Trump
Hates Losers, So Why Is He Refighting the Civil War—on the Losing Side?
A week of protest,
pandemic, and political unrest in the capital.
June 12, 2020
Trump, being Trump, has
tried to tweet his way through interlocking crises. It has not worked.Photograph by Saul Loeb / Getty
It was a small moment in a week of craziness,
but there is nothing like the rage of Donald
Trump when a media outlet publishes a poll proclaiming him an
almost-certain loser. There is, after all, no bigger insult in his vocabulary.
The “fake news” are “sick losers,” Trump said the other day. Mitt Romney is a “loser.” The protesters calling for
racial justice in the streets are “lowlifes and losers.” Not him. When CNN
released a national survey showing
Trump trailing Joe Biden in the general election, by a
hard-to-surmount fourteen points, Trump ordered his campaign to respond. It
did, on Wednesday, with almost comical bluster: a letter in which the
campaign’s lawyers demanded that CNN not only retract the poll but also
apologize for running it. This is petty-tyrant stuff.
In response, CNN’s
general counsel, David Vigilante, mocked the President. “To my knowledge, this
is the first time in its forty-year history that CNN had been threatened with
legal action because an American politician or campaign did not like CNN’s
polling results,” Vigilante wrote. (What a name for a lawyer guarding the First
Amendment in these times.) “To the extent we have received legal threats from
political leaders in the past, they have typically come from countries like
Venezuela or other regimes where there is little or no respect for a free and
independent media.”
Trump cannot change the
numbers by sending in his lawyers, of course. The CNN poll merely found what
the other national surveys have documented in recent weeks: a persistent
decline in the President’s standing as crises proliferate and his leadership is
called further into question. A Gallup Poll, released on
Wednesday, found that Trump’s approval rating had plunged ten points in a
single month. The veteran election analyst Charlie Cook told me that he could
not remember a bigger fall. “It just put an exclamation point on what we were
seeing elsewhere: he’s dropping,” Cook said.
The combined impact of Trump’s
botched handling of the coronavirus pandemic, the concurrent
economic crisis, and now his divisive, inflammatory response to national
protests over police brutality and racial injustice have sent the President
tumbling back to his “bedrock,” as Cook put it: a political base of somewhere
between thirty-five and forty per cent of Americans who seem willing to back
Trump no matter what. If the President stays on this course, he will lose.
The polls are hardly the week’s only
unpleasant reality for the President. Several striking comments by his advisers
in recent days portray a country, not just a political campaign, in big
trouble. On Tuesday, Anthony Fauci, the government’s top
infectious-disease specialist—for Trump and for all Presidents going back to
Ronald Reagan—warned that the coronavirus pandemic, which has now claimed
nearly a hundred and fifteen thousand Americans, is still rampaging. “It isn’t
over yet,” Fauci said, and, indeed, in twenty-one states, from Arizona to
Oregon, cases are still rising.
On Wednesday, the Trump-appointed chairman of
the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, warned that high unemployment and economic
fallout stemming from pandemic shutdowns would persist for years to come. “This
is the biggest economic shock, in the U.S. and the world, really, in living
memory,” Powell said.
On Thursday, the Trump-appointed chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, warned of the dangerous politicization of
the U.S. military and apologized for appearing in his combat fatigues alongside
Trump last week, during a Bible-wielding photo op, minutes before which
National Guard troops and U.S. Park Police violently cleared the square of
peaceful protesters—beating some and firing flash grenades,
chemical spray, and smoke. “I should not have been there,” Milley said. “My
presence in that moment and in that environment created a perception of the
military involved in domestic politics,” he added. “It was a mistake.”
As with
the CNN poll he did not like, Trump’s response to his own government’s warnings
was to deny or dismiss them—to create his own reality when confronted with the
unpleasant fact that the country he leads is lurching from crisis to crisis.
Vigilante’s comparison
to crisis-torn Venezuela, in other words, was painfully apt. When I read it, I
immediately thought of an extraordinary encounter on the streets of Washington
that I witnessed last week, during protests of George
Floyd’s killing. Not content just to have Milley march alongside him
to a photo op, Trump had demanded a heavily militarized response to the crowds
protesting outside the White House and in cities nationwide. In addition to
thirteen hundred members of the Washington, D.C., National Guard, five thousand
National Guard troops were deployed to the city from eleven states, along with
heavily armed federal law-enforcement officers, from prison guards and
border-patrol agents to T.S.A. workers. The downtown area near the White House
was cordoned off at checkpoints by armored Humvees and gun-wielding troops who
refused to identify themselves or even, in many cases, their unit.
On the night of June
3rd, two days after Trump held his photo op there, I watched protesters
confront two lines of troops in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church, across
the square from the White House. Outraged at having been characterized as
lawless rioters by the President, they tried to talk to individual soldiers and
the whatever-they-ares in unmarked uniforms, who refused to speak to them or
even look them in the eye. The deployment of such a military force to face a
bunch of peaceful, sign-bearing, mask-wearing kids looked to me as though it
was happening in Caracas, not the capital of the United States. Amid the
uproar, one protester’s voice rose above the others. “You did it,” the
protester shouted, as he pointed at the young National Guardsmen standing a few
inches away from him. “It wasn’t the politicians. It wasn’t ‘socialism.’ No, it
was your fucking fascist parade that you got over here. You guys look more like
Venezuela than the U.S. right now.” And then he added, with a dramatic flourish
not lost on anyone viewing the painfully un-American scene, “I should know: I
was born there. I was born in Venezuela. You look like Venezuela!”
From ordering in the
military to bludgeoning the media, Trump has certainly been doing a pretty good
impersonation of a hack dictator. In the two weeks since Floyd’s killing
ignited a profound national conversation about America’s terrible legacy of
racism, the President’s contribution to this dialogue has been to consistently
misrepresent what is happening as an outbreak of lawless anarchy that he is
heroically cleaning up, as part of his newly rebranded “law & order” campaign.
Mostly, though, Trump,
being Trump, has tried to tweet his way through the interlocking crises. It has
not worked. On Tuesday, he began the day with a post suggesting that a
septuagenarian protester who had been pushed to the ground by Buffalo police
and suffered a serious head injury was somehow an Antifa conspiracist who did
it to make the police look bad—an absurd conspiracy theory, which had just
aired on Trump’s new favorite TV channel, the One America News Network.
On Capitol Hill, a
by-now-familiar dance quickly began as Republican senators desperately sought
to avoid comment on another incendiary Trump tweet. This time, they contorted
themselves so foolishly that they would have been better off simply saying
something, anything, instead of ridiculously pretending not to have anything to
say about something so reprehensible and stupid. Burgess Everett, a Politico
reporter, took to showing a printed-out copy of the tweet to senators when they
claimed not to be familiar with it. So did Manu Raju, of CNN, who elicited a
gem from Ron Johnson, of Wisconsin, when he tried to read him the tweet. “I
would rather not hear it,” Johnson said, as he ducked into an elevator, which
might as well be the official new motto of the Senate G.O.P. when it comes to
Donald Trump.
They would rather not hear it because, of
course, as a senior White House official told one reporter, the tweet speaks
for itself. Res ipsa loquitur. It sure does. Trump, in all things,
speaks for himself. It’s just that what he says is often so bizarre, alarming,
false, and politically problematic that it is hard to process. It has been
especially so in recent days, as the country has found itself in need of a
leader but stuck with a loudmouth wannabe strongman.
On Wednesday, with
Washington still in a furious buzz over the President’s attack on the
brutalized senior citizen, Trump distracted from that distraction by deciding
to tweet in favor of keeping certain U.S. military bases named for Confederate
generals, in what appeared to be a spectacularly ill-timed intervention on
behalf of traitorous slaveholders who lost the Civil War. Trump could not have
seemed more out of step with the moment. A few hours after that tweet, with the
country experiencing a rare outbreak of bipartisanship on the subject of
racism, protesters toppled a statue of Jefferson Davis in Richmond, Virginia,
while Nascar announced that it was banning all displays of the Confederate
flag. On Capitol Hill, on Thursday morning, even the normally quiescent Senate
Republicans on the Armed Services Committee suggested that Trump had gone too
far and approved, by voice vote, a proposal by the liberal Senator Elizabeth
Warren that would require the U.S. military to rename all bases which currently
honor Confederate officers within three years. That vote, striking as it was,
was quickly overshadowed by an even more consequential rebuke of the President:
Milley’s extraordinary statement repudiating his participation in Trump’s
militarized photo op. Trump, for once, was silent. At least, for a few hours.
I know it is hard to
remember all the crazy things that happen in the course of a week in Trump’s
America, but I will try hard to remember this one: a week when I saw troops in
the streets and worried about a years-long economic crisis; a week when an
untamed pandemic killed up to a thousand Americans a day; a week when massive
nationwide protests suggested that our dysfunctional, gridlocked political
system might finally actually do something about the plague of police brutality
and systemic racism. And then there was the President, who chose to spend the
week refighting the Civil War—on the losing side. This, too, I will remember,
and so, dear reader, should you.