Trump and the Attack of the Invisible Anarchists
Lurid
fantasies about urban hellscapes are all he has left.
By Paul Krugman
Opinion
Columnist
·
Sept. 3, 2020, 6:30 p.m. ET
On Thursday morning I walked across much
of Manhattan and back again. (Why are all the doctors’ offices on the East
Side?) It was a beautiful day, and the city looked cheerful: Shops were open,
people were drinking coffee in the sidewalk seating areas that have
proliferated during the pandemic, Central Park was full of joggers and
cyclists.
But I must have been imagining all
that, because Donald Trump assures me that New York is beset by “anarchy, violence and destruction.”
With only two months left in the
presidential campaign, Trump has evidently decided that he can neither run on
his own record nor effectively attack Joe Biden. Instead, he’s running against
anarchists who, he insists, secretly rule the Democratic Party and are laying
waste to America’s cities.
There’s not much to
be said about Trump’s claims that people “in the dark shadows” control Biden and that mysterious
people dressed in black are menacing Republicans, except that not long ago it
would have been inconceivable for any major-party politician to engage in this
kind of conspiracy theorizing.
There’s a bit more to be said about his
claims of rampant violence and destruction in “anarchic jurisdictions” —
namely, that these claims bear little resemblance to the mostly peaceful
reality.
But invisible anarchists are all Trump
has left. To see why, let’s talk about the real issues: the pandemic and the
economy.
A few months ago the Trump campaign
clearly hoped that it could put the coronavirus behind it. But the virus
declined to cooperate.
It’s not just the
fact that premature reopening led to a huge second wave of infections and
deaths. Equally important, from a political point of view, has been Covid-19’s
geographical spread.
Early in the pandemic it was possible
to portray Covid-19 as a big-city, blue-state problem;
voters in rural areas and red states found it easier to dismiss the threat in
part because they were relatively unlikely to know people who had gotten sick.
But the second surge of infections and deaths was concentrated in the Sunbelt.
And while the Sunbelt surge appears to
be slowly subsiding now that state and local governments have done what Trump
didn’t want them to do — close bars, ban large gatherings and require masks —
there now appears to be a surge in the Midwest.
What this means is that by Election Day
almost everyone in America will know someone who caught the virus, and will
also know that Trump’s repeated promises that it was going away were false.
When it comes to the economy, all
indications are that the rapid snapback of May and June has leveled off,
with unemployment still very high. Friday’s employment report is likely to show
an economy still adding jobs, but nothing like the “super V” recovery
Trump is still claiming. And there will be only one more labor market report
before the election.
Furthermore, the politics of the
economy depend less on what official numbers say than on how people are
feeling. Consumer confidence remains low. Assessments by
businesses surveyed by the Federal Reserve range from
unenthusiastic to glum. And there just isn’t enough time for this to change
much: Trump isn’t going to be able to ride an economic boom into the election.
So he needs to run against those
invisible anarchists.
Now, there has been some looting,
property damage and violence associated with Black Lives Matter demonstrations.
But the property damage has been minor compared with urban riots of the past —
no, Portland is not “ablaze all the time”
— and much of the violence is coming not from the left but from right-wing
extremists.
It’s also true that
there has been a recent rise in homicides, and nobody is sure why. But murders
were very low last year, and even if the rate so far this year continues, New
York City will have substantially fewer homicides in
2020 than it did when Rudy Giuliani was mayor.
In short, there isn’t a wave of anarchy
and violence other than that unleashed by Trump himself. But can voters be
swayed by the president’s lurid fantasies?
Actually, they might. For whatever
reason, there’s a long history of disconnect between the realities of crime and
public perceptions. As Pew has pointed
out, between 1993 and 2018 violent crime in America plunged; murders in New
York fell more than 80 percent. Yet over that period Americans consistently told pollsters that crime was rising.
And with travel and tourism way down,
so that people can’t see the reality of other places with their own eyes, it
may be especially easy for Trump to pretend that our big cities have turned
into dystopian hellscapes.
What’s less clear is whether this lie
will help Trump, even if people believe it. “America has gone to hell on my
watch, so you must re-elect me” isn’t the greatest campaign pitch I can think
of.
And polling suggests that fear is not,
in fact, the president’s friend. For example, by a large margin respondents to
a new Quinnipiac poll declared
that having Trump as president makes them feel less safe. Reactions
to Biden were much more favorable.
Still, expect Trump to keep ranting
about those invisible anarchists. They’re all he has left.
