The reality is slowly dawning, even for Donald Trump
The road to the White House for Donald Trump and in his ability to get 270 Electoral College votes is getting more and more difficult as the days roll by. The coronavirus that is raging in America and steadily getting past the 100,000 lives it has claimed is bad enough for a President who claims that had it not been for his administration’s intervention the death toll would have been much higher. The economic data for the month of May should have been a pleasant surprise to Trump in that jobless rate is said to have come down to 13.3 per cent and that some 2.5 million jobs have been added.
The President quickly claimed a turnaround in the economy and all because of his nudging states to open up for business. As the champagne bottles are being opened there is the grim reminder from economists that the worst is not over yet, more than 25 million Americans are still out of work, the job additions for May could be nothing more than furloughed workers returning and hence not “job creation” as fancifully put out. To top it all off there is also the reminder that more and more Americans are returning only to part-time jobs. For a person who unabashedly claims victory when the going gets good but blames others when he is at the receiving end, the gloating will go on for a few more days.
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There is yet another reality that is yet to dawn on the White House, the President or his re-election campaign team: that in a series of polls in swing and critical states, the incumbent is trailing the presumptive Democratic nominee, the former Vice President Joseph Biden. A recent Fox News poll in Arizona, Ohio and Wisconsin all showed Biden leading Trump. But the shocker was in Texas where a Quinnipiac University survey showed almost a dead-even—Trump at 44 per cent to Biden’s 43 per cent. The rude wake-up call to Trump has to be seen in the fact that the last Democrat to carry Texas in a Presidential contest was Jimmy Carter in 1976. Texas is the second-largest state after California in terms of Electoral College votes at 38.
In 2016 Trump defeated Hillary Clinton by a margin of 9 points in Texas, down from Mitt Romney’s 16 point difference with Barack Obama in 2008.
The Grand Old Party is worried that Texas Senator John Cornyn who is seeking a third term is already posting low numbers and Trump’s loss in the state could deal a blow to Cornyn which in turn jeopardizes Republican control in the Senate. If by any chance Texas falls into the Blue category, it will be very difficult for Trump to get the requisite numbers in the Electoral College, especially in the context of what polls are suggesting in Ohio, Wisconsin, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Florida. The Trump campaign has started pumping money into advertisements in these states, but polling numbers do not show the message sinking in. In 2016 Trump got 306 Electoral College votes but if the present scenarios are taken into account, it appears that the Republican President will not get the magic number of 270 required to push him past the post.
The poll realities were taken before Trump faced yet another crisis of his tenure—the brutal murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis by a white police officer who had his victim pinned down and choked him to death by placing his knee on the victim’s neck for eight minutes and 46 seconds. Even before he paid his routine statement of regret to the family of Floyd, Trump went about handling the aftermath of protests and violence in several American cities in the most preposterous and scandalous fashion, pretending to be the “President of Law and Order”, an old one-liner that can be traced to the campaign of the disgraced Richard Nixon in 1968 against Democratic nominee Hubert Humphrey where historians have generally credited President Lyndon Johnson for that slogan!
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Trump first called protestors thugs and then went on to repeat a line that had been used in the past by a hard-line Miami, Florida, Police Chief Walter Headley and the former Pro Segregationist Governor of Alabama, George Wallace—“ when the looting starts, the shooting starts”. Trump then went on to brazenly call in the elite 82nd Airborne Troops out of Fort Bragg, North Carolina into the Washington DC area, threatened to use military aircraft and actually had army helicopters fly low in downtown Washington DC even as unnamed officials were saying that the President was thinking about invoking the Insurrection Act so that the U.S. military can be called out to quell the protests.
The biggest rebuke to President Trump came from retired and active-duty military officials, some of them who have served in the administration. Unable to tolerate the failed leadership the men in uniform have ripped into Trump accusing him to be playing the role of a “divider” at a time when the country was looking for a unifier. “Donald Trump is the first President in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try. Instead, he tries to divide us”, former Defence Secretary Gen. James Mattis said in a statement. “We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort. We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership”, the former Marine General added much to the consternation of Trump.
Gen. Mattis was not the only uniformed person to snub the President. The former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Martin Demsey, the former White House Chief of Staff, Gen. John Kelly, retired Gen. John Allen have all said that they are against unleashing the military on people who are out in the street protesting racial prejudice, a view endorsed by the current Defence Secretary, Mike Esper. “The option to use active-duty forces in a law enforcement role should only be used as a matter of last resort, and only in the most urgent and dire of situations. We are not in one of those situations now. I do not support invoking the Insurrection Act”, Esper said in a clear break with the White House.
Given the temperament of the President, Esper’s stay in the present job could be numbered, say analysts. Said Senator Lisa Murkowski, the Independent Republican voice from Alaska, “I thought General Mattis’ words were true and honest and necessary and overdue”. The anger at her comment from Trump was along expected lines who said that he would support “anyone with a pulse” when she is seeing re-election to the Senate in November 2022. In fact, in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd, the racial unrest and violence and Trump’s responses have taken a political toll on the President’s staunchest supporters—the Evangelical Christians.
According to the Public Religion Research Institute, the approval rating of Trump by white Evangelicals was 80 per cent in March; by the end of May, that figure had fallen to 62 per cent.
With five months to go for the elections showdown, no one is underestimating the capabilities of the Trump campaign, the star performer being the President himself who has this innate quality of peddling misinformation, disinformation, and outright lies if that is going to make him win an election. He comes from a school of thought that believes if you put enough spin on something that will eventually become the truth. What keeps the Republican President politically going is his belief that his conservative, right-wing base will never let him down, no matter what he did, even without trying hard!
(The writer was a former senior journalist in Washington D.C. covering North America and the United Nations.)
