A race war. Little Donny always wanted a race war. But it was something daddy’s money could not buy him.
Now Acting President Donald Trump is behind Joe Biden in the presidential polls, the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank writes. The economic recovery is in ruins, his coronavirus response has left at over 180,000 Americans dead (and likely many more), members of his own family denounce him, and the social unrest he blames on Biden, Biden reminded voters, are happening on Trump’s watch:
“We’ve arrived at a moment in this campaign,” Biden said during a visit to a rehabilitated Pittsburgh steel mill Monday, that “we all knew . . . we’d get to — the moment when Donald Trump would be so desperate, he’d do anything to hold on to power.”
After violence claimed lives on both sides of the divide between racial-justice demonstrators and Trump supporters in recent days, Biden said Trump “fans the flames” of violence. “He can’t stop the violence because, for years, he’s fomented it.”
Trump is a cornered, wounded animal, Milbank suggests. So in Delta Tau Chi tradition, Trump’s answer? Race war! With a road trip to Kenosha, Wisc. to help it along.
Zak Cheney-Rice writes at New York Intelligencer:
President Trump’s fingerprints are all over the wave of deadly escalation that has gripped cities already coping with unrest. From Portland to Kenosha, Wisconsin, the White House has come to a cynical conclusion: violence in the streets is good for Trump’s reelection odds, allowing him to cast Democrat-governed cities as incubators of chaos and harbingers of what a Biden victory would bring. Whether this is true remains unsettled; that these clashes are happening while Trump himself is president would seem to pose a messaging dilemma for the campaign. But the perverse incentive structure induced by his campaign’s calculation means that there’s little reason to actually attempt to ease tensions. Now, the president plans to travel to Kenosha on Tuesday, despite the recent killings committed by one of his supporters there and a body of evidence that his politicization of the clashes makes matters more contentious on the ground, not less.
Cheney-Rice recounts the familiar details of events since the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May. But is there no way out for Trump other than violence?
Jamelle Bouie offers one in the New York Times, albeit a tongue-in-cheek one. Trump could have his own Sister Souljah moment. With citizens dying amidst protest violence, he could bolster his bona fides as peacemaker and repudiate violent elements among his supporters as Bill Clinton did in 1992:
The solution is for Trump to disavow the instigators. His trip to Kenosha today should include tough words for police officers who insist on using lethal force when it’s not necessary. He should urge police departments to reject the use of tear gas, rubber bullets and military-style equipment against protesters, understanding, as the Kerner Commission report explained in 1968, that “the harmful effects of overreaction are incalculable.”
Face to face with law enforcement at the site of a terrible tragedy, Trump will have the chance to rebuke both bad policing and the self-styled militias who raised the heat on an already tense situation.
Trump needs to show swing voters that he cares about the rights of African-Americans and has a plan to handle police brutality and violence. He needs to show his independence from the most radical parts of his base. It’s an opportunity he shouldn’t let go to waste.
Not going to happen.
Trump wants to see cops and his supporters bust heads. It is who he is: a coward who urges others to fight for him. “Knock the crap out of them, would you?” he told rallygoers in Iowa in 2016. Of a protester in Nevada, he told the crowd, “You know what they used to do to guys like that when they were in a place like this? They’d be carried out on a stretcher, folks. It’s true. … I’d like to punch him in the face, I’ll tell you.” And more.
Leopard. Spots. Etc.
“For one week, the Republican Party sent out a parade of people to make the case that President Donald Trump, insulter-in-chief, has a heart,” Meredith McGraw writes at Politico. “Within days, Twitter Trump had returned.”
“You can’t soften Donald Trump, he is what he is,” said Republican pollster and messaging consultant Frank Luntz.
What has Donald Trump ever accomplished, niece Mary Trump once asked her aunt, Maryanne Trump Barry.
“Well he has five bankruptcies,” Barry replied. Actually, it is six.
But he’s still working on that race war. If God has any grace left to shed on America , Trump will fail there too.
● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.