I had all but written President Trump off. His style is ill-suited to a crisis. When growth was strong and unemployment was low, voters were happy to indulge his chaotic, self-pitying streams of consciousness. But when the coronavirus struck, his narcissistic gabbling suddenly started to grate.
As I write, Joe Biden leads by between 10 and 14 points and is comfortably ahead in key states including Florida, North Carolina, and Arizona. Many pundits are already calling it for the elderly Scrantonian, and they may be right. But over the past week, I have come to doubt the consensus.
What has changed? In a word, disorder. There is almost nothing that voters hate more. People who are usually centrist liberals become suddenly conservative when they see violence and unrest.
One thing I learned from 20 years in elected politics is that the silent majority is always larger than you think. In Britain, as in the United States, hooligans have been pulling down statues. And in Britain, as in the U.S., the media have absurdly tried to frame their vandalism as some sort of civil rights protest, as if all they wanted were equal treatment.
Ordinary voters smell a rat. They know that we live in open societies, where all adults have the right to vote and are treated equally in law. People can spot a hard-left insurrection when they see one. And when I say “people,” I don’t just mean “white people.” There are plenty of middle-class black people whose first reaction to the sight of youngsters smashing property is, “Where the hell are their parents?”
A friend of mine, the black principal of a high school with a largely nonwhite and low-income intake, was apoplectic when she heard that Oxford University was offering special consideration in exams to black students who felt traumatized by the killing of George Floyd. “I want my kids to aim high, and they do,” she told me. “I never let them believe that being poor or black or having a tough home life is an excuse for anything. But here is Oxford University telling them that they are second-best.”
I can’t prove it, but I’d be surprised if there were not plenty of black voters who think as she does. Don’t expect to see them on CNN, though, any more than we see their British counterparts on the BBC.
The chasm between the working classes and the smirking classes that created Trumpism in the first place is widening. Look at who is giving Black Lives Matter a pass: broadcasters, universities, big corporations, actors, comedians, epidemiologists — pretty much everyone, in fact, except the general population.
Which brings us back to Trump. He has spent years fighting culture wars. Often, he picks the wrong target, as when, for example, he mocked the family of a fallen serviceman. This time, however, he has positioned himself deftly, arguing for things that most voters regard as reasonable but which are suddenly being howled down in the media as racist.
“Our nation is witnessing a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values, and indoctrinate our children,” said the president before Mount Rushmore on Independence Day. “We want free and open debate, not speech codes and cancel culture. We embrace tolerance, not prejudice.”
Good, solid stuff — if, by Trump’s standards, unusually well constructed and well delivered. But how was that speech reported? “An openly racist campaign” (Washington Post) that “defended Confederate monuments” (CNN). In fact, in addition to the four presidents behind him, Trump praised Frederick Douglass, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, and Muhammad Ali. He said nothing at all about Confederate monuments.
Trump would like nothing better than for the November election to become a culture war. In their study of how political preferences are determined by personality types, Marc Hetherington and Jonathan Weiler made two especially pertinent points. First, those with what they call “fixed” personalities (wary, conservative, hierarchical, Trumpy) outnumber those with “fluid” personalities (trusting, liberal, open to new experiences). Second, people become more fixed, or Trumpier, when they fear social unrest.
Of course, general elections are not just culture wars. Democrats will be hoping (though they can’t admit it) that, by November, the U.S. will be seen to have suffered more badly than other countries from COVID-19 and that Trump will get the blame.
But what if there is no significant second surge? What if, by November, it turns out that most developed countries suffered similar fatalities and that the bigger variable was how much economic damage they inflicted on themselves through excessive closures? What if Trump’s skepticism turns out to have been justified all along? In that situation, he might be hard to beat.
