Is This the Trump Tipping Point?
I know.
We’ve said we’ve been here a thousand times before. This time feels different.
Opinion
columnist
·
June 7, 2020
You never want to say that you’ve
reached a tipping point with this administration. Donald J. Trump has proved to
be the Nosferatu of American politics: heartless, partial to Slavs, beneath
grace and thus far impervious to destruction.
Even when I read my colleague Jonathan
Martin’s fine
piece on
Saturday, about how some high-profile Republicans refuse to vote for Trump or
are struggling with publicly lending him their support, I thought: yes, but. They’re just a
handful. They’re the usual suspects. Too few of them have coattails.
Yet something right now really is
different. I think.
Before diving into the more entrancing
developments, I’ll start with the obvious: Trump’s old tactics, once so
reliable, are starting to fail him, utterly.
It
was a winning strategy to crow about a border wall with Mexico, but it’s a
loser — and a sign of pure cowardice — to build one around your own White
House. He once basked in the reflected glow of “his generals”; now those
generals are laying waste to him, with James Mattis, his former defense
secretary, explicitly condemning Trump’s immature and divisive
leadership, and John Kelly, the president’s former chief of staff, saying yep, sounds about right.
Maybe there was a time when religious
conservatives would have applauded a photo of Trump standing in front of St.
John’s Episcopal Church, Bible in hand. But using pepper balls and flash-bang grenades to clear
anguished protesters out of the way backfired. The Episcopal bishop of
Washington reacted in horror; Trump’s support among white Catholics slipped 11 points between April and May.
Maybe there was a time when
stigmatizing all progressive protesters as invading marauders would have worked
— bigotry, it gets the job done — but not now. His proposal to suppress the
tumult with the military was greeted with disapproval by his current secretary of
defense, Mark Esper, and disgust by Mattis; the Black Lives Matter movement
now polls at an all-time high, with 66 percent of Americans disapproving of how Trump has
handled the response to George Floyd’s death.
Trump is flailing like an overturned
turtle. A historic health crisis, an economic crisis and a social crisis all at
once — it’s far too much for a reality TV star to handle, no more manageable
than it’d be for him to land an airplane. What this moment may have revealed,
ironically enough, is that only in a time of stability and outrageous decadence
could the United States have had the luxury of picking such a dark and divisive
candidate with the intellectual firepower of a water gun. When Trump asked
voters “What have you got to lose?” most never dreamed that the answer could
be: Everything.
But now for the subterranean tremors
that most beguile me — a suggestion that something deeper is afoot.
Trump,
right now, is trying to stoke white fears about protests in the street. But
he’s having little luck. On Wednesday, Lara Putnam, the chairman of the history
department at the University of Pittsburgh, tweeted a modest but persuasive thread highlighting the easy victory by
Summer Lee, a progressive African-American woman elected to the Pennsylvania
statehouse in 2018, in the Democratic primary on Tuesday.
“Based on the history of the district —
and the range of voters I’ve talked to there myself — it seemed entirely
plausible that there would be white backlash against her in this moment,”
Putnam told me.
If ever there were a moment for a
backlash, she pointed out, this would have been it: Images of social unrest
were all over Pittsburgh television the weekend before the primary, and Lee had
been an outspoken proponent of the protesters. Voters could have selected her
primary opponent, a moderate white borough councilman who had the backing of the county’s most powerful
Democrat — and its Democratic Party.
Instead, voters doubled down. Lee was
already winning on Election Day — we now know this, based on mail-in ballots —
and as the ballot counting continued, she pulled even further ahead. Her
victory suggested that the white suburban women and retirees in her district
were unswayed by Trump’s demonizing and dog-whistling.
In these protests, it is possible we are
seeing the rumblings of a new Democratic coalition. On Saturday, Putnam and two
of her colleagues wrote that the scale and geographic diversity of these
demonstrations were without American precedent.
We already know that Trump’s support
among white women is sliding in the polls, both with college degrees and without; it’s probably not an accident that the
first Senate Republican to endorse Mattis’ views of Trump was Lisa Murkowski,
a white woman from Alaska. (And perhaps, as Jonathan Martin’s piece hinted,
other Republican senators will start to follow, and refrain from giving him
their support.) As Barack Obama pointed out in his recent town hall, “a far more representative cross-section of America” is out protesting
in the streets than in the 1960s.
At a time of genuine crisis, Americans
aren’t pining for Darth Vader. They’re pining for a healer. It’s healing words
of empathy that have thus far won the day. Trump may have been fumbling with
his Bible, but it was Nancy Pelosi who read aloud from Ecclesiastes, and it was Joe Biden who said in a
heartfelt, 24-minute speech that he wished the president
would open it every once in a while.
It’s probably too much to hope for. But
for the first time in three years, change is not.