Countdown 99 days

DEFIANCE OF TRUMP

In an opinion piece in the Washington Post the following editorial was published on July 24^th, 2020 penned by Greg Sargent and is shown below in its entirety. My additional comments follow the end of the article.

 In a revealing aside, President Trump told chief propagandist Sean Hannity on Thursday night that he traces much of the overwhelming enthusiasm for his reelection now sweeping the country back to his Mount Rushmore speech commemorating Independence Day.

“Since that time, it’s been really something,” Trump told Hannity, before raging that fake polls are deliberately obscuring the mighty depth and reach of his support.

In that speech, Trump offered his canonical statement on the unleashing of federal law enforcement into cities, conflating protests against police brutality and systemic racism with a “far-left fascism” out to “take” our “national heritage” away from the “American people.”

At around the time Trump appeared on “Hannity,” all four Major League Baseball teams playing Opening Day games took a knee in solidarity with Black Lives Matter before the national anthem, flatly defying Trump’s relentless disparaging of the protests, and more broadly, the vision outlined in that speech.

In all kinds of ways, Trump’s depiction of this national moment, as enshrined in that speech, is losing its grip on the country. In some cases, Trump’s own officials are defying his efforts to carry that depiction to the authoritarian climax he so craves.

Meanwhile, Trump’s sinking popularity — which is linked to that loosening grip, as his efforts to impose that understanding on us are surely helping drive his numbers down — is leading to open defiance among his own party.

Here’s a roundup:

Players take a knee. 

The support for Black Lives Matter at those baseball openings was remarkable, coming after Trump had fumed that any kneeling during the anthem would render the game “over for me.” This didn’t represent total defiance of Trump, since two of the four teams stood for the anthem itself.

Yet two teams did defy him by kneeling through it. And all four pointedly ratified the gesture of kneeling, while expressing organized support for the protests in numerous other ways. Trump cheerleader Rudolph W. Giuliani raged over this support for BLM, obviously seeing it as repudiation of Trump.

NASCAR bans Confederate flag. 

That echoes Nascar’s decision to ban the Confederate flag even as Trump made a last stand in defense of military installations being named for Confederate traitors. Trump himself interpreted the ban as open defiance of him, raging that it caused the “lowest ratings EVER,” which was a lie.

It’s sometimes correctly argued that these only go so far while private-sector economic power remains unwilling to reform deeper racial wealth and income inequalities. But such displays can reveal deep cultural shifts roiling customer bases, which can portend more change ahead.

Republicans defy Trump on Confederacy. 

With overwhelming GOP support, the Senate just passed a defense authorization bill requiring the renaming of military installations honoring Confederate generals. Trump had raged against the move, nonsensically equating it with disrespecting the military, but Republicans defied him in broad daylight.

Some Republicans move forward with vote-by-mail.

Some GOP state officials are moving forward with efforts to implement vote-by-mail even though Trump has raged that it will be fraudulent, explicitly declaring he opposes it because it could harm his party (i.e., him) in the election.

In a sense, this, too, ties back to the Mount Rushmore speech. Trump is asserting that the election’s results will be illegitimate if he doesn’t prevail, which is tantamount to suggesting that in such an outcome, his people, the real American people, will inevitably be getting cheated and supplanted (the country is being “taken” from them) by those other people.

Yet remarkably, some Republicans think their own constituents should be able to vote safely in a pandemic, even if they vote against Trump.

Military officials defy Trump on Insurrection Act.

After Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807 to send the military into cities, his defense secretary distanced himself, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman put out a remarkable statement calling on members of the military to reaffirm their commitment to our founding documents and values.

Both men surely grasped that by joining Trump’s Bible photo-op in an area violently cleared of protesters, they had been corrupted by him, and moved to preserve their reputations. Trump saw the Bible stunt as a glorious turnaround moment, but his numbers have continued sliding since, which is telling, since it stood as a kind of iconic representation of the values later expressed in the Mount Rushmore speech.

Defense secretary finds Portland crackdown problematic. 

Mark T. Esper let it be known that he raised internal concerns that he was troubled by the fact that homeland security agents descending on Portland, Ore., were wearing garb that would confuse people into seeing them as military.

But the whole point of this display was to create exactly this imagery of a hyper-militarized response to the protests, on Trump’s twisted belief that this would help him politically. Once again, officials declared the display and its underlying intentions themselves to be profoundly problematic.

Officials mute Trump’s desire for another authoritarian crackdown. 

Trump privately wanted a massive law enforcement invasion of Chicago to emulate the crackdown in Portland that thrilled him, the Daily Beast reports. But the final plan was dialed down into a joint-task-force arrangement combating gangs, allowing him to swagger about sending in tin soldiers without precipitating high-profile clashes.

Trump’s handlers surely know those clashes reveal him as an instigating force, hurting him with swing voters. And that’s another sign of the big story here: His glorious Mount Rushmore vision has no hold on the middle of the country.”  End of Washington Post article. 

All the above items are a reversal and in defiance of Trump’s expressed desires.  In addition to the above the following defiance’s occurred last week

Payroll Tax Cut (added)

  I would add the resistance to the payroll tax cut as another example of republican push back on the Trump desires. Trump was adamant Congress cut payroll taxes. Until suddenly he backed down. The proposal does little except help to gut Social Security and Medicare.  If unemployment is the problem, how does this cut help anyone without a check?

School Reopening

He demanded that all the schools reopen for the fall semester until he allowed some room to bend due to the localized nature of the virus.  He was fighting an up-hill battle in that local districts have control of the safety of the students, teachers, and parents.

Republican National Convention

He wanted every seat on the convention floor too be filled, and was savoring a Republican National Convention celebration, until he canceled the event suddenly.  Was he afraid the crowds would not show up as in Tulsa? Afraid of a super spreader event for the elderly republicans that make up the party convention base?

Wearing a Mask in Public

Trump refused to wear a mask until he visited a hospital.  He politicized mask wearing and made wearing a mask an optional thing until he, rather suddenly reversed course after 4 months.  He now has changed course and touts the usefulness in containing the virus spread.

Trump trailing in polls has reversed course on all these issues some this week.  This has been a week of re-alignment for the Trump reelection campaign.  The result of these setbacks and the lagging polls look for Trump to do something totally bizarre to realign his message.  The fireworks have just begun with all the bad news.  

Trump needs to do something to overtake all these setbacks. Will it be a troop withdrawal? Early release of the Biden highly edited tapes from Ukraine and 9-11 Rudy?  Release of the whitewashing and finger pointing of the Muller report by another partisan investigation into the origins of the Russia election interference by William Barr?