Trump Reaches Back Into His Old Bag of Populist Tricks

More than anything, Trump is a gambler and he is taking a high risk approach to re-election. Given public wariness of his handling of the pandemic — and much else — and the recent drop in his favorability rating, he may have no other choice than to stake his political future on his ability to turn the anger and frustration of his credulous audience to his advantage one final time.

Trump Reaches Back Into His Old Bag of Populist Tricks

The president wants 2020 to be a replay of 2016, thematically speaking. In that sense, the coronavirus has changed nothing.

By Thomas B. Edsall

Mr. Edsall contributes a weekly column from Washington, D.C. on politics, demographics and inequality.

·         April 22, 2020, 5:00 a.m. ET

President Trump has chosen his pandemic re-election strategy. He is set on unifying and reinvigorating the groups that were crucial to his 2016 victory: racially resentful whites, evangelical Christians, gun activists, anti-vaxxers and wealthy conservatives.

Tying his re-election to the growing anti-lockdown movement, Trump is encouraging a resurgence of what Ed Kilgore, in New York magazine, calls “the angry anti-government strain of right-wing political activity that broke out in the tea-party movement” — a movement now focused on ending the virus-imposed restrictions on many aspects of American life.

Jeremy Menchik, a political scientist at Boston University, argues in a lengthy Twitter thread that

these protests have something for everyone: small-business, concerns for the working class, anti-elitism for resentful rural whites, fetishism of guns for NRA, dislike of government for traditional conservatives. It’s a crosscutting issue even amid a pandemic.

Menchik makes the point that anti-quarantine protests

will distract the electorate. If the election is a fight between Trump vs governors who refuse to open their economies, Trump doesn’t have to defend his record on Covid-19. He’s an advocate for liberty!

Studies of the 2009-10 Tea Party movement, Menchik writes, suggest that “continued protests will boost conservative turnout in Nov 2020.” The protests

will help frame the 2020 election as a choice between the pro-open economy Trump versus the Washington insider #BeijingBiden who is complicit in China’s efforts to hurt working class Americans.

Crucially, Menchik argues,

Continued protests will help Trump rebuild his coalition of 2016. Scholars of digital social movements emphasize a logic of connective action not collective action; where personalized content sharing across media networks enables coalition building.

Casting the coronavirus epidemic as a wedge issue, Trump is playing both ends against the middle, in an attempt to veil his own inconsistencies. Following up on this idea, Noah Rothman, associate editor of Commentary, asked on April 20: “Can Trump Be All Things to All People?”

Rothman argues that Trump

presides over an administration that has taken a firm stance in favor of phased closures and reduced social interaction even as he insists that the Spartan conditions into which Americans have been consigned are intolerable. Trump has now staked out a position in which he can be all things to at least a majority of voters: cautious to a point, empathetic to another; responsible for the minimum safety standards and contemptuous of any state-level guidance that may come to be viewed as excessive in hindsight.

The calculation underlying Trump’s “liberate” crusade was revealed in a comment on the Facebook page of Pennsylvanians Against Excessive Quarantine:

The eastern border, Philly, and the western border Pittsburgh, is what is causing the state to stay shut down. What about the rest of us??

In other words, Trump and his followers want to place the onus for the social and economic restraints that are still in effect in much of the country on cities, many of them heavily black, where the coronavirus has been most destructive.

Along similar lines, Carol Hefner, co-chair of Trump’s 2016 campaign in Oklahoma and an organizer of an anti-lockdown protest in Oklahoma City, told KOMO TV News on April 15:

“We’re not New York. Their problems are not our problems.”

Trump continues on a well-trodden path as he promotes the corona-liberation movement — stigmatizing inner-city dwellers, scapegoating “foreigners” and blaming the Covid-19 pandemic on China. In a recent email to supporters, his campaign declared: “America is under attack — not just by an invisible virus, but by the Chinese.”

The demonization of China, Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster, noted in an email,

is central to his strategic racism. Trump uses this wedge to solidify and turn out his base and persuade white, blue collar voters. Trump believes strategic racism worked for him in 2016 so why not 2020?

Most recently, Trump has made use of the pandemic to try to align himself with American workers who see their jobs as threatened by competition from immigrants.

On April 21, Trump resumed his assault on immigrants, issuing an order blocking new green cards and instigating a 60-day moratorium on immigration: “I will be issuing a temporary suspension of immigration into the United States,” he said during the daily White House coronavirus briefing. “By pausing, we’ll help put unemployed Americans first in line for jobs. It would be wrong to be replacing them with new immigrant labor flown in from abroad.”

Steve Schmidt — a former Republican consultant and prominent Never Trumper who served as a senior adviser to John McCain’s 2008 presidential bid — described the shape he saw Trump’s 2020 re-election drive taking. As the “administration continues to lie, fumble and flounder,” Schmidt wrote in an April 17 Twitter thread,

get ready for the noxious blend of Confederate flags, semiautomatic weaponry, conspiracy theorists, political cultists, extremists and nut jobs coming to a state Capitol near you.

The 2020 incarnation of the Tea Party, Schmidt continued,

will be stoked by Trump every step of the way as they help make the air fertile for his blame gaming, scapegoating, evasions of responsibility, populist fulminations and nationalist incitements. They will be on TV every night storming the battered ramparts of our politics and civics.

Thomas M. Nichols — a professor at the Naval War College who abandoned the Republican Party in 2018 — succinctly described on Twitter on April 19 how Trump’s alignment with anti-shutdown forces works:

This is perfect for the Angry White Trumper: People in blue states, guided by the elites and know-it-alls they hate, stealing a march on them by being better and more civic minded citizens than they are. So now it’s ‘fighting tyranny,’ because they’ve got nothing else.

The key battleground states in the Midwest are rich soil for the tactics outlined by Lake, Schmidt and Nichols.

John Austin, director of the Michigan Economic Center and a senior fellow at Brookings, outlined the racial divisions in the nation’s heartland in “Covid-19 is turning the Midwest’s long legacy of segregation deadly.”

Austin writes:

The unexpected scale of the pandemic in Detroit and Chicago, and its pronounced impact on African-American communities in cities across the Midwest, lays bare a longstanding reality: The older industrial cities of the Midwest are home to America’s sharpest Black-white divides.

More specifically, Austin documents the disproportionate percentage of urban African-Americans suffering from the pandemic:

In Milwaukee County, black residents account for 27 percent of the local population, but 51 percent of confirmed Covid-19 cases and 57 percent of Covid-19 deaths.

The same pattern emerges in Illinois and Michigan, Austin writes:

In the city of Chicago and suburban Cook County, Ill., the rate of Covid-19 cases per 100,000 people is nearly 470 for Black residents — more than twice that for white and Latino or Hispanic residents. Covid-19 death rates for Chicago’s Black residents are more than four times as high as for other race groups. In the city of Detroit, Black residents account for 79 percent of the local population, but 88 percent of confirmed Covid-19 cases and deaths.

In fact, Hispanics are also disproportionately stricken by Covid-19. USA Today reports, for example, that

In New York, a grim tally tells the tale: Latinos make up 29 percent of the population but are 39 percent of those who have succumbed to Covid-19.

The racial divisions in the Midwest, Austin writes, were crucial to the outcome of the 2016 election:

Racially divided regions such as Detroit, Cleveland, and Milwaukee fed the rise of Donald Trump, with his scapegoating of people of color and nostalgic appeals to white working-class voters yearning for a return to the “good old days.”

Bringing the issue back to the present election, Austin pointed out:

In our state capital of Lansing, an April 15 rally ostensibly protesting social distancing measures was notable for its participants’ use of Trump and Confederate iconography.

The pandemic has, in turn, inspired a renewed Christian right critique of America’s cities. Erick-Woods Erickson, the conservative evangelical American blogger and radio host, posted on his website “A Theology of Cities and The Pandemic” on April 19. It is a diatribe against urban America:

It is no coincidence in scripture that the first city came from Cain, filled with the inbred product of his and his sisters’ relations. Time and time again, God’s people are poorer and in less urban areas. Bad things happen everywhere, but a lot of bad things are magnified in urban areas. Jesus died at the hands of an urban mob. Babel’s residents decided they could rival God.

Now, however, the unbelievers whom Erickson contends populate American cities are getting their comeuppance: “Those who’ve had a good life now outside the presence of God will find nothing good while those who believe will live in splendor.”

Trump and his allies are not only supporting the anti-lockdown movement but providing their own variant of moral justification for it.

Stephen Moore, a White House economics adviser, described the protesters in such states as Michigan and Minnesota as following in the footsteps of Rosa Parks, a heroine of the civil rights movement. “I call these people modern-day Rosa Parks. They are protesting against injustice and a loss of liberties,” Moore said, according to a report in The Washington Post.

Trump, in turn, joined the chorus. On April 19 he declared:

I have never seen so many American flags at a rally as I have at these rallies. These people love our country. They want to get back to work.

I asked Ashley Jardina, a political scientist at Duke and author of the book “White Identity Politics,” about the likelihood of Trump succeeding in capitalizing on the differing percentages of whites and African-Americans suffering from the virus. She replied:

It does not surprise me that Trump tries to shift blame for the pandemic onto communities of color in urban areas. The urban-rural divide is also a racial one, and many of Trump’s core supporters are white people from rural areas that have thus far been somewhat insulated from the disease but not from the economic fallout.

In addition, Jardina continued, it is

unsurprising that most of the people protesting the stay-at-home orders appear to be white. The depressing reality, however, is that it’s likely to be Black and Latino Americans who suffer the most economically from the pandemic. Black unemployment is already at least twice as high as white unemployment, and that gap is likely to grow.

Trump is egging on lockdown protesters in order to generate enthusiasm and drive turnout on Election Day, but Ron Brownstein, writing in The Atlantic, warns that this gambit could backfire.

The Coronavirus pandemic appears destined to widen the political divide between the nation’s big cities and the smaller places beyond them. And that could narrow Donald Trump’s possible pathways to re-election.

The concentration of the virus in cities, Brownstein writes,

threatens to exacerbate one of Trump’s most conspicuous political vulnerabilities: his historical weakness in big metropolitan areas that are full of the minority and white-collar white voters most skeptical of him.

Brownstein cites data illustrating the urban- rural split: “The counties in New York State that fall under the largest metro category — New York City and its environs — have 12,454 cases per million residents.” That compares with 915 per million in the nonmetro counties. In Michigan, “the caseload drops from 4,787 per million residents in the largest counties” to “just 346 in the nonmetro counties.”

If the economic recovery in the aftermath of the pandemic follows the same pattern as the pandemic itself, Brownstein writes, it will force Trump “to generate even bigger margins in small communities to offset a potentially weaker performance than last time in the largest ones.”

That, in fact, is Trump’s current strategy.

Will Bunch, a columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer, is more outspoken in his critique of Trump and the coronavirus liberation movement, arguing that the protesters are unknowingly fronting for the wealthiest Americans:

Right-wing special interests, like the billionaire family of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, are terrified that the 22 million unemployed will demand a social welfare state.

Their goal? To “shift blame away from Trump’s multiple failures on the coronavirus and instead onto public-health-minded governors.”

“These billionaires and millionaires,” Bunch continued, “have zero moral qualms about working with some of the worst white-supremacists or neo-fascists in order to make sure a crowd turns out.”

In states across the country, Facebook groups are surfacing to promote anti-quarantine protests.

On April 19, Isaac Stanley-Becker and Tony Romm of The Washington Post reported that

a trio of far-right, pro-gun provocateurs is behind some of the largest Facebook groups calling for anti-quarantine protests around the country.” Groups in Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York appear to be the creations of three brothers, Ben, Christopher and Aaron Dorr, all of whom are farther to the right on Second Amendment issues than the National Rifle Association.

These groups have been expanding rapidly, reaching more than 200,000 members as of April 19, according to the Post. Each Dorr group contains the phrase “Against Excessive Quarantine” in its name, as in “Wisconsinites Against Excessive Quarantine.”

Anti-lockdown Facebook groups provide the Trump campaign with a vehicle well-suited for harvesting new supporters and activists, a digital tactic that campaign workers have honed over the past five years.

Trump’s opposition to lockdown restrictions — designed to build support for his re-election — poses a series of questions.

First and foremost, are the lockdown protests a genuine reflection of significant popular sentiment — that is, do they have the transformative power of the 2010 Tea Party demonstrations? — or are the protests pseudo-events created by pro-Trump front groups?

Bunch makes the case that lockdown protests are “fake" grass roots — AstroTurf — designed to look real but, in fact, synthetic. William McGurn, a Wall Street Journal columnist, disagrees, writing on April 20:

The protesters are for the most part simply struggling Americans who have concluded that — at least for them — the cure is turning out to be worse than the disease.

While “the protests remain relatively small,” McGurn continued, they “do expose the elite disconnect with ordinary America.”

At the moment, the protesters do not have the backing of a majority of Americans. A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll released April 19 found that:

Nearly six in 10 in the survey said they were concerned that the country would move too fast to loosen restrictions aimed at slowing the outbreak, compared with about three in 10 who said the greater worry was the economic impact of waiting too long.

Trump’s credibility as a national leader during the pandemic appears to be eroding. A Reuters/Ipsos survey released April 21 found that

When asked specifically about Trump’s handling of the coronavirus crisis, 44 percent approved and 52 percent disapproved, which is an 8-point drop in net approval since last week and a 13-point drop from last month.

These poll results lend support to the view of Leonie Huddy, a political scientist at Stonybrook University, who argued in an email that Trump faces the cold reality of a health care crisis — and that voters may not give him as much leeway as in the past:

This may be one instance in which reality and personal experience stand up to political bluster and misstatements. Undoubtedly, many Trump supporters will stick with him and regard the public health response to the Covid-19 pandemic as a costly overreaction. But there will also be political moderates and independents who regard the administration and president as increasingly incompetent in a domain in which it really matters.

The great unknown is whether there will be a resurgence of the coronavirus in those areas of the country that are now starting to reopen businesses and other public venues, often with minimal or no social distancing.

More than anything, Trump is a gambler and he is taking a high risk approach to re-election. Given public wariness of his handling of the pandemic — and much else — and the recent drop in his favorability rating, he may have no other choice than to stake his political future on his ability to turn the anger and frustration of his credulous audience to his advantage one final time.