This isn't new. It elects Donald Trump.
A look back to March, 2016.
Today the Guest Post is my own prior post, the post of March 19, 2016. Events come so quickly and vividly that we lose sight of what we observed about politics four years prior, living in real time, without knowledge of what would come ahead.
History warns us. Trump was talking law and order. Hillary was talking about all of us getting along. Trump was urging his supporters to provoke violence while accusing leftist anarchists of doing that, and welcoming confrontation. Same playbook.
I observed that Trump had the ability to create images of unruly violence and that he was prepared to blame that unrest on weak, irresolute Democrats. This week he and his media allies defended the 17 year old who travelled to Wisconsin with an automatic rifle to confront protesters. Armed White citizens are the good guys. They are the defenders of good order.
I encountered the post because I was looking for my exact quote of Trump, where he finished his rally speech in Boca Raton, Florida, with the shouted assurance that they would win and win and win until you all got tired of winning. At the time I understood him to be saying that they--Americans generally, the people understood broadly--would be winning.
No. I misunderstood. He openly and intentionally governs on behalf of his base, only them, positioning them in opposition to political opponents. "Make the liberals cry" is a unifying idea for Republicans. We won, you lost. Trump plays to win for his team.
Trump has a gift for finding and widening the divisions within Americans. It isn't directly and overtly racial, but it is White against Black, and it is in fact racial for the people who want it to be racial. Armed Blacks are a danger and can be shot. Armed Whites are protectors of cities and suburbs. A fight between White "law and order" protesters versus liberals allied with Blacks might motivate the White male non-college voters of the Upper Midwest, I warned..
Trump has a gift for finding and widening the divisions within Americans. It isn't directly and overtly racial, but it is White against Black, and it is in fact racial for the people who want it to be racial. Armed Blacks are a danger and can be shot. Armed Whites are protectors of cities and suburbs. A fight between White "law and order" protesters versus liberals allied with Blacks might motivate the White male non-college voters of the Upper Midwest, I warned..
I was right. The Upper Midwest states flipped. It is happening again.
This will be a long post. For people inclined to skip the rest, here is how I concluded back four years ago:
"I attempt to see clearly what is right in front of me, which is why I try to get up close and to pay attention. Today I am looking ahead, and have an image of the future that looks very good for Trump, if in fact his transition from provocateur to law and order candidate has been solidified, and the Utah rally certainly suggests it has. Trump is George Wallace and Richard Nixon, 1968, and they got 347 electoral votes between them, a landslide.
That's how Trump gets elected president. He needs those protesters, and he will get them."
A look back to March, 2016
The Cleveland Convention could make Trump the President
I am not up close to it yet, but I can imagine it: Cleveland this summer, with angry protesters at a Trump convention and police in riot gear.
I remember Chicago, 1968. The images on the TV screens drove votes to George Wallace and Richard Nixon. The lesson I drew from this is that regardless of who is actually to blame for violence, the very fact of violence tends to increase support for the perceived strong man who can restore order.
I remember Chicago, 1968. The images on the TV screens drove votes to George Wallace and Richard Nixon. The lesson I drew from this is that regardless of who is actually to blame for violence, the very fact of violence tends to increase support for the perceived strong man who can restore order.
By last Monday, as I observed it at the Boca Raton rally, the actual event demonstrated that Trump was changing focus from being a wink-wink provocateur into that law and order strong man. On Sunday, March 13, it was the old Trump, in an early morning Tweet: "Bernie Sanders is lying when he says his disruptors aren't told to go to my events. Be careful Bernie, or my supporters will go to yours!"
But by Monday in Boca Raton it was a different story, no longer “protesters" vs. Trump's tough-guy supporters. Monday he repeatedly told the crowd to stand down, to let the police handle problems: it was police law and order vs. “professional disrupters”, amid very visible uniformed police officers inside, SWAT trucks outside, ambulances and paramedics walking inside the event perimeter.
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| All quiet in Boca Raton |
The Trump rally in Utah on Friday put protesters across the street from the rally, just like Boca Raton. News stories report that protesters attempted to storm the event, but were held back by riot police. ABC News reported: "Hundreds of people chanted "Dump Trump" and "Mr. Hate Out of Our State" as police in riot gear blocked the entrance to the Salt Lake City building, after protesters tried to rush the door and got into dozens of screaming matches with Trump supporters who didn't make into the venue."
Order in the venue--chaos involving protesters and the police outside it: perfect frame for Trump.
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| Utah police separate protesters from Trump venue |
At the Utah, as in Boca Raton, Trump made frequent references to the protesters and kept the threat of them hovering ominously just outside the cone of safety. "Did any protesters sneak in tonight? Did anybody?," he asked the crowd, which began chanting "Trump, Trump, Trump." He smiled at the chant and flashed two thumbs up.
The protesters, he said, "They're stifling us, folks, they're stifling us. We want nobody to get hurt, we want everything to be perfect. This seems like a perfect evening." With all the big rallies we are having around the country, "people aren't getting hurt, folks." We had to cancel the Chicago event, which was necessary for public safety, he said. "We ended it, nobody was hurt, we did a smart thing."
"You talk about freedom of speech, you talk about the First Amendment. Very unfair, very unfair when they can stifle us. Very unfair."
The ideal frame for Trump in Cleveland is “order versus chaos”, and it would be especially delicious for Trump if the symbols of “chaos" were to exemplify race and ethnicity without Trump needing to say it explicitly. I can easily imagine that people from Black Lives Matter and Hispanic immigrant groups will eagerly play their role, giving the media the conflict—or at least the potential threat of conflict—that would justify the intense Breaking News coverage, and justify the Huffington Post headline “Terror on the Trail” they used after the peaceful Boca Raton event. Trump protesters will want to tell their story.
Trump had positioned himself as the strong man on money, trade, and immigration but is now being reincarnated as a champion of free speech and assembly. In Utah Trump said, "Do we have love for the protesters? Honestly, I love the protesters. I love the protesters. They are doing their thing, they're doing their thing, OK? I don't quite get their thing, but whatever it is, they're doing their thing."
But they are not us. We are the American multitude they are protesting against. "We used to be called the 'Silent Majority', but we aren't silent anymore."
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| Trump and Anti-Trump in Utah |
So, surely, out of a metropolitan population of two million people in Cleveland there will be at least a dozen people on one side or the other to jostle themselves into a fight somewhere near a camera. Surely, there will be anti-Trump partisans confident they are doing their duty by displaying a sign protesting a border wall or calling Trump and his supporters racist. Surely, someone carrying a provocative sign of one sort or the other will dislike being flipped off. It is easy to imagine protesters of several sides, conveniently color coded in black and brown, so that the racial and ethnic “chaos” can be exploited in the way most convenient to the modern “Southern Strategy” GOP, understood and dog whistled, not voiced.
Also it is easy to imagine the Democratic nominee looking “weak and feckless”, as Christie described Obama, as Bernie or Hillary attempts to talk down the conflict that he or she is accused of having encouraged. Trump has already mocked Bernie for looking weak in relation to Black Lives Matter.
“Can’t we all get along,” Rodney King asked the people of LA as the rioting went on and on.
“Can’t we all get along,” Rodney King asked the people of LA as the rioting went on and on.
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| Hillary's version of "Can't we all get along?" |
Hillary is already playing the role of pleader for peace: "The divisive rhetoric we are seeing should be of grave concern to us all. We all have our differences, and we know how many people across the country feel angry. We need to address that anger together."
The protests continue. Clinton talks; Trump employs the police.
Bernie and Hillary would be tied to the grievances of the protesters and therefore to the protest and “chaos” itself, because black and Hispanics are part of their political "identity team," a disadvantaged group, the person advocated for. And protesters have a right to protest, and they will say what is on their mind: Trump is a dangerous xenophobe.
This will give Trump the contrast he wants. Trump would stand with the police, with law and order, with public safety against the "chaos" of protest. Helpless talk vs. strength; chaos vs. order.
With any luck for Trump, some dark skinned teenager will be filmed looting an appliance store somewhere in America that week, which Trump will condemn and Hillary might be forced to comment. She will condemn it, of course, but not the way Trump would. She would put it into a context of poverty, unemployment, hopelessness; Trump would put it into a context of crime and disorder. She would show nuance. Trump would say it is simply wrong and dangerous.
And this being America, no doubt someone in the upper midwest will be shot to death with a gun that week, as happens multiple times every week, convention or not. It will not be hard to find chaos in the form of gun violence to report and add to the mix.
I attempt to see clearly what is right in front of me, which is why I try to get up close and to pay attention. Today I am looking ahead, and have an image of the future that looks very good for Trump, if in fact his transition from provocateur to law and order candidate has been solidified, and the Utah rally certainly suggests it has. Trump is George Wallace and Richard Nixon, 1968, and they got 347 electoral votes between them, a landslide.
That's how Trump gets elected president. He needs those protesters, and he will get them.
7 comments:
Dangerous words for the stock market are”this time it’s different,” but isn’t it different this time? The country is so fractured that playing to his base won’t work with the independents. Aren’t there many more republicans declaring they are voting for Biden. Videos of black men being shot and choked to death is also different. Trump is NOT the law and order candidate, rather he is the CHAOS candidate. That is what is different. America is tired of the drama.
Spineless Ted, the mayor of Portland and its Police Commissioner, gets run out of his own house by violent protesters who break its windows and attempt to burn it down. Could you possibly have a more perfect example of chaotic urban violence being enabled in a city run by Democrats? What a gift for Trump.
Meanwhile, Joe Biden is attempting somehow to blame all of this violence and chaos on Trump, who is not in charge of cities like Portland. Only committed liberals who were already going to vote for Biden will buy that ridiculous theory.
If Portland wanted to reelect Trump, they couldn’t be doing a better job.
I allowed the comment of the person purporting to be Curt Ankerberg once again, so readers can see the Trump message machine with obedient ditto repeaters broadcasting the talking points. Trump's behavior is a problem. His performance in office is a bigger problem. The word has gone out: attack Biden and call him senile. It takes the focus off Trump's own mental and psychological capacity and, more important, off his CovId response. The USA looks terrible in comparison with peer nations. Therefore, the word went out to the troll machine: beat the Drum on the Biden demented story.
It is possible that the writer calling himself Curt is actually a real person, a Curt Ankerberg of Medford, although I am suspicious of that. The actual Ankerberg has a more independent point of view, sort of Republican and Trumpy, but also skeptical of the buddy-boy system of GOP politics, and is unlikely just to parrot the company line, straight from the campaign message office. I am getting comments recently that make me think that "Curt" is an imposter, perhaps Russian, carrying out a campaign assignment and using a somewhat known local name, not realizing that Ankerberg was a controversial name to use.
In any case, "Curt's" comment above is straight from the office of Trump attack memes. It will be echoed in the GOP media and in social welfare by paid and unpaid agents, some of whom are actual citizens speaking their own mind.
"The Perrier Went Straight to My Head at Creepy Joe's Party"
That is how the Smiths lyrics described the phenomenon in which one awakes with a sickening hangover but had no drinking fun in getting it. That is what our party is on the brink of suffering, a sinking feeling about Biden preceded by no enthusiasm for him whatsoever. As the ultra-liberal Susan Glasser wrote yesterday in the New Yorker: "Biden today is a bad debate, a campaign stumble or two, and an October surprise away from a 2016 repeat. Which is why the small ups and downs of the race may, in fact, matter— the slight shifts that do not register in the national aggregate but mean everything in Wisconsin or Pennsylvania or Florida. " See, The New Yorker, "The 2020 Election, a Race in Which Everything Happens and Nothing Matters", (Sept 3, 2020). Ms. Glasser portrays journalistic flummox in asking: "If a pandemic that has killed nearly two hundred thousand Americans can’t significantly hurt Trump’s support, can anything?" The article reviews the eerie similar state of the polls at this time in 2016, big giggling leads over the Neanderthal, the sweet taste of the easy win over the deplorables, and then...? Peter was prescient, and my answer to his question of what is different now than in 2016 is this-- back then we were drunk with imminent victory, while today our starting state of mind has been "I guess" followed by a sinking feeling.
In an oblique reference to the econometric models I regularly reference, the Washington Post's data analyst wrote today: "The trajectory of this race feels obvious — voters are done with Trump. But it’s more complicated than that. One simple concept — reversion to the mean — can explain why. Mean reversion isn’t very complicated: It’s the idea that a number that is tracked over time — whether a candidate’s standing in the polls or a company’s financial returns — might fluctuate, but in the long term, it tends to return to its historical average." See, Washington Post, "A Tiny Change in the Electoral Math Could Blow up Joe Biden’s Campaign" (Sept. 4, 2020). There is behavioral science behind the overwhelming incumbency status Trump enjoys called "status quo bias", which is the inherent belief that the risk of changing leaders is always substantial, and the challenger must show clearly superior initiates and leadership ability. See Investors Business Daily, "Will Trump Win Re-Election? Behavioral Economics May Hold The Answer" (Feb. 12, 2019). A dithering Joe Biden is not up to that task.
My hope for Biden, which is irrational given the compelling and historical data that he will lose, is that he makes an excuse for not debating Trump. Nancy Pelosi and others (which the Biden campaign refers to as "bedwetters") are pushing hard to keep old Joe off the stage with Trump. My alternative hope is that if he does go on the stage, then we remove him afterwards and put Harris at the top of the ticket.
It is a sickening thing to experience a hangover when you didn't have any fun at the party. The Democratic Party.
I think that Biden would have to stumble badly in the debates for trump to look like a winner. One difference between Biden and Hillary is how much Biden is liked and even loved by people, whereas Hillary was disliked by so many who even supported her views.
Nevertheless, we must heed Sage's sage observations, and hope for a good debate performance.
Makes it hard to sleep at night!
Biden is experienced. He knows the job of a debate. If he keeps from being bated into an angry tirade, sticks to rope A dope principals, He could show Trump’s weakness “ no knowledge about anything except showing off.” What killed Hillary was her toothy smile even under attack. Trump stalked her around the stage and she retreated...smiling the whole time. This time Man to Man if the viagra can kick in. Biden wins by a calm mocking, laying out three facts with a charismatic smile, and staring into the eye of the camera, and then shutting up!
Maybe.
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