Trump, Twitter, and Shy Tories

President Trump has established a clear pattern of saying something
that people would naturally be expected to attack, but which they
can't attack without bringing attention to a subject which hurts their
cause. Often but not always he has done this on Twitter. Often, indeed
perhaps almost always, little considerations like whether making the
intended attack will hurt their cause don't stop people from attacking
him.

For example, this pattern seemed pretty clear in Trump's "Pocahontas"
remark about Elizabeth Warren. The remark was a fullthroated violation
of the taboo of using some stereotypical folk figure to refer to real
racial issues, so of course it was going to be criticized. But it
couldn't be criticized without exploding the Journolist-style working
agreement to bury the sorry Elizabeth Warren purely-fake-diversity
affirmative action affair. (Also, to an interesting extent, making the
people criticizing look like creepy villains for prioritizing the
oh-so-sensitive stereotypical-figure taboo over things that are more
central substantive violations of modern racial norms, such as using
false claims of racial identity to get affirmative action preferences
which were supposed to be for members of other racial groups.)

In many cases, including the Warren one, this plays out in a fairly
obvious predictable way, and I find myself pretty sure that Trump has
a pretty good idea what he's getting from this, and a pretty good idea
the price that he's paying, and that he's basically correct that the
political benefits for him are large compared to the political costs.
But in some messier cases, including the recent controversy over his
(vaguely second-hand sourced) remarks along the lines of "why do we
want immigration from that shithole", I can't see how anyone, me or
Trump included, could make the computation very accurately, in part
because it's difficult to anticipate people's reactions to the remark,
and in part because it's a "Shy Tory" sort of issue that makes it
difficult to observe people's reactions reliably. I can't think of any
wonderfully sophisticated professional marketer/politician survey
technology Trump could be using to overcome these problems, so it
seems as though he must be mostly "playing it by ear".

So far, eyeballing it from the outside, my impression is that he's
likely been pretty successful at it even in these messier cases, but I
wonder whether that impression will hold up in hindsight as we learn
more (e.g. from voting, or from other tells) about people's reactions.