Made-for-TV fascism: how Trump’s ‘crime
explosion’ ploy could backfire
Trump is facing a big election with an even bigger
need for a political masterstroke – enter a surge of federal agents to fight
supposed violence
Tom
McCarthy
@TeeMcSee
Email
Sat 25 Jul
2020 11.00 BST
With an election looming and the polls looking bad,
Donald Trump was in need of a quick political boost.
Seizing on
television images of a procession of refugees out of Honduras, the president
announced an imminent “invasion” of the United States by a “migrant caravan”
and said he would deploy 15,000 military personnel to stop it. For weeks, Fox
News blared “coverage” of the emergency.
That was in
October 2018, and as a political strategy ahead of the midterm elections, the
gambit utterly failed.
The
Democrats flipped 40 seats in the House of Representatives the next month and
racked up the largest popular vote margin in midterm elections history, on the
highest turnout in 100 years. The “caravan” emergency was heard of no more.
Now two
years later, Trump is facing an even bigger election, with an even bigger need
for a political masterstroke if he is to win a second term in November.
Instead of
deploying troops to the border to confront a made-up threat, Trump has
announced “a surge of federal law enforcement into American communities” to
fight a supposed cataclysm of violence born of a Democratic plot to undermine
local police.
“To look at
it from any standpoint, the effort to shut down policing in their own
communities has led to a shocking explosion of shootings, killings, murders and
heinous crimes of violence,” Trump said at the White House on Wednesday. “This
bloodshed must end. This bloodshed will end.”
The
deployment against anti-racism protesters is a ploy to burnish his strongman
credentials, critics say – Trump is pursuing made-for-TV fascism, with the
imposition of federal forces into US cities against the will of local
authorities. As with 2018, the unmistakeable bogeyman is people of color, whom
Trump portrays, with the help of conservative media, as again posing an
existential threat to the country that only he can defend against.
In some
respects, the strategy has a long pedigree, going back to the 1968 “law and
order” presidential campaigns of Richard Nixon and George Wallace, the Alabama
segregationist. But there is a crucial difference between Trump’s foreign
“invasion” charade of 2018 and his current domestic “crime explosion” ploy,
analysts say.
Unlike the
deployment of troops to a US border, the deployment of federal troops inside
American cities threatens to fulfill its own fantasy, turning a dark and
opportunistic fable spun by the White House into a daunting new reality in
which violent clashes really do play out in the streets and unaccountable
federal law enforcement officers really do round up and detain US citizens.
“What one
has to ask is, how much is spectacle and how much is reality?” said Jason
Stanley, a Yale philosophy professor and author of How Fascism Works. “Now, the
spectacle should already worry us, because he did the spectacle in Lafayette
Square,” Stanley said, referring to Trump’s violent clearance of peaceful
protesters from a park near the White House in June.
What one has to
ask is, how much is spectacle and how much is reality?
Jason Stanley
“Then he
did the spectacle in Portland. And when you allow too much spectacle, as it
gets worse over time, people start to say, ‘This has been happening for awhile,
what’s the big deal?’
“The
spectacle normalizes, and then you can’t tell – say it’s November – you can’t
tell if it’s still spectacle any more. It’s spectacle until someone gets hurt.”
Just how
big of a spectacle the White House has planned for the run-up to the November
elections is unknown.
In
Portland, Oregon, unidentified federal officers have shot protesters and used
unmarked vehicles to detain activists, and graffiti writers have been branded as
“violent anarchists”. Trump plans to deploy troops from at least five federal
agencies to Chicago and to Albuquerque, New Mexico, the justice department
announced this week.
Multiple
other cities including New York, Philadelphia, Detroit, Seattle, Baltimore,
Oakland and Milwaukee have been named for potential future deployments, despite
the unambiguous objections of those cities’ mayors.
“Unilaterally
deploying these paramilitary-type forces into our cities is wholly inconsistent
with our system of democracy and our most basic values,” more than a dozen
mayors of major US cities warned Trump in an open letter last week.
Trump is
correct that some US cities have seen increases in gun violence in recent
months, but crime in the US is down overall in 2020, and Trump is virtually
alone in seeing a heavy-handed federal response as palliative.
Criminal
justice experts have tied upticks in violence to the ravages of the coronavirus
pandemic, which has now killed about 145,000 Americans; historic unemployment;
social unrest following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May;
seasonal fluctuations and other factors.
In any
case, phalanxes of heavily armed officers descending on largely peaceful
protesters risks sparking violence and unraveling months of work to establish
community dialogue about police violence and racial injustice, the mayors have
warned.
Julia
Azari, a professor of political science at Marquette University, noted that
crime is not currently a top issue of concern for a majority of US voters and
said that the Trump campaign was working on a tenuous strategy of a narrow win
through the electoral college.
“This has
really never been a majority-focused administration,” Azari said. “In some ways
it’s been an administration focused on mobilizing a particular segment of the
American electorate, which is sort of strategically located throughout the
states that are important in the electoral college.
“It’s a
very uphill strategy.”
As a
candidate, Trump can appear to be cornered. Polling indicates that Americans
think Trump is wrong about the street protests, they disapprove of his
performance as president overall by more than 55% on average, and they
disapprove of his handling of the coronavirus pandemic specifically by a
whopping 60%.
But Trump
has been cornered in the past, as when he was supposed to lose in 2016. Then as
now, Trump lashed out on race.
Talking
about crime in big cities “can be dog whistles for racial divisions” to Trump
supporters, especially in the midwest, who as a group are older, more white and
more rural than the average US voter, Azari said.
But
emphasizing chaos in the streets is a questionable strategy for an incumbent
president, she said. “For most swing voters, the question comes down to, ‘Are
things good, are things not good?’ And I don’t see this story as being a really
compelling way to reframe the situation as like, ‘things are good’.”
For most swing
voters, the question comes down to, ‘Are things good, are things not good?’
Julia Azari
Even if
Trump loses in November and is ushered off the national stage, his gestures in
the direction of fascist politics – made-for-TV or not – will not be easy to
erase, because Trump’s politics are merely a current expression of a 30-year
Republican arc, said Stanley.
“There has
been a long buildup before Trump,” Stanley said. “A core to authoritarianism –
whether fascism or communism – is the one-party state. And Republicans for
years before Trump, all the way back to [former House speaker] Newt Gingrich,
who I blame all of this on, have been acting like their political opponents are
traitors and not legitimate opponents.”
Stanley
praised Joe Biden, Trump’s 2020 rival, for pursuing multi-party politics.
“What
Biden’s doing is very impressive in that he is constantly – at first I
criticized it – he is constantly talking about a return to a multi-party
system, where we are going to prize the fact that we have different viewpoints,
and that’s the core of our democracy.
“This idea
that you can have people who differ and are Republicans or Democrats, and can
have different views and can come together, is a repudiation of the Newt
Gingrich-led attempt to undermine democracy and place Republicans in power by
declaring the opposition party illegitimate.”
America 'staring down the barrel of martial law',
Oregon senator warns
Ron Wyden says Portland tactics threaten democracy
Senator Jeff Merkley deplores ‘military-style assault’
David Smith
and Daniel Strauss in Washington
Sat 25 Jul
2020 07.00 BSTLast modified on Sat 25 Jul 2020 07.03 BST
America is
“staring down the barrel of martial law” as it approaches the presidential
election, a US senator from Oregon has warned as Donald Trump cracks down on
protests in Portland, the state’s biggest city.
In
interviews with the Guardian, Democrat Ron Wyden said the federal government’s
authoritarian tactics in Portland and other cities posed an “enormous” threat
to democracy, while his fellow senator Jeff Merkley described it as “an all-out
assault in military-style fashion”.
The
independent watchdogs for the US justice and homeland security departments said
on Thursday they were launching investigations into the use of force by federal
agents in Portland, where unidentified officers in camouflage gear have
snatched demonstrators off the streets and spirited them away in unmarked
vehicles.
But Trump
this week announced a “surge” of federal law enforcement to Chicago and
Albuquerque, in addition to a contingent already in Kansas City. The move
fuelled critics’ suspicions that the president was stressing a “law and order”
campaign theme at the expense of civil liberties.
Wyden said
in a written statement on Thursday: “The violent tactics deployed by Donald
Trump and his paramilitary forces against peaceful protesters are those of a
fascist regime, not a democratic nation.”
I wish the
president would fight the coronavirus half as hard as he attacks my home town
Senator Ron Wyden
Speaking by
phone, he said: “Unless America draws a line in the sand right now, I think we
could be staring down the barrel of martial law in the middle of a presidential
election.”
Military
control of government was last imposed in the US in 1941, after the Japanese
attack on Pearl Harbor that triggered entry into the second world war. In
current circumstances it would entail “trashing the constitution and trashing
people’s individual rights”, Wyden warned.
The Oregon
senator recalled a recent conversation with a legal adviser for the head of
national intelligence.
“I asked
him again and again what was the constitutional justification for what the
Trump administration is doing in my home town and he completely ducked the
questions and several times said, ‘Well, I just want to extend my best wishes
to your constituents.’
“After I
heard him say it several times, I said my constituents don’t want your best
wishes. They want to know when you’re going to stop trashing their
constitutional rights.”
The White
House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, began a briefing on Friday with a
selectively edited video montage depicting protests, flames, graffiti and chaos
in Portland.
“The Trump
administration will not stand by and allow anarchy in our streets,” she said.
“Law and order will prevail.”
Trump has
falsely accused his election rival, Joe Biden, of pledging to “defund the
police” so violent crime will flourish. Democrats condemn Trump for a
made-for-TV attempt to distract both from Black Lives Matter protests and his
mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic, now killing more than 1,000 Americans
a day.
“I wish the
president would fight the coronavirus half as hard as he attacks my home town,”
Wyden said. “I think he’s setting up an us-against-them kind of strategy. He’s
trying to create his narrative that my constituents, who are peaceful
protesters, are basically anarchists, sympathisers of anarchists and, as he
does so often, just fabricate it.
“Trump
knows that his [coronavirus] strategy has been an unmitigated disaster. The
coronavirus is spiking in various places and he’s trying to play to rightwing
media and play to his base and see if he can kind of create a narrative that
gives him some traction.”
The
Portland deployment, known as Operation Diligent Valor, involves 114 officers
from homeland security and the US Marshals Service, according to court
documents. Local officials say their heavy-handed approach, including teargas
and flash grenades, has merely enflamed demonstrations against police brutality
and racial injustice. The justice department-led Operation Legend involves more
than 200 agents each in Kansas City and Chicago as well as 35 in Albuquerque.
It is targeted at violent crime.
Lori
Lightfoot, the mayor of Chicago, has vowed to resist the federal intervention.
It’s very clear
what the president is trying to do is incite violence and then display that
violence in campaign ads
Senator Jeff Merkley
“We’re not
going to allow the unconstitutional, state-sanctioned lawlessness we saw
brought to Portland here in Chicago,” she said on Thursday.
Merkley
offered warning words of advice based on Oregon’s current experience.
“I would
say that you probably don’t believe that these federal forces will attack
protesters if the protesters are peaceful and you will be wrong because that’s
exactly what they’re doing in Portland,” he told the Guardian.
“This is an
all-out assault in military-style fashion on a peaceful-style protest. The way
to handle graffiti is put up a fence or come out and ask people to stop doing
it, not to attack a peaceful protest but that’s exactly what happened. It’s
very clear what the president is trying to do is incite violence and then
display that violence in campaign ads. And I say this because that’s exactly
what he’s doing right now. This is not some theory.”
The senator
added: “This is just an absolute assault on people’s civil rights to speak and
to assemble.”
Merkley
argued that with past targets such as Islamic State and undocumented migrants
losing their potency, Trump has settled on African American communities in
inner cities to be his latest scapegoats.
“I think
it’s also important to note the president we’ve always known has this intense
authoritarian streak,” he said. “He loved and had so much affection for the
leader of North Korea, Putin in Russia. Just admiration for some of the tactics
in the Philippines with Duterte and Erdoğan in Turkey, by the crown prince in
Saudi Arabia.”
On Friday
the United Nations warned against the use of excessive force against
demonstrators and media in the US.
“Peaceful
demonstrations that have been taking place in cities in the US, such as
Portland, really must be able to continue,” the UN human rights office
spokeswoman, Elizabeth Throssell, told reporters in Geneva.
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