Some presidents, when they get into trouble before an election, try to “wag the dog” by starting a war abroad. Donald Trump seems ready to wag the dog by starting a war at home. How did we get here? Well, when historians summarise the Trump team’s approach to dealing with the coronavirus, it will take only a few paragraphs:
“They talked as if they were locking down like China. They acted as if they were going for herd immunity like Sweden.
They prepared for neither. And they claimed to be superior to both. In the end, they got the worst of all worlds — uncontrolled viral spread and an unemployment catastrophe.
“And then the story turned really dark.
All of this street violence and defund-the-police rhetoric plays into the only effective Trump ad that I have seen on television. It goes like this: A phone rings and a recording begins: “You have reached the 911 police emergency line. Due to defunding of the police department, we’re sorry but no one is here to take your call
“As the virus spread, and businesses had to shut down again and schools and universities were paralysed as to whether to open or stay closed in the fall, Trump’s poll numbers nosedived. Joe Biden opened up a 15-point lead in a national head-to-head survey.
When I heard Trump suggest, as he did in the Oval Office on Monday, that he was going to send federal forces into US cities, where the local mayors have not invited him, the first word that popped into my head was “Syria.”
Trump's dilemma
Listen to how Trump put it: “I’m going to do something — that, I can tell you. Because we’re not going to let New York and Chicago and Philadelphia and Detroit and Baltimore and all of these — Oakland is a mess. We’re not going to let this happen in our country.”
These cities, Trump stressed, are “all run by very liberal Democrats. All run, really, by radical left. If Biden got in, that would be true for the country. The whole country would go to hell. And we’re not going to let it go to hell.”
Populists — whether Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Vladimir Putin in Russia, Viktor Orban in Hungary, Jaroslaw Kaczynski in Poland or Assad in Syria — “win by dividing the people and presenting themselves as the saviour of the good and ordinary citizens against the undeserving agents of subversion and ‘cultural pollution,” explained Stanford University’s Larry Diamond, author of “Ill Winds: Saving Democracy From Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency.”
In the face of such a threat, the left needs to be smart. Stop calling for “defunding the police” and then saying that “defunding” doesn’t mean disbanding.
If it doesn’t mean that then say what it means: “reform.” Defunding the police, calling police officers “pigs,” taking over whole neighbourhoods with barricades — these are terrible messages, not to mention strategies, easily exploitable by Trump.
Moment of racial justice
The scene that The Times’ Mike Baker described from Portland in the early hours of Tuesday — Day 54 of the protests there — is not good: “Some leaders in the Black community, grateful for a reckoning on race, worry that what should be a moment for racial justice could be squandered by violence.
Businesses supportive of reforms have been left demoralised by the mayhem the protests have brought. On Tuesday morning, police said another jewellery store had been looted. As federal agents appeared to try detaining one person, others in the crowd rushed to free the person.”
A new Washington Post-ABC News poll, according to The Post, found that a “majority of Americans support the Black Lives Matter movement and a record 69% say Black people and other minorities are not treated as equal to white people in the criminal justice system.
But the public generally opposes calls to shift some police funding to social services or remove statues of Confederate generals or presidents who enslaved people.”
All of this street violence and defund-the-police rhetoric plays into the only effective Trump ad that I have seen on television. It goes like this: A phone rings and a recording begins: “You have reached the 911 police emergency line. Due to defunding of the police department, we’re sorry but no one is here to take your call.
If you’re calling to report a rape, please press 1. To report a murder, press 2. To report a home invasion, press 3. For all other crimes, leave your name and number and someone will get back to you. Our estimated wait time is currently five days. Goodbye.”
Turkish example
Today’s protesters need to trump Trump by taking a page from another foreign leader — a liberal — Ekrem Imamoglu, who managed to win the 2019 election to become the mayor of Istanbul, despite the illiberal Erdogan using every dirty trick possible to steal the election. Imamoglu’s campaign strategy was called “radical love.”
Radical love meant reaching out to the more traditional and religious Erdogan supporters, listening to them, showing them respect and making clear that they were not “the enemy” — that Erdogan was the enemy, because he was the enemy of unity and mutual respect, and there could be no progress without them.
As a recent essay on Imamoglu’s strategy in The Journal of Democracy noted, he overcame Erdogan with a “message of inclusiveness, an attitude of respect toward (Erdogan) supporters, and a focus on bread-and-butter issues that could unite voters across opposing political camps.
On June 23, Imamoglu was again elected mayor of Istanbul, but this time with more than 54% of the vote — the largest mandate obtained by an Istanbul mayor since 1984 — against 45% for his opponent.”
I bet that could work in America, too. It is the perfect answer to Trump’s politics of division — and it is the one strategy he will never imitate.
Thomas L. Friedman is a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist and author
The New York Times
