Just hours after former Vice President Joe Biden made history by electing California Senator Kamala Harris as his running mate – making her the first Black and Asian woman on a presidential card – Donald Trump coughed up his reaction. Shortly after 10 a.m. Wednesday night, Trump posted a tweet claiming that “Joe Biden has a racism problem.”
The reaction on Twitter was, as one might think, contemptuous, given that Trump is an open racist who lays heavily on white nationalist rhetoric. His uncle, psychologist Mary Trump, says she heard him use the N-word, an accusation that no one genuinely doubts.
“Let’s be real: Trump attacks Biden as racist after Biden nominates the first woman of color to be vice president in American history is above idiot,” tweeted Mark Follman, the editor of national affairs at Mother Jones, in a typical response.
“Not to mention Trump’s ‘white power’, his impetus for ‘very fine’ torch with neo-Nazis, etc etc etc,” Follman added.
But this was not yet a case of the President of the United States, intoxicated by Fox News, pulling out an idiot on Twitter. On the contrary, the “racism problem” tweet was a well-edited video that was clearly compiled by the Trump campaign, and made audio clips of Biden misrepresenting or saying dull things about race, including comments about his 1970s relationships. with segregationist senators, which is why Harris famously criticized him in a 2019 debate.
In other words, this was a strategic choice by the Trump campaign, which has quietly become more competent in recent weeks (despite managing to grow a toddler as a candidate), after dumping relative novice Brad Parscale as a campaign manager in favor of the more experienced Bill Stepien. This was an example of the false equivalence strategy, and Democrats should be on the alert, because earlier versions of this same strategy were used with great effect to defeat Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and Al Gore in elections that Democrats expected to win.
People who danced on Trump on Twitter do not understand that this strategy is not meant to convince anyone that Trump is not a racist, who knows Stepien and other campaign officials completely, is an impossible task. The point is that potential Democratic voters need to be convinced of that both candidates are irresponsibly flawed, and they could sit these elections as well as sulk themselves by voting for “the lesser of two evils.”
This is not even a Trump innovation, but pretty standard administrative procedure in Republican politics. A team of a GOP candidate outlines the various strengths that the Democrat has over his candidate and then begins to systematically try to cast doubt on that with voters, often by projecting the mistakes of his own candidate on the Democrat .
What Republicans understand, and too many political commentators do not, is that no election is strictly a choice between two candidates. There are always other choices: do not vote at all or cast your vote on a third-party candidate. Republicans know they can win no more voters than those they have, so they win by poisoning the good against the Democrat.
In 2016, Republicans were saddled with a candidate who is a pathological liar with a long history of corruption, and who does not appear to be in the greatest mental or physical condition. So they turned around and accused Clinton of all these things, nicknamed her “Crooked Hillary” and claiming she had secret health issues that she was hiding from the public.
It was the same story with the 2004 election, when Democrats Kerry, a decorated Vietnam veteran, ran against George W. Bush, whose evasion only made his desire to have children of other people in the wake of a foreign war more to make suspicious. But the Bush campaign immediately attacked Kerry’s record, falsely accusing him of violating his counter-record, implying that he did not deserve his Purple Hearts.
The same story, again, with the 2000 election, in which the Bush campaign was successful in portraying Gore as a liar and a fabulist, and derived from Bush’s own habit of telling lies – including those he regretted shortly thereafter. deployed, trying to justify its invasion of Iraq.
This “I know you are, but what am I” strategy only works because the mainstream media – live in perpetual fear of conservatives who accuse them of “bias” (which they will do no matter what) – is all too eager to play along with Republican efforts to wildly exaggerate Democratic flaws, all so that journalists can crawl on how to equate “both sides”, and without quite realizing that they are doing their duty for the truth separated with this false equivalence.
The 2016 election provides a perfect example of how the media is falling for this trick. Clinton is actually one of the most honest politicians in America, pretty much free from all proven ‘corruption’ despite endless harassment and investigation. Nevertheless, journalists ran with every false Clinton scandal that right-wingers threw at them, from the false accusations against the Clinton Foundation to the e-mail server debacle because they were more motivated by the desire to be ‘balanced’. see then they were by telling the truth. (Sexist stereotypes about female mendacity also carried much of the coverage.) Kerry and Gore received inconsistent treatment by the press in the name of “balance.”
As I repeatedly warned in 2019 – to no avail – Biden’s foot-in-mouth disease makes this an easy play for the Trump campaign. As my colleague Chauncey DeVega explained this week, Biden has a ‘sense of affinity’ with Black voters that makes him too comfortable and leads him to “share political views at unusual times.”
In the past, that kind of nuanced statement has too often fallen on deaf ears in a media environment, more driven by the need to portray “both sides” as equal than to explore the truth.
That said, there’s reason to be mildly optimistic this time around that Trump’s efforts to sow a “both sides are bad, so do not vote” story may not work as well as it did in 2016, or as well as it did for Bush in 2000 and 2004. The media just does not seem so interesting this time around to dispel nonsense.
That’s probably because the Trump presidency has been such a catastrophe that even the journalists most devoted to both sides of the aisle are temporarily shocked by their addiction to false equality. As the economy collapses and the US succumbs to the coronavirus pandemic in a way incompatible with the rest of the world – all because of Trump’s malice and reluctance, such as Republican opposition to authoritarian rule – it has become impossible to keep a straight face when claiming any moral or political equivalence between Democrats and Republicans.
A similar situation occurred in 2008, when the disaster of the George W. Bush presidency finally overwhelmed the desire of the mainstream media to suggest that there was no significant difference between Democrats and Republicans. Oh, there were attempts to scandalize Obama with nonsense, like when right-wingers got journalists to take the bait to portray Obama’s pastor of Chicago as anti-white and anti-American. But it never worked in principle, because that kind of circus side-show shone faintly in the face of the 2008 economic disaster, the failed response to Hurricane Katrina, and the devastating invasion of Iraq.
Compared to Donald Trump, Bush is small potatoes in the department with failed presidencies. The seriousness of our current crisis makes it difficult for the press to play their cunning fake games from both sides. That it does not work for Trump so far.
But it is still two and a half months until the elections, and we know it will feel longer than that. The media’s desire to appear ‘immovable’ is strong, even in the face of an economic catastrophe and rising COVID-19 mortality rates. Trump will continue to try to make this election about bullshit, and it is important to remain vigilant against a press struggling to resist the siren call of false equality.
