A divided country is just how Trump likes it
WASHINGTON— A few days ago, on U.S. Independence Day, hundreds of people gathered along the waterfront in Georgetown to watch the fireworks display over the National Mall a few miles away. It seemed likely a safer and less chaotic option than going downtown, which local police and the mayor had asked people to avoid, even as the White House planned a public celebration there.
When they began at 9:07 p.m., the fireworks were spectacular. But less than halfway through the 35-minute display, they became difficult to see across the water of the Potomac River — the relentless ballistics had left a dark cloud floating in the sky that all but blocked the ongoing bursts of colour.
Presumably visibility was clearer downtown. If not of fireworks, then at least of a fractured nation on its birthday. All day in heat hovering near 35 C, Black Lives Matter protesters had marched through downtown Washington, protesting racism and police brutality and President Donald Trump. Large groups of Trump supporters had also marched, in support of the president and opposition to Black Lives Matter.
Reporters from local news site DCist observed a physical confrontation between the two groups near the Washington Monument as the fireworks filled the sky, broken up within minutes by Park Police after a Trump supporter peppersprayed anti-racist protesters she said were “Marxists” trying to grab her phone.
If the party on the National Mall wasn’t as well-attended as Trump had hoped, the bombast and conflict among citizens certainly played alongside the script he has recently been trying to write. Friday night, standing before Mount Rushmore in North Dakota, Trump had unleashed rhetorical bombs aimed at the anti-racist protests across the country. “Our nation is witnessing a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values and indoctrinate our children. Angry mobs are trying to tear down statues of our founders, deface our most sacred memorials and unleash a wave of violent crime in our cities,” the president said, accusing protesters, the media and his Democratic party opponents of being part of a “new wave of fascism.”
This is, according to reports citing White House insiders, a conscious strategy of the president amid overlapping national crises — to whip up racial division and stoke the flames of a culture war in an attempted appeal to white voters.
The same reports say even his close advisers are skeptical of these tactics, and public opinion polls seem to show Americans, including white ones, sympathize with the protesters, not with the president.
Still, Trump is digging in. In the weeks before the holiday weekend, and in the days since, he has struck notes from the same chorus: tweeting (and then deleting) a video of one of his supporters yelling “White Power”; lashing out at NASCAR after it recently banned the Confederate flag; attacking professional sports teams in Cleveland and Washington who are considering changing racist nicknames; calling COVID-19 “Kung Flu”; and repeatedly saying movements to remove Confederate monuments are a ploy to erase America’s proud history. “Their goal is not a better America; their goal is the end of America,” he said Friday.
He spoke those words in front of the chiselled faces of Washington and Jefferson and Lincoln, men who led wars, one of them against those flying the Confederate battle flag, dedicated to the proposition that all are created equal and equally entitled to the rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
Of course, neither those men nor their country has ever fully lived up to those ideals. Much of U.S. history can be seen as a struggle between those trying to progress toward the famous promise of the country’s founding, and those who seek to halt progress, appealing to the agesolder propositions that “might makes right” and “to the winners go the spoils.”
In the streets of Washington, it doesn’t seem that Americans are trying to erase history. They appear to be trying to participate in it. To make it.
I heard one Fourth of July protester near the White House describing the holiday as less a celebration than an occasion to strive for better. He invoked the words of the Black American poet Langston Hughes: “O, let America be America again / The land that never has been yet / And yet must be — the land where every man is free … America never was America to me / And yet I swear this oath — America will be!”