the white identity politics as close to full throttle as possible.

Miller still believes the attacks on the nonwhite lawmakers will be beneficial — stoking white grievance is still the game plan, as long as the true animating impulse underneath it isn’t made too explicit.

White voters reject Trump’s racist attacks

But will that really work among white voters to the degree Trump needs? The new CBS News poll offers a clue. It finds that majorities of Americans disagree with Trump’s attacks, dislike them and see them as unpresidential, even as a plurality views them as “racist.”

Interestingly, white voters disagree with the attacks by 52-48; they dislike the attacks by 49-31; they say they’re unpresidential by 51-22; and say they’re racist by 41-41 (on this last, white voters are evenly divided, but that’s still a surprisingly large percentage agreeing with that sentiment).

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