Longtime observers of US President Donald Trump have often compared him to an old man sitting at the end of a bar, holding forth with crazed opinions, overwhelming self-assurance and taboo-busting shock value guaranteed to draw a crowd.
Now, perhaps for the first time, it seems the US president might have lost the room.
Trump’s sixth sense for striking populist notes appears to have deserted him in the wake of the death of George Floyd, an African American man killed by a white police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota, kneeling on his neck for nearly nine minutes, sparking Black Lives Matter protests nationwide.
Illustration: Mountain People
Over the last three weeks the president has found himself on the wrong side of public opinion — and history — on everything from police reform to symbols of the Confederacy, which fought the US Civil War to preserve slavery 150 years ago.
Even a sport synonymous with his base, NASCAR (the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing), is on a different wavelength having banned the Confederate flag from its events.
Some presidents capture a moment and give voice to a movement. However, at this time of national reckoning, Trump seems to have hit the wrong notes, out of tune with much (if not all) of the rest of the nation.
“Whether it is suggesting shooting protesters or siccing dogs on them, pre-emptively defending the Confederate names of military installations or arguing that his supporters ‘love the Black people,’ Mr Trump increasingly sounds like a cultural relic, detached from not just the left-leaning protesters in the streets, but also the country’s political middle and even some Republican allies and his own military leaders,” the New York Times wrote on Thursday last week.
The uprising over Floyd’s killing, and more than four centuries of slavery, segregation and injustice, demanded a space and time to heal, not a time to fight.
However, Trump’s entire political identity is constructed around conflict. At the height of the demonstrations, he staged a bizarre photo opportunity outside a church after law enforcement used tear gas to clear peaceful protesters outside the White House.
In an unprecedented announcement last week, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley apologized for taking part.
Meanwhile, Trump’s economic adviser, National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow, said: “I don’t believe there is systemic racism in the US.”
Asked if the president believes that there is a problem with institutional racism, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany replied: “I think this is the fourth time I’ve been asked it, and I’ve said each and every time: There are injustices that we have seen ... and I would say this president has done a whole lot more than Democrats have ever done when it comes to rectifying injustices.”
Yet the public mood now acknowledges that racism is systemic and not merely a case of some “bad apples.” Crowds protesting in 750 US cities for more than two weeks have been strikingly multiracial.
After the death of Floyd, a Monmouth University poll found that 57 percent of Americans (and 49 percent of whites) believe police are more likely to use excessive force against African Americans, compared with just 33 percent of Americans after Eric Garner was killed by New York City police in 2014.
Frank Luntz, a Republican consultant and focus group organizer, tweeted: “In my 35 years of polling, I’ve never seen opinion shift this fast or deeply. We are a different country today than just 30 days ago. The consequences politically, economically, and socially are too great to fit into a tweet.”
Even Trump’s enabler and enforcer, US Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, seemed to get the memo.
“We are still wrestling with America’s original sin,” he told reporters, adding that Senate Republicans are working on a police reform to tackle the “obvious racial discrimination that we’ve seen on full display on our television screens over the last two weeks.”
However, if Republicans, fearful of losing their Senate majority in November, are feeling the weight of public opinion, Trump remains defiant.
His attempt to retool his election campaign around Nixonian “law and order” rhetoric seems increasingly discordant as the violence and looting dwindled and the protests became overwhelmingly peaceful.
When he held a roundtable on policing in Dallas on Thursday last week, he failed to invite three of the county’s top law enforcement officials, all of whom are African American, and reiterated his demand for police to “dominate” the streets.
“If someone’s really bad, you’re going to have to do it with real strength, real power,” he said.
That evening, the conservative Fox News channel, normally a safe space, became treacherous ground.
While interviewing the president, Harris Faulkner said: “You look at me, and I’m Harris on TV, but I’m a Black woman. I’m a mom. You’ve talked about it, but we haven’t seen you come out and be that consoler in this instance.”
On Friday last week, Pew Research published the results of a survey of 9,654 people, conducted between June 4 and Wednesday last week, that showed six in 10 say Trump’s message in response to the protests has been wrong, including 39 percent who think it has been completely wrong and 21 percent who think it mostly wrong.
Only 37 percent say his message has been completely or mostly right.
LaTosha Brown, a civil rights activist and cofounder of the Black Voters Matter Fund, said: “He is fundamentally, if you look at his actions, a fascist. He has been tone deaf and disrespectful. He’s shown how far he’s willing to go to dismantle democracy. He is the quintessential example of why people are protesting. He’s the embodiment of white supremacy, of structural racism, of someone who finds no value in human rights.”
The president has seldom seemed so isolated, both from the public and his own party. When he tweeted a baseless conspiracy theory that a 75-year-old protester shoved to the ground by police in Buffalo, New York, was in fact in league with the fringe anti-fascist movement known as Antifa, Republicans declined to lend their support, ducking and weaving as a reporter confronted them with a printout of the tweet.
Then a Republican-led Senate panel on Thursday last week approved a plan by US Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat, to have the names of Confederate figures removed from military bases and other Pentagon assets.
Trump, apparently siding with the slave-owning losing side in the US Civil War, preemptively declared his opposition and threatened to veto legislation changing them.
Protesters have also targeted Confederate monuments in numerous cities, prompting some state officials to consider taking them down.
US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat who is pushing for Confederate statues to be removed from the US Capitol building, said of the president: “He seems to be the only person left who doesn’t get it.”
Last week NASCAR announced it would ban displays of the Confederate flag at its races, and Bubba Wallace, an African American driver, wore a T-shirt that said “I Can’t Breathe” and drove a race car with “Black Lives Matter” written on the side on a track in Martinsville, Virginia.
This was particularly resonant because NASCAR organizers and drivers have long appeared with Trump and his rallies have a NASCAR-like feel with their rambunctious atmosphere and blue collar, overwhelmingly white demographic.
On Thursday last week, two days after Floyd’s funeral, Trump announced his first campaign rally after a three-month hiatus due to the far-from-over COVID-19 pandemic.
It was declared that it would take place on June 19 — a day dedicated to honoring Black emancipation, Juneteenth — in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which was the scene of a racist massacre in 1921.
“Think about it as a celebration, my rally is a celebration.” he told Fox News on Friday last week, despite uproar at the timing and location.
However, he finally bowed to the criticism later that night, tweeting that the rally would be postponed to Saturday.
“Many of my African American friends and supporters have reached out to suggest that we consider changing the date out ... of respect for this holiday,” he wrote.
Meanwhile, Tuesday marked the fifth anniversary of Trump declaring his candidacy for president with the charge that Mexico was sending drugs, crime and rapists into the US that only a border wall could stop.
His race-baiting campaign flew in the face of conventional wisdom in an increasingly diverse US and condemned him to defeat in the popular vote — but threaded a needle in the Electoral College.
Tara Setmayer, a political commentator and former Republican communications director on Capitol Hill, said: “Anyone who knows the history of this country has to acknowledge that systemic racism is the original American sin.”
“There is a considerable amount of Donald Trump’s base that harbors these types of antiquated, bigoted attitudes toward minorities in this country. He began his entire campaign with the baseless racist birtherism charge against [former US president Barack] Obama and going after Mexicans as rapists and criminals and he is ginning up that sentiment. There’s a reason why the racists and white supremacists of this country support Donald Trump. Why is that?” she said.
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