9/1/20
For Donald Trump's America-on-fire campaign strategy to work, he needs violence to boil in cities right up until Election Day, or at least for enough voters to believe the nation is spiraling into an abyss of chaos and savagery. That brought the extraordinary spectacle Monday of a president -- who would by tradition call for calm at a time of civic unrest -- justifying violence by his supporters and all but excusing a pro-Trump vigilante who allegedly killed two protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin. At the same time, in the White House briefing room, he minimized police brutality against African Americans that sparked a summer of protest and agony. In a Fox News interview, the President callously compared police officers who shoot Black men in the back to professional golfers who "choke" over a three-foot putt. His word choice was particularly ugly given the death of George Floyd, who stopped breathing with a police officer's knee on his neck in Minnesota in May. rump's inflammatory behavior on Monday came on a day that could come to be seen as critical for the destiny of the White House after Democratic nominee Joe Biden launched a counterattack, warning no one was safe in "Trump's America" -- which he said was hobbled by disease and fear.
It also unfolded on the eve of Trump's visit to Wisconsin, which local leaders pleaded with him to cancel to avoid exacerbating tensions. Instead, the President gave every indication that he plans to use the trip to troll his critics with his claims of a nation on the edge from a platform in a key swing state. Trump's day of fury reflects how he has now firmly settled on a campaign of demagoguery to save his presidency. Trump's provocative appearance represents a bet that a hardline "law and order" campaign can drown out the pandemic that he has badly mismanaged, that has killed more than 180,000 Americans and on Monday crossed the 6 million mark in known infections. In a classic authoritarian tactic, Trump also vastly over stated the extent of lawlessness and political violence, then promoted himself as the kind of strongman needed to restore order. On Monday, Biden left his campaign-from-home bubble in Delaware to travel to Pittsburgh to parry Trump's attacks amid increasing nervousness among Democrats that the President's hardline approach could lift him back into a race in which he is trailing. "The violence you're seeing in Donald Trump's America. These are not images from some imagined 'Joe Biden's America' in the future. These are images from Donald Trump's America today," Biden said.