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(Clearly this article ends on a sour note by endorsing Biden but it is
still a persuasive case being made by the wheels falling off the Trump
wagon. As she puts it, "Trump is flailing like an overturned turtle.")
NY Times Op-Ed, June 8, 2020
Is This the Trump Tipping Point?
By Jennifer Senior
You never want to say that you’ve reached a tipping point with this
administration. Donald J. Trump has proved to be the Nosferatu of
American politics: heartless, partial to Slavs, beneath grace and thus
far impervious to destruction.
Even when I read my colleague Jonathan Martin’s fine piece on Saturday,
about how some high-profile Republicans refuse to vote for Trump or are
struggling with publicly lending him their support, I thought: yes, but.
They’re just a handful. They’re the usual suspects. Too few of them have
coattails.
Yet something right now really is different. I think.
Before diving into the more entrancing developments, I’ll start with the
obvious: Trump’s old tactics, once so reliable, are starting to fail
him, utterly.
It was a winning strategy to crow about a border wall with Mexico, but
it’s a loser — and a sign of pure cowardice — to build one around your
own White House. He once basked in the reflected glow of “his generals”;
now those generals are laying waste to him, with James Mattis, his
former defense secretary, explicitly condemning Trump’s immature and
divisive leadership, and John Kelly, the president’s former chief of
staff, saying yep, sounds about right.
Maybe there was a time when religious conservatives would have applauded
a photo of Trump standing in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church, Bible
in hand. But using pepper balls and flash-bang grenades to clear
anguished protesters out of the way backfired. The Episcopal bishop of
Washington reacted in horror; Trump’s support among white Catholics
slipped 11 points between April and May.
Maybe there was a time when stigmatizing all progressive protesters as
invading marauders would have worked — bigotry, it gets the job done —
but not now. His proposal to suppress the tumult with the military was
greeted with disapproval by his current secretary of defense, Mark
Esper, and disgust by Mattis; the Black Lives Matter movement now polls
at an all-time high, with 66 percent of Americans disapproving of how
Trump has handled the response to George Floyd’s death.
Trump is flailing like an overturned turtle. A historic health crisis,
an economic crisis and a social crisis all at once — it’s far too much
for a reality TV star to handle, no more manageable than it’d be for him
to land an airplane. What this moment may have revealed, ironically
enough, is that only in a time of stability and outrageous decadence
could the United States have had the luxury of picking such a dark and
divisive candidate with the intellectual firepower of a water gun. When
Trump asked voters “What have you got to lose?” most never dreamed that
the answer could be: Everything.
But now for the subterranean tremors that most beguile me — a suggestion
that something deeper is afoot.
Trump, right now, is trying to stoke white fears about protests in the
street. But he’s having little luck. On Wednesday, Lara Putnam, the
chairman of the history department at the University of Pittsburgh,
tweeted a modest but persuasive thread highlighting the easy victory by
Summer Lee, a progressive African-American woman elected to the
Pennsylvania statehouse in 2018, in the Democratic primary on Tuesday.
“Based on the history of the district — and the range of voters I’ve
talked to there myself — it seemed entirely plausible that there would
be white backlash against her in this moment,” Putnam told me.
If ever there were a moment for a backlash, she pointed out, this would
have been it: Images of social unrest were all over Pittsburgh
television the weekend before the primary, and Lee had been an outspoken
proponent of the protesters. Voters could have selected her primary
opponent, a moderate white borough councilman who had the backing of the
county’s most powerful Democrat — and its Democratic Party.
Instead, voters doubled down. Lee was already winning on Election Day —
we now know this, based on mail-in ballots — and as the ballot counting
continued, she pulled even further ahead. Her victory suggested that the
white suburban women and retirees in her district were unswayed by
Trump’s demonizing and dog-whistling.
In these protests, it is possible we are seeing the rumblings of a new
Democratic coalition. On Saturday, Putnam and two of her colleagues
wrote that the scale and geographic diversity of these demonstrations
were without American precedent.
We already know that Trump’s support among white women is sliding in the
polls, both with college degrees and without; it’s probably not an
accident that the first Senate Republican to endorse Mattis’ views of
Trump was Lisa Murkowski, a white woman from Alaska. (And perhaps, as
Jonathan Martin’s piece hinted, other Republican senators will start to
follow, and refrain from giving him their support.) As Barack Obama
pointed out in his recent town hall, “a far more representative
cross-section of America” is out protesting in the streets than in the
1960s.
At a time of genuine crisis, Americans aren’t pining for Darth Vader.
They’re pining for a healer. It’s healing words of empathy that have
thus far won the day. Trump may have been fumbling with his Bible, but
it was Nancy Pelosi who read aloud from Ecclesiastes, and it was Joe
Biden who said in a heartfelt, 24-minute speech that he wished the
president would open it every once in a while.
It’s probably too much to hope for. But for the first time in three
years, change is not.
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