President stirs up nation during a crisis
Even by President Donald Trump’s standards, it was a rampage: He attacked a government whistleblower who was telling Congress that the coronavirus pandemic had been mismanaged. He criticized the governor of Pennsylvania, who has resisted reopening businesses. He railed against former President Barack Obama, linking him to a conspiracy theory and demanding he answer questions before the Senate about the federal investigation of Michael Flynn.
And Trump lashed out at Joe Biden, his Democratic challenger. In an interview with a supportive columnist, Trump smeared Biden as a doddering candidate who “doesn’t know he’s alive.” The caustic attack coincided with a barrage of digital ads from Trump’s campaign mocking Biden for verbal miscues and implying that he is in mental decline.
That was all on Thursday.
Far from a one-day onslaught, it was a climactic moment in a weeklong lurch by Trump back to the darkest tactics that defined his rise to political power. Even those who have grown used to Trump’s conduct in office may have found themselves newly alarmed by the grim spectacle of a sitting president deliberately stoking the country’s divisions and pursuing personal vendettas in the midst of a crisis that has Americans fearing for their lives and livelihoods.
Since well before he became president, Trump’s appetite for conflict has defined him as a public figure. But in recent days he has practiced that approach with new intensity, signaling both the depths of his election-year distress and his determination to blast open a path to a second term, even at the cost of further riling a country in deep anguish.
His electoral path has narrowed rapidly since the onset of the pandemic as the growth-and-prosperity theme of his campaign disintegrated. In private, Trump has been plainly aggrieved at the loss of his central argument for reelection. “They wiped out my economy!” he has said to aides, according to people briefed on the remarks.
It is unclear whether he has been referring to China, where the virus originated, or health experts who have urged widespread lockdowns, but his frustration and determination to place blame elsewhere have been emphatic.
Ken Goldstein, a professor of politics at the University of San Francisco, said that Trump and his campaign were going on the offensive in nasty ways in an attempt to shift the attention of the public away from him and onto other targets, and ultimately onto Biden.
“If this election is about Trump, he probably loses,” Goldstein said. “Trump’s only hope is to make the election about Biden.”
A number of Republican operatives believe Biden’s advantage is soft and that his penchant for gaffes will at least make the race more competitive than it otherwise would be amid a pandemic and an incipient economic depression.
“We have a very good story to tell on him, and we’ve got to do it,” Corry Bliss, a Republican strategist, said of the negative narrative his party aims to generate about Biden.
Republicans nervous
Still, Trump’s behavior has rattled even some supportive Republicans, who believe it is likely to backfire and possibly cost them the Senate as well as the White House. It also has further alarmed Democrats, who long have warned that Trump would be willing to use every lever of presidential power and deploy even the most unscrupulous campaign tactics to capture a second term.
In many respects, Trump’s approach to the 2020 election looks like a crude approximation of the way he waged the 2016 campaign against Hillary Clinton, attacking her personal ethics, often in false or exaggerated terms; taking Clinton’s admitted errors and distorting them with the help of online disinformation merchants; and making wild claims about her physical health and mental capacity for the job. Given that the 2016 campaign — the only one Trump has ever run — ended in a razor-thin victory for him, it is perhaps not surprising that the president would attempt a kind of sequel in 2020.
But there are vitally important differences between 2016 and 2020, ones that amplify the risks involved both for Trump and for the country he is vying to lead.
He is running against an opponent in Biden who, despite his vulnerabilities, has not faced decades of personal vilification as Clinton
did before running for president. And unlike 2016, Trump has a governing record to defend — one that currently involves presiding over a pandemic that has claimed more than 80,000 American lives — and he may not find it easy to change the subject with incendiary distractions.
Power play
Yet with the responsibility to govern also comes great power, and Trump has instruments available to him in 2020 that he did not have as a candidate four years ago — tools like a politically supportive attorney general, a Republican-controlled Senate determined to defend him and a vastly better financed campaign apparatus that has been constructed with the defining purpose of destroying his opponent’s reputation.
His attacks over the last week on Obama have showcased Trump’s persistent determination to weaponize those tools to bolster a favorite political narrative, one that distorts the facts about Flynn, the president’s former national security adviser, to spin sinister implications about the previous administration.
But Trump also appears to genuinely believe many of the conspiratorial claims he makes, people close to him say, and his anger at Obama is informed less by political strategy than by an unbending — and unsubstantiated — belief that the former president was personally involved in a plot against him.
Democratic anxiety about the president’s attacks on Biden runs higher. But in general Biden’s advisers have professed confidence that the severity of the country’s problems will make it difficult for Trump to retake control of the campaign and that Biden’s fundamental political strengths make him well positioned to survive a campaign of attempted character assassination.
On a conference call with reporters Friday, Mike Donilon, one of Biden’s closest advisers, said Trump was transparently engaged in “an all-out effort to take people away from what they’re living through.”
“I think that’s going to be real hard to do because the country has really been rocked,” Donilon said. “And where the president has succeeded in the past in terms of throwing up lots of distractions and smoke screens and trying to move the debate to other questions, I don’t think he’s going to succeed here.”
The president has been grumbling about his own campaign and last week complained to allies that he had not significantly outraised Biden in April, according to a Republican who spoke with Trump.
Still, Trump’s political operation has moved over the last month to devise a plan for tearing down Biden, who does not inspire great enthusiasm in voters but is held in higher esteem by most than the incumbent president. The result has been a blizzard of negative digital and television ads battering Biden on a range of subjects in a way that suggests Trump’s advisers have not yet settled on a primary line of attack.
The campaign’s ads on Facebook are as relentless as they are varied, as if plucked from a vintage Trump rally rant: Some make unfounded inferences about Biden’s mental state, saying “geriatric health is no laughing matter.” Others paint the presumptive Democratic nominee as “China’s puppet,” highlighting statements that Biden made when he was vice president, like, “China is not our enemy.” Still others stick to traditional themes of illegal immigration.
Over the past week, the Trump campaign has spent at least $880,000 on Facebook ads attacking Biden.
Yet there are persistent doubts even within Trump’s political circle that an overwhelmingly negative campaign can be successful in 2020, particularly when many voters are likely to be looking for a combination of optimism, empathy and steady leadership at a moment of crisis unlike any in living memory. And the more Trump lashes out — at Biden and others — the more he may cement in place the reservations of voters who are accustomed to seeing presidents react with resolute calm in difficult situations.