Trump’s dream: To run against Ocasio-Cortez
Was it an infantile expectoration or part of a grand plan? Did he count to 10 before he tweeted or just let the ugliness rip?
That’s the question whenever Donald Trump drops a bomb like his suggestion that four congresswomen of color “go back” to the countries from which they came. This time the answer is easy. The president knew what he was doing.
With his attack on the congresswomen — three of whom were born, as was he, in these United States — he had specific goals. They’re all about the 2020 presidential campaign, which has now begun in full and will rapidly devolve into a grotesqueness that is sure to make 2016 look like a garden party with cucumber sandwiches.
He wants to reframe it, so that he’s running not against whomever the Democrats wind up nominating but against Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley. Against who they are individually. Against what they represent ideologically. Against what they telegraph about the demographic direction of the country and about a new distribution — a new sharing — of power.
Trump doesn’t want to run against Joe Biden, because no matter Biden’s energy level or the oxymoronic record that’s almost inevitable when you’ve put in as many decades in public service as he has, he radiates decency the way Trump glows orange.
He doesn’t want to run against Elizabeth Warren, because all the nicknames in the world won’t erase her seriousness, which brings his incoherence into vivid relief. He doesn’t want to run against Kamala Harris, because he has seen how poised and fierce she is.
Besides, it’s better to run against four people than against one. Four are more readily turned into an idea. A symbol. And what do Ocasio-Cortez, Omar, Tlaib and Pressley symbolize?
Their average age is 38. They suggest in aggregate that the future of both the Democratic Party and the country belongs as much to women and to people of color as to anyone else. Trump is betting that Americans threatened by that will be scared enough to drive up the turnout for him. He’s wagering, too, that enough voters whose allegiances aren’t predetermined will overlook his administration’s dysfunction and his own indecency to keep him in the White House.
So he wants the four congresswomen front and center, which is where his tweet put them. They put themselves there on Monday, at a news conference to respond to him. Omar called for his impeachment. I bet he was fine with that.
The four congresswomen — the Squad, as they’ve come to be known — make the Democratic Party look much more progressive than it actually is. These four are also a tool for promoting discord in the Democratic ranks, because as the recent feud between them and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi demonstrated, plenty of their fellow Democrats find them too fantastically idealistic, too censorious of those who disagree with them, too quick to play the race card, too much.
For now, Trump’s unconscionable tweet has downgraded that feud and united Democrats. What happens next is an open question.
Trump gets that. He’s ignorant, not stupid. And he understands that if he causes enough offense, the screaming in the public square will be so loud that many battered and baffled Americans won’t be able to hear the inner voice that’s telling them what they should and at some level do know: that he must go.