In 2018, Donald Trump’s very stable genius plan to win the midterm elections for Republicans was to exalt an alleged caravan of Central American refugees who were crossing Mexico in hopes of seeking asylum in the United States. About 7,000 people, mostly families with children, were taking the 2,500-mile walk to escape poverty and gang violence, but Trump and his Republican flatterers tried to convince American voters that they would come to the United States. to kill the whites and burn them. through the suburbs. Through his preferred Twitter and Fox News media, Trump endlessly promoted the “invasion” of these migrants and suggested that they could be terrorists and come to create a gang war, not escape it.
The constant scream of fear over the caravan worked its magic in the always gullible mainstream media. A Media Matters study published two weeks before the election showed a dizzying increase in cable news coverage of what would otherwise have been a lesser story, as similar caravans had been in previous years.
But if Trump and his henchmen managed to hijack the news cycle with their racist hysteria, they failed in their goal of winning the 2018 midterm elections. While Republicans certainly took advantage of their unfair electoral advantages to maintain a disproportionately disproportionate share of power. Democrats accumulated historic victories, retaking the House of Representatives with an election of 40 seats, in addition to winning seven governorates and hundreds of state legislative seats.
While the media let Trump’s racist advertising machine around the caravan boost its coverage, actual voters were concerned about an issue that had hit the headlines 15 months earlier: health care by far the most Concern cited by voters in 2018 exit polls.
Trump and Republicans had tried to repeal affordable healthcare in the summer of 2017, failing only at the last minute when Senator John McCain voted against the effort. But while McCain may have slightly reduced the impact, Democrats were still able to run a bunch of announcements and host numerous events highlighting the fact that Trump wanted to take people’s health insurance off. The strategy worked not only to win those elections, but also to keep the issue of health care at the center of voter concerns, no matter how much Trump was promoting racist fears.
Now is the time for another, even more important election, and Trump, who never believes he was wrong just because he failed, is pulling out the same playbook. He has replaced “caravan” with phrases like “professional anarchists, violent or incendiary mobs, looters, criminals, troublemakers, antifa”, all the terms he uses to describe the largely peaceful protesters who have rallied against police brutality and the racism since May.
It is essentially the same trick: taking a group of people who are peaceful and indeed genuinely opposed to violence, refugees fleeing violence, protesters opposing police brutality, and portraying them as a threat to life and extremities ( and most importantly, to property) of “real” Americans, defined as people who are sure that Jesus was white.
Naturally, Fox News and other Republican supporters of the field are echoing the message in maximally hyperbolic terms, with Laura’s primetime anchor Laura Ingraham declaring that if Joe Biden defeats Trump in November, “he will become the target of criminals, radicals and cancel the culture “who will destroy” our families, our children, our churches, our schools, our way of life “.
To reinforce this message, Trump is sending federal police, equipped to look like invading troops, to American cities to arrest people without cause, launch tear gas at groups of protesters, and hit people, all to generate images of violence and chaos. that he can use to scare what he imagines as a “silent majority” of frightened whites who cower in their suburban homes. With his usual lack of subtlety, Trump even tweeted Thursday that “Suburban Housewives of America” should believe that “Biden will destroy his neighborhood.” (He seems to be unaware that most women with children under the age of 18 in the home work outside the home.)
But there is no reason to believe that this strategy works for him. As I wrote Thursday, all the polls so far suggest that voters accurately perceive that Trump’s crackdown is the source of the violence, not the protesters themselves. As Jamelle Bouie of the New York Times pointed out Friday, there it is “a silent majority in this country,” but he opposes Trump’s racism and scaremongering.
Perhaps most importantly, however, the silent majority care very much about protecting access to healthcare. They cared in 2018, when those concerns secured massive wins for the Democrats mid-term. They cared in 2019, when Democrat Andy Beshear won the governor’s race in Kentucky, a state Trump won by 30 percentage points, in large part because former Republican Governor Matt Bevin kept looking for ways to take Medicaid away from people.
While there haven’t been many polls in the past few months to assess the highest priority issues, it is a safe bet that these healthcare-sensitive voters are not particularly pleased with the way Trump and Republicans have let the coronavirus spread. Take over our country, infecting more than 4 million Americans and killing 144,000 as of Friday morning, with both infection rates and death rates on the rise again.
Also, largely because Trump and Senate Republicans have handled this crisis so poorly, more than 5 million Americans have lost their health insurance since the pandemic. Many of these people are, or should have been, eligible for Medicaid coverage, but the refusal to expand Medicaid in 14 states, along with massive Trump-era cuts to education and outreach programs have kept many Americans out. of the list.
Trump’s surprise victory in 2016 left many progressives wondering if he was some kind of political genius, though he seems to think it’s a brag-worthy event to pass a cognitive test used to determine if someone has debilitating dementia. But that choice was a fluke in many ways, a true black swan event. Thanks to his pathological narcissism, Trump cannot imagine what he would like to worry about losing access to health care, nor can he believe that other people are not as racist as he is. So he’s running a campaign strategy, if you can call it that, that reflects the “concerns” of a spoiled racist poisoned by Fox News, rather than the things that American voters are really concerned about. As long as Democrats stay away from the Trump media and continue to publicize their superior policies on real people, they have nothing to fear from Trump’s “anarchist and looter” strategy.
