With an impending election and polls looking bad, Donald Trump needed a quick political boost.
Taking advantage of television footage of a refugee procession outside Honduras, the president announced an imminent “invasion” of the United States by a “migrant caravan” and said he would deploy 15,000 military personnel to stop it. For weeks Fox News criticized the “coverage” of the emergency.
That was in October 2018, and as a political strategy before the midterm elections, the gambit failed completely.
Democrats overturned 40 seats in the House of Representatives next month and racked up the largest popular vote margin in the history of the midterm elections, with the highest turnout in 100 years. The emergency of the “caravan” was no longer known.
Now, two years later, Trump faces even bigger elections, with an even greater need for a political coup d’etat to win a second term in November.
Rather than deploy troops across the border to confront an invented threat, Trump has announced “increased federal law enforcement in American communities” to combat an alleged cataclysm of violence stemming from a Democratic plot to undermine local police.
“To see it from any point of view, the effort to shut down the police in their own communities has led to a shocking explosion of shooting, murder, murder and heinous crimes of violence,” Trump said Wednesday at the White House. “This bloodshed must end. This bloodshed will end.
The deployment against anti-racism protesters is a ploy to polish his strong man credentials, critics say: Trump is pursuing fascism made for television, with the imposition of federal forces in US cities against the will of local authorities. As in 2018, the unmistakable bag man is people of color, whom Trump represents, with the help of conservative media, as a new threat to the country that only he can defend against.
In some respects, the strategy has a long pedigree, dating back to the 1968 presidential “law and order” campaigns of Richard Nixon and George Wallace, the Alabama segregationist. But there is a crucial difference between Trump’s 2018 foreign “invasion” farce and his current national “crime blast” ploy, analysts say.
Unlike the deployment of troops on a U.S. border, the deployment of federal troops within American cities threatens to fulfill its own fantasy, turning a dark and opportunistic fable spun by the White House into a daunting new reality. Where Violent Clashes Really Occur The streets and inexplicable federal law enforcement officers really surround and detain American citizens.
“What one has to ask is, how much is spectacle and how much is reality?” said Jason Stanley, a Yale professor of philosophy and author of How Fascism Works. “Now, the show should already worry us, because it put on the show in Lafayette Square,” said Stanley, referring to Trump’s violent clearance of peaceful protesters from a park near the White House in June.
“Then he did the show in Portland. And when you allow too much show, as it gets worse over time, people start saying, ‘This has been going on for a while, what’s the matter?’
“The show is normalized, and then you can’t say, let’s say it’s November, you can’t tell if it’s still a show. It’s a show until someone gets hurt.
It is unknown what great show the White House has planned for the run-up to the November election.
In Portland, Oregon, unidentified federal officials shot at protesters and used unmarked vehicles to stop activists, and graffiti writers were branded as “violent anarchists.” Trump plans to deploy troops from at least five federal agencies in Chicago and Albuquerque, New Mexico, the justice department announced this week.
Several other cities, including New York, Philadelphia, Detroit, Seattle, Baltimore, Oakland, and Milwaukee, have been named for possible future deployments, despite unequivocal objections from the mayors of those cities.
“The unilateral deployment of these paramilitary forces in our cities is totally incompatible with our system of democracy and our most basic values,” Trump warned in an open letter last week to more than a dozen mayors from major cities in the United States. .
Trump is right that some U.S. cities have seen an increase in gun violence in recent months, but crime in the U.S. has declined overall in 2020, and Trump is virtually alone on seeing an answer. federal lasts like a palliative.
Criminal justice experts have linked increases in violence to the ravages of the coronavirus pandemic, which has now killed some 145,000 Americans; historical unemployment; social unrest following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May; seasonal fluctuations and other factors.
In any case, the phalanxes of heavily armed officers descending on largely peaceful protesters run the risk of provoking violence and unraveling months of work to establish community dialogue on police violence and racial injustice, the mayors warned.
Julia Azari, a professor of political science at Marquette University, noted that crime is not currently a major issue of concern for most American voters, and said the Trump campaign was working on a tenuous strategy of limited victory through of the electoral college.
“This has never really been a majority-focused administration,” said Azari. “In some ways, it has been an administration focused on mobilizing a particular segment of the American electorate, which is strategically located in all the states that are important in the electoral college.
“It is a very uphill strategy.”
As a candidate, Trump may appear to be cornered. Polls indicate that Americans think Trump is wrong about street protests, disapprove of his performance as president overall by more than 55% on average, and disapprove of his handling of the coronavirus pandemic by an astonishing 60%.
But Trump was cornered in the past, like when he was supposed to lose in 2016. Then, as now, Trump lashed out at the race.
Talking about crime in big cities “can be a whistle for racial divisions” for Trump supporters, especially in the Midwest, who as a group are older, whiter and more rural than the average American voter, Azari said.
But emphasizing chaos on the streets is a questionable strategy for a sitting president, he said. “For most undecided voters, the question boils down to ‘Are things good, aren’t they good?’ And I don’t see this story as a really convincing way to reframe the situation as “things are fine.”
Even if Trump loses in November and leaves the national stage, his gestures in the direction of fascist politics, made for television or not, will not be easy to erase, because Trump’s policy is simply a current expression of 30 years. Republican arc year, Stanley said.
“There has been a lot of buildup before Trump,” said Stanley. “A core of authoritarianism, be it fascism or communism, is the one-party state. And Republicans for years before Trump, all the way back to [former House speaker] Newt Gingrich, whom I blame for all of this, has been acting as if his political opponents were traitors and not legitimate opponents. “
Stanley praised Joe Biden, Trump’s 2020 rival, for pursuing multi-party policies.
“What Biden is doing is very impressive, since he is constantly, at first I criticized him, he constantly talks about a return to a multiparty system, where we are going to value the fact that we have different points of view, and that is the core of our democracy.
“This idea that you can have people who differ and are Republicans or Democrats, and they can have different points of view and they can join, is a repudiation of Newt Gingrich’s attempt to undermine democracy and put Republicans in power by declaring illegitimate to the opposition party. ” . “
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