In a major speech at Mount Rushmore, President Trump said that the goal of nationwide protests is not, quote, “a better America.” Their goal, he said, is the end of America.
The month of June was pretty calamitous for President Trump politically and in terms of his legacy. It began with the federal government having protesters forcibly cleared using chemical irritants from Lafayette Park across from the White House, so that the president could then take a photo op. To mass protests across the country. To a huge spike in coronavirus cases in areas of the country where it really had not been that prevalent, and where the governors in those states were looking toward reopening.
So the president tried for a reboot of his campaign with a rally in Tulsa on June 20. That rally was sparsely attended compared to what they had advertised as their likely attendance. And so Mount Rushmore and this event was supposed to be the reboot of the failed reboot. This was going to be an effort by the president to show he was in charge and trying to look toward the general election.
So the president needs an enemy to fight against. In 2018 during the midterms, you saw the president try to galvanize support against a looming threat, as he put it, of a caravan that was headed across the southern border with Mexico. And this was basically a threat of a foreign invasion. And he talked about this a lot and he tweeted about it a lot. And the main enemy that the U.S. is dealing with right now is the coronavirus, which is spreading rapidly. That’s an issue on which his polling is pretty bad. And his advisers know it. And another force that the country is dealing with right now is police brutality. Neither of those are issues that Donald Trump is seen as particularly strong on, or areas where he has shown he wants to lead.
President Trump aimed his speech at left-wing culture
So instead, looking for this enemy, aides described in his speech he was going to go after a left-wing culture coming after people who don’t agree with it. Now the threat is other Americans. The threat is people who don’t think like you.
I would start just understanding what it looked like. He was standing at this podium, surrounded by flags, in front of this historic monument. And that was supposed to underscore this current conversation about monuments and statues around the country.
Much of the conversation has been around Confederate totems, Confederate statues, the Confederate flag. The president has resisted those conversations. But even members of his own party have said that it is time to remove some of those monuments. Where he is drawing the line is when the conversation moves to George Washington or Thomas Jefferson. Those are two of the faces on Mount Rushmore. And that’s part of why he’s choosing to have this conversation there.
What he is suggesting is that the political left is trying to rewrite history by calling into question those men, by suggesting that their legacies need to be thought about again. And the reason that people are saying that their legacies need to be reconsidered is because they were slaveholders, and that you can’t have an honest conversation about race if you do not acknowledge that.
What he’s really trying to do is convince Republicans who are feeling shaky about him — and he hopes some independent voters — that the protests around the country have gone too far. He is trying to get them to see it the way he sees it, which is, this isn’t just a movement about the Confederacy. They’re coming for our whole history — “our.” They are coming for the history of white America.
President Trump continues to attempt to appeal to older white voters
It is in keeping with what President Trump has done for many, many years now, which is an ‘us versus them’ approach to his base of older, white voters. So the president very quickly went on to talk about how a, quote unquote, political weapon of the Americans he is talking about in this speech is so-called “cancel culture.” He is describing it as anyone who disagrees with certain folks are going to get chased out of polite society. And that’s not really what this.
So in part, this is appealing to a longstanding sense among conservatives that they are being attacked by the left for their beliefs. Also notice his emphasis on our values and our culture. He has used the words culture and values repeatedly to appeal to his base since 2017. This is the thing that he shares with his voters. It certainly is not geography — in many cases they’re in the Deep South. And he is a man from Queens. But this sense of our way of life is being taken over is what he has used time and again to appeal to people.
So keeping up with these themes, the president went on and said —“This left-wing cultural revolution is designed to overthrow the American Revolution.” And then he went on a little bit later to say their goal is not a better America. Their goal is the end of America. You would think that he was talking about the British the way that he’s describing this as opposed to talking about primarily Black people in this country, but not only, who have been trying to right historic wrongs. He is making it sound, once again, as if something is being taken from him and his supporters.
I think it more than feels that way. I would argue it is race baiting. Look, I don’t think that Donald Trump is suddenly a different person. I think this is who he has been for a very, very long time, going back decades. But I do think he is getting explicit in what he is saying, both as protests are growing in the country and as his own poll numbers are sinking.
Trump comparing one America from another America
He is not explicitly using the words black and white. But he is explicitly describing one version of America versus another. And that, I think, is different, along with the fact that we have really not seen a president before use an Independence Day speech to be so divisive and to pit Americans in two, the way he is here.
What most surprises me about this speech, and the fact that it is supposed to be a reset of a presidential campaign, is that the message seems to fly in the face of polling that shows Americans don’t agree with this version of how to deal with race.
I read the polls. They all make clear that the president is wildly out of step with where the majority of voters are right now, where conservative voters are, where independent voters are, where a broad spectrum of voters are. This is a president who likes to do things his own way. He has ideas that he wants to put out there, regardless of how much it upsets his advisers, regardless of how scared senators are about losing their seats because his rhetoric is making things very hard for them. But he is not where the majority of Americans are in those polls.
Many of the people in the president’s campaign believe the direction that the polls are taking, even if they argue with some of the margins. Some of the people around the president share with him a belief or theory, or whatever you want to call it, that people are not being honest with the pollsters when they talk about how much support they have for these protests, and that the numbers will come around in President Trump’s favor when we get to the fall.
Trump campaign blowing off poll numbers
They think that people are inclined to lie to pollsters on matters of race. Now there have been campaigns where that has happened. The margins that we’re talking about are so large that it would be really hard to fathom that. But that is the bet that some of his advisers are making. Now are they making that on science? Not necessarily. Are they making that on political research? Only on the margins. For the most part, this is wishcasting that the president is not doing himself the damage he seems to be doing.
Because there’s the way the president wants to campaign. And they try to shape it around that. This is what Donald J. Trump thinks his campaign message should be. Now, there are areas where his advisers have gotten him to stick to that script that was written out and say things that they consider to be less potentially divisive. So for instance, he spoke broadly about culture and history. But he did not explicitly give a defense of Confederate statues, which really turns off suburban voters, in particular suburban women. And his advisers were very pleased with that, that he stuck to the script and didn’t say Confederate.
But then on Monday morning, he tweets support of the Confederate flag being aired at NASCAR events. So it undoes a lot of what had taken place before. There is no evidence that this message is going to help the president win again. There is no evidence that this is a successful approach to the voters he needs in order to win. But advisers are pretty candid that he thinks this is how he won last time. And he is convinced he can do it again.
The president is of the opinion — and again, this is not his campaign. There are people in the campaign who understand this is not the same electorate. But the president has convinced himself that nothing has changed, that he can turn Joe Biden into Hillary Clinton. And so far there is no reason to believe that either of those things is true. The campaign itself, I think, would like to be delivering a less blunt instrument version of what the president is saying. But because the president is able to speak only the way he’s comfortable, he will not change. And so yes, I think this is what you will see for the next few months.
If you enjoy our writing, please consider leaving a small donation. Your support helps keep the lights on and allows us to hire more writers and pay our current writers.
 |  |  |  |
The Washington Ledger 