While Donald Trump tries for a 2016 rerun, voters look for a fresh script
The virus also has depleted the big bag of tricks that helped to put Trump over the top in 2016.
He’s canceled rallies and the big Jacksonville, Fla., component of the Republican National Convention mainly because the coronavirus, which he used to say would “just disappear,” has spread, killing more than 140,000 Americans
Even his favorite social network, Twitter, has turned against him, in his view, by footnoting or blocking tweets it judges to be out of bounds.
Instead, he has turned to the very conventional tricks of culture-war politics: respond to one national emotionally charged crisis by pumping up another one.
Trump’s administration set the tone by sending law-enforcement help to mayors who did not request it. Most dramatically, paramilitary units from Homeland Security’s Customs and Border Protection landed unannounced in Portland, Ore., in a federal crackdown on protests against police violence.
Instead of de-escalating violence and tempers, local officials say the arrival of federal troops actually increased the numbers of protesters. Playing commander-in-cities gave Trump the opportunity to deploy another old trick from four years ago: rebranding his opponents.
He morphed “Sleepy Joe” Biden into an opponent who, Trump says, wants to abolish the police, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Second Amendment and the suburbs. Biden denies the accusations.
Yes, the ever-important suburbs, which amount to about half of the presidential electorate and voted mostly for Trump in 2016, have moved heavily to Biden’s corner this year.
Reversing that trend may be asking a lot of the Trump campaign, with an electorate that already seems quite exhausted by the president’s daily and unpredictable displays across all news and social media.
Even without doing much campaigning other than by video chat, Biden has scored a lead in the polls, simply by not being Trump.
By this point in the campaign cycle, Trump told his rally crowds four years ago, “You’ll be seeing so much winning that you’ll get tired of winning.” Now an electorate “tired of winning” his way is looking away.
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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)
(c) 2020 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.
