Tlaib’s comments put the Democrats’ whole anti-Trump communication strategy at risk, Politico claimed on Friday:
House Democrats are furious that an incoming freshman’s expletive-riddled statement about impeaching Donald Trump has suddenly upended their carefully crafted rhetoric on their plans to take on the president.
And deep liberal fault lines over the I-word got exposed, added the Times:
[After Trump mentioned the possibility of his own impeachment,] Ms. Pelosi and senior Democrats said they were determined not to take the bait for now and risk generating a backlash from Mr. Trump’s supporters, who would most likely see impeachment as the overreaction of out-of-control Democrats. But the words of Ms. Tlaib, who stood by her comments on Friday, made evident the pressure already mounting from the left, where public opinion polls suggest a majority of liberals want the president removed from office.
The real point is about 2020, CNN’s Chris Cillizza insisted:
What Tlaib did on Thursday night might feel good for Democrats. It might make them feel as though they are regaining some of the fire and the fight they lost when Trump won in 2016. But it almost certainly is the wrong strategy if Democrats want to beat Trump in 2020. Why? Well, put as simply as possible: Never wrestle with a pig because you both get dirty and the pig likes it.
And think of the norms, Elaine Godfrey argued in The Atlantic:
[Her expletive] also helped underscore a rapidly emerging pattern. Some incoming progressive Democrats are repeatedly disregarding norms and breaking with their party in order to criticize the president and speak to their passionate base. Curiously, it’s an approach to politics that mirrors the tactics of the man they’re up against. Tlaib’s comments could foreshadow an intensifying drumbeat of norm-breaking on the left similar to the one that Trump has already imposed on the GOP.
Our civility and our culture are what’s at stake, former Obama faith outreach director Michael Wear worried in the Post:
[S]ome on the left defended Tlaib using the same arguments that they’ve blasted Republicans for in the Trump era. They are wrong, of course, just as those who have explained away President Trump’s corrosive impact on our political culture have been wrong. This kind of rhetoric is harmful to Democratic policy and political objectives, and to our political culture.
And what about the children, Mitch Albom opined for the Detroit Free Press:
Tlaib, who at 42 is not a kid, should know better. I’d like to think she’d set a better example for her own children, aged 7 and 13, but that’s not my business; the example she sets for our children is. They will hear and study the things she says. Her election was notable. As a woman in a largely men’s field, and a Muslim in an overwhelmingly non-Muslim body of government, she was representing change.
Her profanity last week — and her vigilant defense of it — doesn’t sound like change from our current status quo. It sounds like more of it.
And what about how none of this ever seems to actually matter, anyway, Dave Weigel pointed out in a series of tweets:
I could maybe, *maybe* buy the “Tlaib’s rhetoric will hurt Dems” stuff if this was October 2020. But we’re almost as far as you can get from the next election. At this point in the 2018 cycle, the Serious People were wringing hands about f-bombs at the Women’s March.
I’m not even getting into the “outrage: real or not?” thing. This is being piped into the political discussion with a pretty risible theory about what swing voters, who are 22 months away from a presidential election, may think. … I could do a whole “We Didn’t Start the Fire” lyrics sheet of stuff that was supposed to Affect the Election and got forgotten, because we all have Memento brains now.
Or is the whole episode just a harbinger of the maddening return to politics-as-usual, as Osita Nwanevu proposed via a Twitter thread:
[I]t’s worth pointing out that the Tlaib thing is also a preview of how quickly the right and much of the press will pretend Trump never happened or minimize his conduct to make facile comparisons when he’s gone. … If Trump doesn’t go to jail, he’ll be rendered in the press post-presidency as a bumbling, comic figure. His dishonesty and incompetence will stick. The racism and criminality will be alluded to loosely and amorphously. But he’ll mostly be an object of fun. A rascal.
