The Lawbreakers Trump Loves
He uses
scare tactics about “law and order.” But what distinguishes this White House is
its ties to criminals.
Opinion
Columnist
·
Aug. 29, 2020, 2:39 p.m. ET
Even as President Trump accepted the
Republican presidential nomination on the White House lawn, lawbreakers
rampaged through the capital.
Would our law-and-order president leap
off the podium and tackle them? He once said he would race unarmed into a building to
tackle a school shooter. But sadly he ignored these blatant lawbreakers,
presidential aides violating Hatch Act restrictions on political manipulation
of government.
It’s one law he doesn’t want to uphold.
Asked about the Hatch Act, the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, scoffed, “Nobody
outside of the beltway really cares.”
Inside the beltway,
Trump and other speakers at the Republican National Convention conjure grave
national threats from raging anarchists.
“Your vote will decide whether we
protect law-abiding Americans, or whether we give free rein to violent
anarchists, and agitators, and criminals,” Trump warned in his acceptance
speech.
The Republican convention
included video glimpses of
“Biden’s America,” with a scary scene of fire raging in the streets. But those
streets turned out to
be in Barcelona, Spain; it wasn’t “Biden’s America” or even America at all,
just another in a stream of lies. (By the count of The Washington Post, Trump
has uttered more than 20,000 false and misleading
statements since taking office.)
Of course, even if it had been filmed
in America this year, it wouldn’t have been Biden’s America, but Trump’s
America. The real Biden’s America, the period when he was vice president, was a
time of comparative calm, growing prosperity and improving health care.
Yet Trump is determined to terrify
Americans. “If you want a vision of your life under a Biden presidency, think
of the smoldering ruins of Minneapolis, the violent anarchy of Portland, the
bloodstained sidewalks of Chicago,” Trump warned earlier.
It’s true that there
has been violence and looting in some American cities, and this is a genuine
challenge to order and economic recovery. But by any objective measure the
bigger risk comes from right-wing extremists.
“Right-wing attacks and plots account
for the majority of all terrorist incidents in the United States since 1994,
and the total number of right-wing attacks and plots has grown significantly
during the past six years,” the Center for Strategic & International
Studies concluded after
examining terror plots in the United States from 1994 to May of this year.
“Right-wing extremists perpetrated two-thirds of the attacks and plots in the
United States in 2019 and over 90 percent between January 1 and May 8, 2020.”
The anti-fascist protesters known as
antifa have committed violent acts but aren’t known to
have ever killed anyone, while right-wing extremists have killed hundreds. Just
a few days ago, a Trump supporter, Kyle H. Rittenhouse, allegedly shot two
protesters dead in Kenosha, Wis. One can’t help wondering if Rittenhouse, an
impressionable 17-year-old living in Illinois, was galvanized to take a gun and
drive to Kenosha because of panic promoted by Trump and Fox News.
After fulminating about threats from
Black Lives Matter protesters, Tucker Carlson of Fox News seemed to defend the
Kenosha killings, saying, “How shocked are we that 17-year-olds with
rifles decided they had to maintain order when no one else would?”
At the Republican convention, Vice
President Mike Pence warned voters, “You won’t be safe in Joe Biden’s America,”
and cited a federal officer, Dave Underwood, “killed during the riots in
Oakland.” But the man charged with
killing Underwood was Steven Carrillo, a follower of the extremist right-wing
Boogaloo movement.
I covered the Portland protests and was
duly tear-gassed by the federal agents dispatched by Trump to create violent
street scenes. Sure, Portland had a genuine problem with protest violence, but
it was inflamed by Trump — and those leftists who did throw rocks or set fires
played into the hands of Trump, even as they damaged their own city.
I asked Gov. Kate Brown of Oregon what
she thought of Trump turning the state into a punching bag.
“He has nothing else,” she said. “He
has to scare the bejesus out of people.”
“This is all about
distraction from his appalling failure to provide a national response” to
Covid-19, she added.
Trump and his proxies used the G.O.P.
convention to defame Democratic-run parts of America as caldrons of violence.
In fact, the single state with the highest rate of violent crime is Alaska, a red
state with Republican leaders. The state with the lowest violent crime is
Maine, a swing state that currently has a Democratic governor.
“Don’t let Democrats do to America what
they’ve done to New York,” Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor, pleaded in his
convention speech. Hmm. Let’s just note that there were 319 murders in New York
City last year under Democratic leadership; when Giuliani was mayor, the
lowest annual total was 649,
under a police commissioner who later went to prison.
Oh, and two Giuliani associates were
indicted last year on federal campaign finance charges, and he reportedly is
himself under criminal investigation. What distinguishes this White House on
law and order is simply its ties to criminals: Eight associates of
Trump have already pleaded guilty or been convicted of crimes since he took
office.
Even as Trump exaggerates threats from
“anarchists,” there are plenty of legitimate threats to the public that he
ignores. Climate change raises the risk of forest fires, drought, intense
hurricanes and flooding. And the coronavirus is claiming American lives at the
rate of more than one every 90 seconds — yet Trump simply pretends to have
defeated the virus, defying the need for masks and social distancing.
“The most basic duty of government is
to defend the lives of its own citizens,” Trump said in his 2016 convention speech. “Any
government that fails to do so is a government unworthy to lead.” That’s a fair
point that Trump voters should consider: His missteps contributed to the
180,000 American deaths from the coronavirus; Trump is one reason the United
States has 4 percent of the world’s population and 22 percent of coronavirus
deaths.
There’s nothing new about politicians
trying to scare the public. The present fear-mongering recalls Nixon’s Southern
Strategy. Two years ago, Trump and Fox News tried to win Republican votes in
the midterm elections by manufacturing fears of an invasion by Central American
caravans; predictably, the issue disappeared as soon as voting ended.
“This is an old game
that the Trump campaign is playing,” said Daniel Ziblatt, a Harvard scholar and
co-author of “How Democracies Die.” “It is out of the authoritarian’s
playbook.”
Professor Ziblatt said he doubted that
scare tactics would win over many voters, but he fears that the alarmism may
activate fans in the Trump base to take the law (and guns) into their own
hands. “That is terrifying,” Ziblatt added.
