2020 desk: Trump’s Hispanic Appeal

At Fox News, Liz Peek brings bad news for liberals: “Hispanics could help throw the 2020 election to President Trump.” Democrats’ tendency to take “the Hispanic vote for granted,” she warns, “could cost them the election.” In 2016, Trump did better among Hispanics than did Mitt Romney in 2012, and “Hispanic support for the president continues to grow.” Trump won 28 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2016, and Republicans won 29 percent in the 2018 midterms. Polls also show significant Hispanic support for Trump on abortion, gun rights and other issues, and that Hispanics credit him for better job numbers among minorities. Bottom line: Hispanics may shock Democrats in 2020 — “by re-electing a president who is making life better for them.”

Health beat: Curing the Mental-Illness Crisis

The Trump administration is looking for ways to improve care for the seriously mentally ill. At The Hill, DJ Jaffe offers two suggestions. First, “there is a nationwide shortage of at least 95,000 psychiatric hospital beds — and the shortage grows worse every year.” The president has signaled he wants more beds, and one way to help is by eliminating a law that forces states to remove mentally ill adults from psychiatric beds in order to qualify for Medicaid funding. Second, he should boost the “use of assisted outpatient treatment, a procedure that allows judges — after full due process — to commit the few seriously mentally ill who are historically and potentially dangerous to stay in up to one year of outpatient treatment.” The dysfunctional status quo is not “fair, and it’s not compassionate.”

Libertarian: Democrats’ Obama Love-Hate

“The riddle facing Democrats in 2020,” Matt Welch observes at The Los Angeles Times, is figuring out how to “replicate the electoral success” of President Barack Obama while “repudiating” his policy record. The 44th president enjoys sky-high ratings among Democrats, yet the party’s presidential candidates are “staking out positions far to the left of anything Obama ever imagined,” from health insurance for illegal immigrants to slavery reparations. The dynamic has especially hurt Obama’s veep, Joe Biden, who recognizes “potential constraints on presidential action” when it comes to enacting a hard-left agenda. The question haunting Biden: Is the Democratic base “willing to show grace to Obama’s right-hand man?”

From the right: Leave Our Straws Alone

National Review’s Madeleine Kearns asks that you humor her on her “first world problem”: She hates it when the new, ecologically correct paper straws in her breakfast smoothie “disintegrate in her mouth.” Plastic-straw bans are part of a general “War on Plastic” — a thoroughly misplaced priority in the West. Much of the plastic waste in the oceans can be traced to a few nations: China, Indonesia, Philippines and Vietnam. Meanwhile, a “2015 study in Science finds that under 5 percent of land-based plastic waste currently afloat at sea comes from” the West. So “it is unclear how dictating Western consumer habits . . . will do anything other than keep up appearances.”

Historian: The Left’s Too-Convenient Nazi Myths

For many progressives, “the Nazi era has been both a sort of moral scripture and a source of certainties,” Peter Hitchens writes at First Things. “The left has managed to associate the Hitler period with” the right, linking everything from “immigration controls” to “love of country” with the Third Reich. Yet “many conservative European societies . . . never engaged in racial mass murder and in many cases bravely resisted.” Other inconvenient facts: Nazis and Communists helped each other, “most spectacularly in that great ignored spasm of cynicism, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939.” Then there are the progressive aspects of the regime: “National Socialism was egalitarian and horribly modern. . . . It built super-highways, gigantic holiday camps, space rockets and jet engines. It planned to create mass car ownership.” And the Nazis “poured resources into the movie industry, developed television and sponsored a type of Godless modern architecture” — not the actions of a conservative regime. The lesson for our contemporary debates: “All ideas must be argued on their merits,” and “all attempts to establish guilt by association should be regarded with suspicion.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board