Our view: Mr. Fixit turns to scare tactics and blame shifting
Four years ago, at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Donald Trump portrayed an America beset by violence and economic ruin. After setting that stage, and in one of his most messianic moments, he declared that crime “will soon come to an end” and that only he could deliver the nation from these ruinous calamities: “I alone can fix it.”
In point of fact, over the past 3 1/2 years, he has not so much delivered us from these things as he has delivered these things to us.
When Trump spoke in 2016, the unemployment rate was under 5%. Today it is 10.2%.
When he spoke in 2016, the nation had just been through an Ebola scare, which the Obama administration had handled with great skill and very little loss of life. Today, more than 180,000 Americans are dead from COVID-19, the highest toll of any nation and a number far higher than it would have been under more competent stewardship in Washington.
When he spoke in 2016, the crime rate was quite low. Today, it is still low. But Trump is intent on using the unrest in select cities to paint a picture of rampant lawlessness, claiming that "no one will be safe" in Joe Biden's America.
As he took to the South Lawn last Thursday night to accept the Republican Party’s nomination for a second term — after plans to deliver his acceptance in Charlotte, North Carolina, and Jacksonville, Florida, fell through because of the pandemic — the most responsible words Trump could have uttered would have been: I’m sorry.
Alas, no such luck. Instead, Trump, inappropriately using the White House as backdrop for a political speech, and in front of a mostly maskless crowd that was not socially distanced, delivered a sometimes listless, sometimes blistering account that could have been titled: I alone am still the only one who can fix it.
As an exercise in logic, it is the equivalent of a quadruple axel, something like: You have to vote for me to solve the problems that I created, exacerbated or ignored.
As the presidential campaign enters the home stretch, polls show that many of the voters Trump must reach, including some within his own party, are fatigued by his incendiary rhetoric. But he also knows that if the election is strictly a referendum on his first term, he is likely to lose.
To that end, he is trying to cast the election as choice between two competing philosophies and to portray Biden, the Democratic nominee, as a frightening menace to society. "This election," Trump said, "will decide whether we save the American dream or whether we allow a socialist agenda to demolish our cherished destiny."
Trump has spent much of his first term claiming that the sun rises in the West and water flows uphill. In last week’s speech, he even laughably claimed to have "done more for the African American community than any president since Abraham Lincoln."
Even Trump seems to realize that Biden can't credibly be labeled as a wildeyed leftist, so the president is trying to make the case that his opponent would be a puppet of progressives. Yet as progressive Democrats know well, Biden played a key role in some of the tough-on-crime legislation of the 1990s and supported the 2003 Iraq war. Although his agenda has been drifting left in recent years — and Biden ought to more forcefully denounce the lawlessness that is tarnishing the racial justice movement — it could hardly be called radical.
Indeed, a large part of Biden’s appeal is traditional conservatism — a wistful yearning for the world that existed before Trump tried to fix everything.