Trump tries to scare up a win
As President Donald Trump frantically tries to frighten voters with the specter of “anarchists” and “looters” and planes full of black-clad “bad people” coming to menace your suburban neighborhood, take a trip down memory lane. Recall those desperate days of 2018, when the nation was sacked, pillaged and reduced to smoking ruins by vast, unstoppable caravans of marauding Latino migrants.
Except the invasion never arrived; the invading force, as Trump depicted it, never even existed. Which is my point.
This is not the first time Trump has tried to manufacture fear and loathing to swing an election in his favor. Two years ago, it didn’t work. Democrats seized control of the House, flipping 40 seats and transforming Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., from minority leader into speaker.
That doesn’t mean the ploy is certain to fail now: Americans are under great strain from the COVID-19 pandemic and the economic consequences of suppressing it. But 2018 does provide some context for Trump’s decision to use the continuing protests for racial justice as a wedge issue, abandoning any pretense of trying to promote understanding or heal long-festering wounds. Anyone who thinks this strategy is a guaranteed winner for Trump is simply wrong.
Trump’s rhetoric in September and October of 2018 was as apocalyptic as his fantasies are now. Aided by the right-wing-media machine, the president seized on a long-standing phenomenon — groups of Central American asylum seekers banding together in groups to safely make the dangerous trek through Mexico to the U.S. border — and portrayed it as an acute threat.
There were “some very bad people” in the caravans, Trump warned. “Go into the middle of the caravan, take your camera and search,” he dared a reporter. “You’re going to find MS-13,” referring to the notorious street gang, “you’re going to find Middle Eastern, you’re going to find everything.”
Fox News sent reporters deep into Mexico to breathlessly chart the progress of one caravan that was nearly 1,000 miles from the border. Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., who can be even Trumpier than Trump, tweeted an unverified video of a man handing cash to would-be migrants in Honduras and suggested, falsely, that financier George Soros might somehow be behind the payments.
Barring Latin American migrants at the border was seen as Trump’s most reliable issue, his sweet spot. He and the GOP demagogued the daylights out of the caravans in an attempt to hold on to the House — and failed miserably. Outside of the party’s hardcore base, voters just didn’t respond.
Trump’s ploy failed at a time when the economy was rapidly growing, unemployment was steadily falling and Republicans were triumphally touting the massive tax cuts they had rammed through. Today, the political landscape is bleak and daunting — not just for Trump, but for many Americans.
The nation is gripped by a pandemic that has claimed more than 183,000 lives. It is considered good news that “only” 881,000 workers filed new unemployment claims last week. While other wealthy countries followed the advice of scientists and drove COVID-19 rates of infection and death low enough to enable a cautious return to normal life, most Americans are still largely housebound, many large U.S. school systems are unable to open the school year in person and the death toll here still averages around 1,000 a day.
There are two obvious differences between 2018 and 2020 (beyond the wild-card logistics of holding a national election in the middle of a pandemic). One is that Trump himself is on the ballot this year. That will surely bring out some true believers who sat out the midterms, but also more Democrats determined to make Trump a one-term president. The other difference is that the issue Trump has seized on is race — a cleavage so fundamental and incendiary since the nation’s founding that it led to the Civil War.
Trump has chosen not just to decry violence and property damage, which Joe Biden and the Democratic Party also denounce, but to deny that systemic racism exists — even in policing, even in the killing of George Floyd and the shooting of Jacob Blake and all the other victims whose names are emblazoned on Black Lives Matter banners and Tshirts.
Maybe there are substantial numbers of infrequent White voters out there, especially in the Rust Belt states Trump won in 2016, who will respond to his divisive appeal for White racial solidarity. So far, however, the pollsters haven’t been able to find them.
Trump is right that ranting about race and violence is probably better for him than talking about his dismal failure on the COVID-19 pandemic. But there is a very good chance it won’t be enough. Those caravans never arrived, and neither did Trump’s midterm victory.