Nothing sticks to Donald Trump. But could this be an exception?
It has been a while since I’ve travelled through an airport in the US, but I assume that in that time, nothing has changed. Specifically: buying snacks in a branch of Hudson News and being asked, while paying, if you would like to make a donation with your purchase to support the US military. This never got any less weird, not just the solicitation, but the piety with which it was made. As a friend said after one such experience, he was sorely tempted to reply, “on the contrary: I would like to reduce their budget by at least 80%”. It would, we suspected, result in instantaneous repatriation to Britain.
Reverence for the military is a cultural norm in the US that makes the recent Donald Trump firestorm around veterans unusual. According to a report in the Atlantic, the president allegedly made private remarks in which he referred to dead American soldiers as “losers”, and “suckers,” while expressing bafflement as to why anyone would join the military. “What’s in it for them?” he is said to have asked.
Trump, of course, denies having said any of this, as he has denied most of the terrible things attributed to him over the years. And he has insulted the military before. In 2016, while still running for president, he attacked Khizr Khan, the father of a US army captain killed in Iraq, after he appeared at the Democratic national convention. A year earlier, he said of John McCain, “he’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured.” And of course Trump has, over the years, insulted far more vulnerable groups than the US military, including disabled people, immigrants and a long list of women accusing him of sexual misconduct, all without making any apparent dent in his public approval.
If the “loser” remarks landed differently this time, it is thanks, in part, to a dynamic that Trump himself has set up with his supporters. It’s a curious fact about his denials that they appeal to his base precisely because they are so wildly implausible. A large part of Trump’s popularity lies in his shamelessness; in his willingness to lie, flagrantly and repeatedly, to disregard the most basic political and social norms. Prior to this latest upset, his brazenness clearly struck many of his supporters as a twisted version of truth to power, a burn-the-house-down middle finger to “liberal values” and all they imply. The fact that his lying was so adolescent and obvious made it all the more thrilling to the mob.
The problem for Trump, now, is that faced with arguably the one area of American life you can’t trash without consequence, it is impossible for him to row back and claim plausible deniability. If he got away with the comments about Khan in 2016, it was by making capital out of Khan being a Muslim. (Trump suggested Khan’s wife, Ghazala, wasn’t permitted to speak.) And there is a big difference between a guy in real estate who is running for office shooting his mouth off about McCain’s war record, and a sitting president disparaging the nation’s fallen soldiers.
“Nothing sticks” has become the received wisdom about Trump, but amid the fallout from the Atlantic story last week, there were indications this might be an exception. On social media, people reported Trump-loving relatives and neighbours, many of them veterans, being given pause about the president for the first time. Trump himself seemed rattled, so much so that he sent out Melania to speak up for him – the Atlantic story “is not true”, she tweeted, and called it “activism, not journalism” – a rare intervention by the first lady.
And there was mild disturbance in the polls. Trump should, last week, have received a boost from the Republican nominating convention, and all his “law and order” rhetoric around social unrest in Kenosha and Portland. Instead, he remained behind in every swing-state poll. Not by much – according to one Fox News poll, Trump lagged behind Biden by nine points in Arizona, eight in Wisconsin, and four in North Carolina – but the very fact he was lagging at all suggested his credibility might have taken a hit.
You have to spit three times after making this kind of statement, of course, but there was one further cause for slight optimism: for the first time, in August, the Biden campaign out-fundraised Trump, attracting $154m more in donations. (Overall, Biden still lags considerably, with an overall fundraising haul prior to August of $699m to Trump’s $1.2bn.)
It might be nothing; it might be something. It would, however, have a certain poetic justice to it if, after allegations of rape, flagrant racism, and a body-count (thus far) of 191,000 Americans from Covid-19 did nothing to undermine Trump, it was the country’s devotion to the military – that fundamentally conservative American reflex – that finally brought him down.