In 2018, it was the nonexistent caravan threat. In 2020, it's antifa and Black Lives Matter protesters who are supposedly threatening the American way of life and, according to Trump, white suburbia in particular.
Trump has simply recycled some of last cycle's losing slogans, such as "jobs not mobs," that helped deliver historic wins last cycle to House Democrats, particularly in suburban districts. Indeed, the New York Times reports that Republicans can't even point to polling data that supports Trump's tactics. In fact, when you really dig into the public polling, more voters clearly trust Biden to address racial justice issues, unite the country, and keep Americans safe.
Yet here we are with Trump rerunning his 2018 playbook as if it was a whopper of a success. Trump is fixated on the notion that BLM protesters are throwing soup cans, never mind the heavily armed Trump supporters who show up and start shooting people. "They throw rocks, they throw cans of soup, they throw lots of hard objects," Trump said Monday, revisiting his soup can fetish.
Also, it's not just antifa, now there's an airtifa element—the "people that are in the dark shadows” who control Joe Biden are apparently boarding planes. "We had somebody get on a plane from a certain city this weekend and in the plane it was almost completely loaded with thugs wearing these dark uniforms, black uniforms with gear and this and that. They’re on a plane,” Trump recounted excitedly last week to Fox News host Laura Ingraham, who remarked, “that sounds like conspiracy theory.”
Yup. No further details have emerged yet, but it's "under investigation," according to Trump.
But Trump's fearmongering is even grander and more pervasive than it was in 2018. It's not just protesters and black-clad "thugs" boarding planes, it's also Democrats and nearly all American cities since they're mostly run by Democrats.
"Joe Biden and the radical socialist Democrats would immediately collapse the economy,” Trump said Monday. “If they got in they would collapse it. You’ll have a crash the likes of which you’ve never seen before."
The initial signs of rot can all be traced back to "Democrat-run cities," according to Trump. "When you look around at Portland and you see what these Democrats are doing to our cities, take a look at what’s happening in New York and Chicago," he told reporters Monday.
Trump has also continued to drive home the fantasy that Biden would "abolish the suburbs" and "defund police," an action Biden has explicitly opposed. But in Trump's recasting a nation presided over by a Democratic president, mayhem would be the order of the day.
However, as the Times points out, if fear was a part of the equation in 2018, voters were far more fearful of losing their health care than some theoretical caravan rolling into their cities and towns. Trump and Republicans clearly think 2020 can be different, partly because the civil unrest they're playing on a loop is happening closer to home. Any avid consumer of Fox News these days thinks Americans cities are all aflame with rioters and looters—which they're not. The vast majority of BLM protests since George Floyd’s killing have been peaceful. Violence has mainly been isolated and often stoked by armed right-wing groups infiltrating the protests.
And even some GOP strategists think Trump's rhetoric is so old school that it's hurting him more than it's helping him. “The problem with ‘law and order,’ if you ask voters they will tell you they think of cops hitting protesters over the head, and nobody wants that. Trump is using the language of 1968, and it’s 2020,” GOP pollster Frank Luntz told the Times.
No comments:
Post a Comment