Trump, Not So Statuesque
Things
are looking down for the Donald.
By Maureen Dowd
Opinion
Columnist
·
June 27, 2020, 2:30 p.m. ET
WASHINGTON — For a long time, Republicans
have brandished the same old narrative to try to scare their way into the White
House.
Their candidates were presented as the
patriarchs, protecting the house from invaders with dark skin.
With Nixon, it was the Southern
Strategy, raising alarms about the dismantling of Jim Crow laws.
With Reagan, it was launching his 1980
campaign on fairgrounds near where the Klan murdered three civil rights
activists.
With Bush senior, it was Willie Horton
coming to stab you and rape your girlfriend.
With
W. and Cheney, it was Qaeda terrorists coming back to kill us.
With Donald Trump, it was Mexican
rapists and the Obama birther lie.
For re-election, Trump is sifting
through the embers of the Civil War, promising to protect America from
“troublemakers” and “agitators” and “anarchists” rioting, looting and pulling
down statues that they find racially offensive. “They said, ‘We want to get
Jesus,’” Trump ominously told Sean Hannity Thursday night.
But Trump is badly out of step with the
national psyche. The actual narrative gripping America is, at long last, about
white men in uniforms targeting black and brown people.
In the last election, Trump milked
white aggrievement to catapult himself into the White House. But even Republicans today recognize that we have to
grapple with systemic racism and force some changes in police conduct — except
for our president, who hailed stop-and-frisk in the Hannity interview.
The other scary narrative is about our
“protean” enemy, as Tony Fauci calls Covid-19, which Trump pretends has
disappeared, with lethal consequences. With no plan, he is reduced to more
race-baiting, calling the virus “the China plague” and the “Kung Flu.” Nasty
nicknames don’t work on diseases.
The
pathogen is roaring back in the South and the West in places that buoyed Trump
in 2016. Texas, Florida and Arizona are turning into Covid Calamity Land after
many residents emulated their president and scorned masks and social distancing
as a Commie hoax.
Is Trump’s perverse Southern Strategy
to send the older men and women who are a large part of his base to the I.C.U.?
The president showed off his sociopathic flair by demanding the
repeal of Obamacare — just because he can’t stand that it was done by Barack
Obama. Millions losing their jobs and insurance during a plague and he wants to
eliminate their alternative? Willful maliciousness.
And this at the same time he has been
ensuring more infections by lowballing the virus, resisting more testing
because the numbers would not be flattering to him, sidelining Dr. Fauci and
setting a terrible example.
The Dow fell 700 points on the news
that Texas and Florida are ordering a Covid-driven last call, closing their
bars again, and the virus is revivifying in 30 states.
In 2016, the mood was against the
status quo, represented by Hillary Clinton. But now the mood is against chaos,
cruelty, deception and incompetence, represented by Trump. In light of our
tempestuous, vertiginous times, Joe Biden’s status quo seems comforting.
It is a stunning twist in history that
the former vice president was pushed aside in 2016 by the first black president
and put back in the game this year by pragmatic black voters.
Bill
Clinton was needy; he played a game with voters called “How much do you love
me?” Do you love me enough to forgive me for this embarrassing personal
transgression, or that one?
But Trump has taken that solipsism to
the stratosphere, asking rallygoers in Tulsa to choose him over their health,
possibly their lives, recklessly turning a medical necessity into a tribal
signifier. I wasn’t surprised that so many seats there were empty, but that so
many were filled.
In a rare moment of self-awareness,
Trump whinged to Hannity about Biden: “The man can’t speak and he’s going to be
your president ’cause some people don’t love me, maybe.”
It’s not only the virus that Trump is
willfully blind about. A Times story that broke Friday evening was
extremely disturbing about Trump’s love of Vladimir Putin.
American intelligence briefed the
president about a Russian military intelligence unit secretly offering bounties
to Taliban-linked insurgents for killing coalition troops in Afghanistan, including
Americans. Yet Trump has still been lobbying for Putin to rejoin the G7.
Trump had a chance, with twin
existential crises, to be better after his abominable performance in his first
three years. But then, we’ve known all along that he is not interested in
science, racial harmony or leading the basest elements of his base out of Dixie
and into the 21st century. Yes, the kid from Queens enjoys his newfound status
as a son of the Confederacy.
A Wall Street Journal editorial Thursday
warned that he could be defeated because he has no message beyond personal
grievances and “four more years of himself.”
But Trump has always been about Trump.
And the presidency was always going to distill him to his Trumpiest essence.
I
asked Tim O’Brien, the Trump biographer, what to expect as the man obsessed
with winning faces humiliating rejection.
“He will descend further into abuse,
alienation and authoritarianism,” O’Brien said. “That’s what he’s stewing on
most of the time, the triple A’s.”
Good times.
