A divided nation
Donald Trump is right to say he did not create his country’s divisions, but, asks Dan Balz , will he make any effort to heal them?
Donald Trump becomes President of the United States today. And while the billionaire businessman may be right to say he did not create his country’s divisions, Dan Balz asks if he will make any effort to heal them
“We meet on democracy’s front porch, a good place to talk as neighbours and as friends,” George H. W. Bush said from the expansive West Front of the Capitol moments after taking the presidential oath in 1989. “For this is a day when our nation is made whole, when our differences, for a moment, are suspended.”
That is the imagined ideal of Inauguration Day, a time of coming together in the spirit of national unity. It is a theme that Donald Trump sounded shortly after accepting a concessionary phone call from Hillary Clinton on the night he won the presidency — “Now it is the time for America to bind the wounds of divisions,” he said.
It is customary for incoming chief executives to do so as they speak to the country for the first time as its leader. But after a rancorous campaign that exposed the raw nerves of partisans on both sides, that was fought over elemental questions of character, honesty, temperament and national identity and that saw allegations that the Russians interfered in the process, Trump’s United States is as deeply divided as it has been in years and with no signs of a reconciliation on the horizon.
The condition is hardly new. Lest anyone forget, Trump reminded everyone of that in a tweet yesterday that read: “It wasn’t Donald Trump that divided this country, this country has been divided for a long time!” Stated today by Reverend Franklin Graham.
Embedded in the political system today are partisan and ideological differences so deep and abiding that it likely would take a supreme effort on Trump’s part — and a willingness of his opponents to respond in kind — to see it changed.
The divisions have been widening. As important is the fact that passions have intensified. A sense of good will toward political opponents has largely faded. Now it is common not just to disagree but to ascribe the worst in the other side.
This has left a mark on Barack Obama. He left office with higher approval ratings than at any time since the early months of his presidency, but he has the distinction of being the president with the most divided approval ratings of any recent president, according to data from the Pew Research Centre. It is a reflection not just on him as a president but also of the deepening partisanship of the public over the past two decades. Data published by the Pew shows the degree to which former presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton were also highly polarising leaders.
Gary Jacobson, a political scientist at the University of California at San Diego who has studied the outlines of polarisation for years, sees Trump as likely to continue the pattern.
“At this point, it looks like the Trump years will outdo the previous two presidencies in polarising the nation — not an easy thing to do,” he wrote in an email. “I don’t think unifying the country is a priority at all, however. After all, he got where he is by dividing it with highly polarising rhetoric and proposals.”
The Gallup organisation has asked people whether they believe the country is united or divided. Two months after the 9/ 11 attacks, 74 per cent said the country was united. By the beginning of the 2004 election cycle, 45 per cent described the country as united. Last year, in the wake of the 2016 election, just 21 per cent thought so.
The United States are not united politically. Based on election results, some red states have become redder and some blue states bluer. But voting patterns are but one measure of the state- by- state divisions that exist.
Pollster V. Lance Tarrance studied data from Gallup surveys and found a series of issues on which attitudes in states that went for Trump differ significantly from states that went for Clinton. They include abortion, the promotion of “traditional values”, climate change, government regulation and whether refugees going into Europe and North America represent a threat to US interests.
Partisanship is perhaps the single most important indicator. Last year, there was speculation that Trump’s candidacy, which was splitting the Republican Party, might result in an increase in ticket- splitting, after a series of elections in which splittickets were at historic lows. In the end, that did not happen. As Jacobson noted in a recent paper, “For the first time, every Senate contest was won by the party that won the state’s electoral votes.”
Partisanship and election results colour attitudes about the state of the country.
Over most of the past two presidencies, majorities have described the direction of the country as seriously off track. But changing presidents can change who says this.
In the Washington Post- ABC News poll released this week, 63 per cent described the state of the country that way, only slightly better than the 68 per cent who said so last July. Beneath those numbers was a dramatic shift in the perceptions of Democrats and Republicans.
In July, 49 per cent of Democrats
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said the country was on the wrong track and 45 per cent said things were going in the right direction.
Today, only 19 per cent are positive while 74 per cent are negative. Republicans have gone from 8 per cent positive to 45 per cent positive, from 90 per cent negative to 50 per cent negative.
Trump is the inheritor of conditions he did not create. Still, the campaign just concluded made things worse in at least one important way: Trump starts his presidency with a deficit unlike his most recent predecessors. As the Post- ABC poll and other surveys have found this week, he will be sworn in with the lowest approval ratings of any incoming president in at least four decades.
Trump’s post- election statement for unity and any calls for healing today will represent bookends of a transition in which a series of other comments, tweets and actions have done the opposite. Democrats say they can point to little as evidence that Trump truly wants to make the country whole.
Former Obama White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer said in an email that, with the exception of being conciliatory toward Obama, Trump has done nothing of consequence to bring the country together. “He extended exponentially more olive branches to [ Russian President] Vladimir Putin than the Democrats in Congress, Hillary Clinton, or the majority of the country that voted for someone else,” he wrote.
Kevin Madden, a Republican strategist and former adviser to 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney, offered a more charitable assessment, pointing not only to Trump’s visit to the Oval Office but also his consideration of Romney as secretary of state.
Madden said the Romney meeting sent a signal to a divided Republican Party that Trump was “serious about surrounding himself with the best people”. He argued that any skepticism that Trump was cynically playing Romney was outweighed by the “calming effect” this had on many Republicans. The tone of his language when he met with Obama “helped him as he transitioned from presumed long- shot candidate to President- elect”.
Anita Dunn, who also served Obama as White House communications director, said the nature of Trump’s campaign offers the best hints to how he will govern. She wrote in an email: “When you win, and you win against the odds, and you win in the face of implacable opposition, you often feel like taking advice and being told how to do things by the people you just vanquished is about number 101 on your list of 100 most important things to remember.”
The question is how important binding a divided nation will be to Trump as president. Will he seek to unify the country and if so how? Or will he decide there is little he can do and then govern a divided nation the way he sought and won the presidency — by accentuating those differences?
The ultimate answer will not come today, but clues will emerge soon after, as the 45th president and his adversaries begin to engage over his and the Republicans’ agendas. Actions, not words, will tell the tale.