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The images of violent clashes in the United States give a boost to President Trump, who poses as a defender of law and order during the election campaign. His opponent Biden faces a delicate task Monday during one of his rare public appearances.
Month-long rallies against police violence in Portland have called counter-protesters like this man to the scene, who follow the slogan “law and order.”
With the conclusion of the two great congresses of the party in the United States, the decisive phase of the battle for the White House began. Republican President Donald Trump has so far managed to move an issue that benefits him to the center of the national debate: concern for public safety. Trump has been using protests against police brutality, which have been going on for months and have regularly degenerated into violence, to present himself as the “president of law and order.” The images of anarchy and destructiveness of democratically ruled cities like Portland, Oregon and Kenosha (Wisconsin) serve as welcome propaganda. In a series of Twitter posts on Sunday, Trump portrayed challenger Joe Biden as the leap from a radical left who, as president, would see the United States slide into chaos.
This forces Biden to react, although he would prefer to attack Trump in other areas, such as the Corona issue. Biden will now step up his election campaign, which previously ran mostly from home and, according to his staff, will go to a public appearance in neighboring Pennsylvania on Monday. On Sunday night, he issued a written statement in which he described the deadly violence in Portland as unacceptable.
Climbing with pepper spray and projectiles.
In the West Coast metropolis, a Trump supporter was shot and killed in the street Sunday night. The man belonged to a right-wing group called Patriot Prayer, which had participated in a rally against left-wing protesters. It is not yet clear whether the bloody act was related to a provocative appearance by radical Trump supporters that night. A convoy of hundreds of vans, some of which were marked with Trump banners, had passed through Portland in the style of an invading army, passing in front of left-wing protesters. Volumes of pepper spray were fired from some vehicles at the protesters; they responded with insults and sometimes with projectiles. Videos of these near-civil war scenes immediately hit screens across the country.
Supporters of President Trump drive through Portland in flagged vehicles and sometimes come into conflict with left-wing protesters.
The bloody escalation is politically dangerous for Biden, even if he bears no responsibility for it. He is forced to distance himself from the extreme left without abandoning his concern: a police reform. Biden did this with the words that the United States must not become a country in which it would be accepted if a politically different fellow citizen were killed. He combined this with the accusation against Trump of irresponsible incitement to violence. It is the job of a president to reduce tensions, not deepen divisions. Trump has failed at this for years.
With these comments, Biden alludes to a series of controversial moves by the president. The White House has announced that the president will travel to the unrest-shaken city of Kenosha on Tuesday. However, there is no evidence that his visit can help alleviate the situation there. The protests in the Lake Michigan town began a week ago in response to a brutal police operation in which an African-American man was severely shot in the back. However, Trump has no plans to reunite with the victim and his family, nor has he distanced himself from the act of a teenage fanatic and Trump fan who shot two people amid the tumult of protests and counter-protests.
Unwanted guest
According to the White House, the president wants to get an idea of the damage in Kenosha; some preparations indicate that he is planning a performance in front of a burned building to advertise there as a defender of law and order. His planned visit is rejected by the local authorities; Wisconsin Democratic Governor Tony Evers wrote in a letter to Trump to cancel the trip. He feared the visit would only increase tensions in the city and lock in police resources that would otherwise be needed.
The governor is probably right, but he is unlikely to be heard in the White House. Since the outbreak of the unrest, Trump has relied not on constructive cooperation with authorities at lower levels of government, but on confrontation. He put the mayor of Portland over the weekend as a total failure; at the same time he demanded the deployment of the National Guard in the city. The fact that Trump is not really concerned about a concern in Portland is evident from the fact that he praised his radical supporters, who added fuel to the fire with the convoy of vehicles, as great patriots on Sunday via Twitter.
The White House is blatantly arguing that unrest in American cities is helpful to the president’s reelection campaign. “The more chaos, lawlessness, vandalism and violence reign, the better it shows who is the best candidate for public safety, law and order,” resigned presidential aide Kellyanne Conway said on television last week. If this is the dominant state of mind in the White House, and there is much to be said for it, no conciliatory gestures from Trump can be expected. The motto of his speech at the end of the Republican party congress last week was that a vote for Biden is equal to a free pass for leftist anarchists, looters and criminals.
Militant opponents of Trump facilitate his work by repeatedly creating terrifying images, for example, running the gauntlet of Republican Senator Rand Paul, who a few days ago in the middle of Washington could only fight back with difficulty and under the police protection of a group of activists. protesting.
“Everything else does not matter”
For Republicans, this fact is a welcome relief from the bad news of recent months. Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara, an adviser to the president, summed this up Sunday with these words: “If you don’t have security, what do you have? Everything else doesn’t matter. ”It’s an attempt to suggest an entirely different order of priorities to voters than those previously determined primarily by economic misery and the crown pandemic.
It is not yet possible to estimate to what extent this strategy will be successful. Biden’s leadership in the polls has declined slightly in recent days, but the Democrat continues to lead nationally averaging about seven percentage points ahead of Trump, as do most of the member states deemed electoral.
