Trump’s salvation only comes from playing on fear

There are endless reasons to believe President Trump will be unceremoniously kicked out of the White House in November after a four-year experiment in utter lunacy.

The most compelling is this administration’s flagrant incompetence in the hands of one of the worst managers in political history. From bumbling a global pandemic to exploiting and stoking racial divisions, destroying foreign alliances and getting played by foreign enemies, failing to deliver on basic campaign promises and losing the House to Democrats, Trump has failed presidenting at nearly every level.

There’s also, of course, the corruption, abuses of power, law-breaking and lies; the cronyism, nepotism, racism, narcissism and nihilism; the unhinged and erratic behavior, the late-night rage-tweeting, uncontrolled name-calling, pathological insecurity and self-destructive foot-shooting. Trump’s obviously deteriorating mental health is reason enough to keep him far away from our nuclear arsenal.

Indeed, Democrats and their nominee, Joe Biden, should feel very good about their chances in November, and a slew of recent polls puts Trump behind Biden by double digits nationally.

But he’s still got one advantage, the same one that helped propel him to the White House in 2016, and one that could get him reelected if the left keeps steamrolling over it: Resentment.

Don’t underestimate the unmitigated power of this raw and ugly emotion — at the very least, it breeds unneighborly contempt. At its worst it breeds racism, class warfare, xenophobia, anti-Semitism and every other kind of corrosive hatred that tears communities apart. And Trump has thrived on it.

There is understandable optimism surrounding the wave of long overdue outrage over police brutality and systemic racism in America — we are coming together in unprecedented ways to protest a broken system and a country that continues to fail its black communities. The momentum for real change feels unstoppable. We’ve had enough.

But in the exuberance over what may finally be realized, watchwords like “hypocrisy,” “double standards” and “bias” are political canaries in the coal mine that should be taken far more seriously than they seem to be at the moment.

The intersection of public health and civil unrest this month has provided multiple examples. Public health officials, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, celebrities and many in the media spent months rightly insisting that leaving our homes — even for funerals and church — put us all at risk for COVID19. We stayed home, remember, so that first responders and essential workers could go to work.

We wagged our fingers at “open up” protesters, risking their health and ours to defy government lock down orders. The concern was well-founded — a not small number of those protesters did in fact contract the disease.

But in the wake of the horrific death of George Floyd and the protests that ensued, the outrage over mass gatherings dissipated.

“Suddenly, Public Health Officials Say Social Justice Matters More Than Social Distance,” read one headline in Politico Magazine, thanks in no small part to tweets like this well-trafficked one, from Johns Hopkins epidemiologist Jennifer Nuzzo:

“In this moment, the public health risks of not protesting to demand an end to systemic racism greatly exceed the harms of the virus.”

Now, you can agree with this calculation — and millions of Americans who joined in protests clearly did. But you can also see why millions of others who were unable to say goodbye to loved ones, who postponed weddings and missed graduations, who lost their jobs because they refused to put their families at risk, might be confused by — indeed, resentful of — the sudden and seemingly political about-face.

The outrage flipped on Americans yet again when Trump announced he’d resume rallies, the first one set for Tulsa. Suddenly, concern over COVID was back.

“Trump Plans An Indoor Rally In Tulsa. That Has Public Health Officials Worried,” read one headline.

“Trump pushes forward with Tulsa rally despite coronavirus threat,” read another.

“Tulsa Officials Plead for Trump to Cancel Rally as Virus Spikes in Oklahoma,” in yet another.

These hard-to-ignore double standards allow Trump to claim the system, including media, medical experts, politicians, whomever else is convenient, is rigged against him and his supporters.

But it’s not Trump supporters the left need worry about. It’s the folks on the sidelines of politics, whose real lives don’t revolve around Trump or his opponents, Twitter or cable news fights. For voters who are more worried about their jobs, their schools reopening, getting sick, protecting their families’ health and safety, they’re watching the politicization of public health with whiplash, suspicion, and maybe even a building resentment.

Trump doesn’t deserve a second term. This country quite simply can’t afford one. The majority of Americans agree. But he only needs enough of a minority to believe they have been picked on, ignored, tricked and dismissed to give him one. And if we’re not more careful with our framing of these important issues, we’ll do just that.