The Last
Stand
Trump’s Handling of the Coronavirus Could Cost
Him Presidency
With the infection rate exploding and the economy in
collapse, Donald Trump has failed spectacularly as a crisis manager. It would
probably take a massive shock for him to get re-elected, but it appears he’s
trying to make that happen, too.
By Guido
Mingels, Ralf Neukirch, René Pfister, Marc Pitzke und Mathieu von Rohr
24.07.2020,
19.23 Uhr
An American
president setting off a war somewhere in the world to win an election he thinks
is already lost - it’s a script familiar to moviegoers. But an American
president who threatens to wage war on American cities to turn an election
campaign around? That’s unheard of.
At least it
was until now.
Amidst the
clouds of tear gas, anonymous federal police in battle gear throw stun grenades
into a crowd, arresting protesters in the streets, locking them up without
warrants. The videos showing the deployment of militarized troops in the United
States look like scenes from the combat video game "Call of Duty.” But
they’re real.
Donald
Trump has deployed the federal troops from his Department of Homeland Security
as a kind of presidential militia in Portland on the West Coast, where they
have been using brute force against Black Lives Matter supporters who have been
protesting in the city for weeks. The heavily armed security force is usually
reserved for things like counter-terrorism operations or going up against drug
smugglers. They are in plain clothes and their vehicles have no license plates.
Every day,
hundreds of mothers are peacefully standing up to the authorities. They call
themselves the "wall of moms” and sing "please don’t shoot us” and
nursery rhymes. But the security forces have no regard for them. "Every
night, moms have been teargassed, moms have been arrested, moms have been
treated violently," Joselyn Merrill, one of the protesting moms, says by
phone. Merrill is an Air Force veteran with three children.
"A
member of my congregation, who is also a city commissioner, was
teargassed," says Merrill. "The street medics have also been
targeted. These are people that are volunteering their time to make sure that
everybody's safety is of the foremost importance every night. It's shocking
that this is happening."
Merrill
says she took an oath on the constitution as an Air Force veteran. "I
never thought that this was going to happen on U.S. soil."
The
president, who is lagging far behind challenger Joe Biden of the Democratic
Party in virtually all polls, is doing something that none of his predecessors
has done: He’s invading American cities. "We’ll do something,” Trump said.
New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit and Baltimore, he said, are ruled by
"liberal Democrats,” by the "radical left.” He argued that if Biden
wins the presidency, the same would happen in the rest of the country.
"The whole country would go to hell. And we’re not going to let it go to
hell.”
Portland
was the start. The president now wants to turn to cities where he believes
there’s too much crime, which has in fact gone up in some places during the
pandemic. But the fight against crime is normally the responsibility of the
local police, with federal forces usually only stepping in if they are
requested by local authorities. On Wednesday, Trump announced a "surge,” a
military term from the Iraq war period that describes a massive increase in the
number of troops with the goal of pacifying the country. Hundreds of federal
officers are now heading to cities like Chicago.
Critics
warn that Trump, who is not exactly coming across as sane in the White House
these days, is sowing the chaos only so that he can then portray himself as a
savior. Earlier this week, leftist New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg
wrote: "Trump’s occupation of American cities has begun.”
It feels
like the last stand of a failed leader hoping for some major event to happen
that would enable him to get re-elected in November – like fighting in the
streets, or maybe even a miracle.
Historical
Failure
Donald
Trump’s presidential campaign is marked by a historical failure. The man who
sold himself as a born manager literally fell apart when America faced its
biggest crisis. COVID-19 has laid bare Trump’s talents as president – which is
to say, a complete lack thereof. It has also horrified many of his former
voters.
He publicly
suggested that injecting bleach could help protect against the virus and said
that he told his people to test less in the country – since the problem for him
wasn’t the many people who are sick, but rather the number of people being
tested.
The number
of COVID-19 deaths in the country is nearing the 150,000 mark. The COVID-19
pandemic has pushed around 30 million Americans into unemployment and robbed 5
million of their health insurance. With the rising number of infections
preventing the economy from getting back on track, the recession is
increasingly eating away at the American middle class.
The idea
that the U.S. is a special nation is deeply anchored in the American soul.
Under Trump, however, the word exceptionalism has taken on a whole new meaning.
No developed nation has managed the COVID-19 crisis as terribly as the U.S.:
The country of 330 million is counting 66,000 new infections per day. In the
European Union, which is home to 446 million people, the daily new infections
number less than 5,000.
The U.S.’s
top pandemic expert, Anthony Fauci, one of the last remaining voices of reason
in the Trump administration, has described it as a "nightmare.” This
prompted Trump’s press team to start a campaign against the immunologist, who
did nothing more than state things as they are, scientifically. That alone was
enough to attract Trump’s ire.
Holy War
The
coronavirus pandemic could have been the opportunity for Trump to show that he
was a crisis-capable president who transcended party politics. In the end,
nothing could have been further from the truth. Trump turned the fight against
the virus into a holy war in which the mask was a symbol. For months, the
president refused to wear one. The message he sent was clear: Only liberal
weaklings who are susceptible to the propaganda of the left-wing mainstream
media wear masks. There are countless videos online in which furious Trump
supporters defend their right to mask-free shopping.
Trump’s
crusade against the mask has mostly backfired on him. Few things have spurred
the spread of the virus like the refusal of many Americans to wear masks. Many
governors, especially in Republican strongholds, shied away from mandating that
people must wear face-coverings out of fear of Trump’s hardliner supporters.
This recklessness has allowed the number of infections to explode, for example,
in Jefferson Parish, a community on the edge of New Orleans.
A first
wave of the pandemic rolled through the community in March. Mayor Cynthia Lee
Sheng managed to dramatically lower the number of new infections by imposing a
lockdown. "I had the feeling we had the virus under control,” she says.
But after
businesses and restaurants reopened, the numbers of infections went up again –
partly because many refused to wear a mask. Now, Louisiana is the state in
which the number of daily new infections is growing second-fastest in the
country, after Florida.
Since neither
the president nor the governor, a Democrat who didn't want to issue a general
mask requirement, helped, Lee Sheng had to act alone. On June 29, she imposed a
mask requirement for her community. The decision was controversial. "There
were emotional reactions, people protested in front of my office for two days,”
she says. "But it is my job to contain the virus, and for that we need the
mask rule.” Lee Sheng is a Republican, and she has a clear opinion of Trump’s
coronavirus policies. "Anybody who's a role model, regardless of party,
should be wearing a mask," she says.
Devastating
Poll Figures
Is a
president with this kind of disastrous record even re-electable? If common
sense and the rules of politics still mean anything, Trump should lose on Nov.
3. His poll numbers are almost at an all-time low. No president since Jimmy
Carter has had such devastating numbers. In the national polls, Trump is on
average trailing behind Biden by 9 percentage points. As things stand now,
Biden would also win the crucial swing states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and
Ohio.
Federal law
enforcement agents in Portland: "Trump’s occupation of American cities has
begun." Foto: Noah Berger / dpa
It is
mainly older voters and whites with a college degree who are turning on Trump.
His core voters, whites without college educations, are still sticking with
him, but based on the polls, he has even lost support there. If Trump is
disappointing even his most loyal voters, then he has serious problems.
"Polling
is inexact, you have to be careful how you interpret it. There are just so many
moving parts,"says Micah Cohen, one of the senior editors at
FiveThirtyEight, a leading American poll-tracking website. "Trump is down
by enough that it would take a historically huge polling error for him to win
again like in 2016."
Trump has
been written off once before – and that resulted in a trauma for Washington’s
political class. In the fall of 2016, only a few outsiders believed that the
greedy real-estate shark, who boasted that he could grab women by the crotch
without being asked, would win. Even on election day, the New York Times put
Hillary Clinton’s changes of victory at a whopping 85 percent.
That only
made the hangover worse. The errors behind those incorrect predictions went
beyond the statistical one. They became part of a larger narrative about an
aloof Washington bubble that had completely lost touch with what was happening
in the rest of the country. Is history repeating in 2020? That’s what Trump is
hoping. In an interview, he claimed that the polls had already been "fake”
in 2016, and that today they are "even more fake.”
He claims
that there is still a lot of enthusiasm for him, but that his supporters are
simply afraid of expressing it publicly. "The silent majority is stronger
than ever before,” he recently stated.
Does he
really believe that? Trump’s show of brute force in American cities, and his
recent behavior, cast doubt on that.
"Scripted
Trump”
It was a
new Donald Trump who appeared in the White House Press Room on Tuesday. "I
have no problem with the masks,” said the man who helped politicize masks more
than anyone else in the U.S. But now he was playing a different tune: that
"anything that potentially can help is a good thing.” He also said he has
a mask himself, which he wears in elevators.
Trump
sounded calm, reasonable, almost boring. The wall behind him showed the
infection curves – a graph that has become a kind of fever curve for his
presidency -- that he liked to keep quiet about during earlier press briefings.
Did the
U.S. suddenly have a new, reformed president? A leader one could trust to lead
the country through the terrible crisis?
This new
Trump could be called the "scripted Trump,” a man who listlessly reads
what others have written for him, a Trump who popped up especially often during
the 2016 election campaign, when his advisers believed that it was best to hide
the real Trump.
Scripted
Trump made his return appearance at the Tuesday briefing, which also marked the
resumption of the White House coronavirus briefing. Early in the pandemic, the
president appeared in front of the cameras almost daily, but the appearances
would spin out of control, with Trump denying the dangers of the virus and, in
the eyes of his advisers, doing so much damage himself so much that the
briefings were discontinued in April.
Now they
are back, with a more serious-looking Trump. But past experience suggests that
he won’t last long in this role. If the new edition of the briefings suggests
anything, it’s that the fear of defeat has reached the president himself.
An
Apocalyptic Air
In recent
days, he hasn’t just been plagued by the polls – his appearances have also had
an apocalyptic air to them. After the CEO of Goya, a bean company popular with
Latinx Americans, said he supported Trump, left-wing Latinx politicians
announced a boycott, and the president was photographed holding a can of beans.
There have also been devastating books published by his former National
Security Advisor John Bolton and his niece Mary Trump, both of whom portray the
president as mentally incompetent.
And
finally, Trump gave a devastating interview to journalist Chris Wallace of Fox
News, usually his favorite channel. It marked a rare moment in which a
journalist from the station questioned the president’s statements and thwarted
his performance with precise questions. The president went off the rails,
seeming tired and irritable.
Then casino
owner Trump in 1990: Trump has never been a very successful entrepreneur. He
inherited a large part of his fortune, more than $400 million, from his father.
Foto: ddp images / interTopics
Trump made
it clear that he might not accept defeat in the election, and Wallace
confronted him about his false claim that Joe Biden wants to abolish the
police. Trump also repeated that he had passed a cognitive test that he claimed
Biden would be unlikely to pass. The Montreal Cognitive Assessment is designed
to detect early forms of dementia in patients – and, contrary to what Trump may
think, it is not an IQ test.
The
journalist had to point out to Trump that the test was very simple, and merely
required someone to, for example, recognize a drawing of an elephant.
Nevertheless, the president boasted in another interview this week that, as
part of the test, he had actually managed to memorize and repeat the words
"person,” "woman,” "man,” "camera” and "TV.” The video
became a viral sensation.
The
problems faced by Trump in his campaign are especially evident in the
Republican stronghold of Texas. "Financially,” says restaurateur Adam
Duran, "I can only hold out a few more months.” He’s sitting at the
counter of the Fry Street Tavern, sipping a glass of water. It’s eerily quiet
in the bar, which is located in the central Texas town of Denton, about 40
miles north of Dallas. The only sound is of the whirring of the new ventilation
system Duran installed for $2,000 to protect his guests from the virus. It was
of no use. A few days later, Governor Greg Abbott announced that all bars in
the state had to close again. "I had just ordered more alcohol,” Duran
says.
There is
probably no other place in the United States where the policies for containing
the coronavirus are as contradictory as they are in the Republican-governed
state of Texas. When the virus began spreading in the spring, Dan Patrick gave
what has since become an infamous interview to Fox News. Shortly before his
70th birthday, the state’s lieutenant governor said that he was prepared to
sacrifice his life to keep the Texas economy going. "I'm all in,” Patrick
said, as if fighting the virus were a game of poker.
The state’s
response mirrored that attitude. For weeks, Governor Abbott acted as though
COVID-19 was a disease that would only hit states governed by Democrats. It
wasn’t until March 19, when the intensive care units in New York were filling
up, that he ordered a comprehensive lockdown in his state, even though it
wasn’t officially even called that. Everyone was free to leave their home,
Abbott assured. He also forbade cities governed by Democrats from fining anyone
who refused to wear a mask.
On April
30, Abbott lifted most of the restrictions in Texas. Restaurants, nail studios
and hairdressing salons opened, along with bars, including the one owned by
Adam Duran. Looking back, Duran says it was far too early. "I think the
restrictions should have been in place for at least another month,” he says. Almost
as soon as his business started up again, infection rates began to skyrocket in
Texas. Almost 10,000 new infections are currently being reported each day in
the state.
"We
have a lack of competent politicians,” Duran laments. For him, it is no longer
just a question of the 35 people he employs at his establishments. He’s also
worried he won’t be able to pay the mortgage on his home. "What we need is
a return to normality,” Duran says. "I, for one, am going to elect a
politician in November who knows how to run the country and is not busy with
his Twitter account all the time."
The front
page of the New York Daily News reporting on how close
Trump’s casinos were to bankruptcy in 1990. Foto: Daily News
In November
2016, Trump carried Texas by 9 percentage points. Now it seems at least
theoretically conceivable that, for the first time in decades, the Democrats
will prevail in the state in this November’s election. A June survey here
showed Biden with a five-percent lead in the state. If Texas, with its nearly
30 million inhabitants were to vote for the Democrats, the election would be as
good as lost for Trump.
Bankrupt As
a Businessman and Politician
Perhaps the
greatest misconception about Donald Trump before he got elected as president
was that, even though he didn’t have experience as a politician, he was a good
manager -- a successful businessman and a self-made billionaire who knew about
deals.
But that
was wrong even then. Trump has never been a very successful entrepreneur. He
inherited a large part of his fortune, more than $400 million, from his father.
The New York Times has reported that his companies posted losses of a billion
dollars in the 1980s and 1990s alone. Germany’s Deutsche Bank, of all
institutions, stepped in from the 1990s onward with loans to the tune of
billions, long before Trump became president. Many of his companies went
bankrupt, including three casinos in Atlantic City and the Plaza Hotel on Fifth
Avenue in New York. The stories of contractors and subcontractors Trump never
paid are notorious.
But it took
the coronavirus to unmask Trump for what he really is and for him to be
stripped of his apparent Midas touch, making it impossible to overlook the fact
that Trump is bankrupt not only as a businessman, but also as a politician and
president.
It’s
Tuesday morning, and a long line has formed again in front of the Salvation
Army building on Texas Avenue in Atlantic City. Several dozen people are
waiting to pick up a package with sandwiches, a bottle of water and some fruit.
The casino skyscrapers are just a short distance away and a several of the men
and women in the line have worked there or in the restaurants and shops of the
malls connected to them.
The
situation in Atlantic City isn’t likely to improve anytime soon. The casinos
have partly reopened and people are strolling along the Boardwalk, but the city
was already in trouble before the coronavirus. The pandemic has merely
accelerated the decline. Numerous buildings are empty and many streets are
filled with litter. Things deteriorate quickly when you get just a few blocks
away from the casinos.
Here, Keith
Fullmer has twice fallen victim to Donald Trump.
In 2000,
Fullmer landed a job as a bartender at the Taj Mahal, the Trump organization’s
largest casino in Atlantic City. It was the year Trump personally took over the
management of his casino empire. Thanks to Trump, who owned three buildings
there, Atlantic City appeared to be on its way to overtaking Las Vegas as the
gambling capital of the world.
No Viable
Business Model
Fullmer,
who is 69, talks fast and incessantly. He saw Trump occasionally when he
inspected the Taj Mahal. "He never shook anyone's hand," Fullmer
says. "He was afraid of germs." Business was already bad by that
point. Trump had financed the casinos with loans and junk bonds that were
shackled with absurdly high interest rates. It soon became clear that the
casinos would never generate enough income to pay back the creditors. Indeed,
Trump lacked a viable business model.
The
consequences were dramatic for many people. Hundreds of employees lost their
jobs, including Fullmer. Suppliers had to accept a fraction of what they were
entitled to. Investors also had to pay. Only one person escaped the whole
episode nearly unscathed: Trump. He received millions of dollars in salaries,
bonuses and expenses he billed through the company. Trump didn’t have a good
reputation among ordinary employees, and it was particularly bad among those
like Fullmer who were union members. "He didn't want unions in his
casinos," Fullmer says. "He kept trying to squeeze our wages and cut
our health insurance."
Trump's
casino companies went into bankruptcy proceedings four times. "I knew many
of the alcohol suppliers,” he says. "Trump owed them a lot of money. When
he filed for bankruptcy, they went bankrupt.”
Two of
Trump's casinos changed owners. The third, the former Trump Plaza, still stands
empty on the Boardwalk, the famous stretch of casinos. Parts of the white
facade have crumbled off, and the grounds are secured with a fence to prevent
anyone from getting injured. The complex is scheduled for demolition next year.
Nobody here talks about Las Vegas anymore.
After the
Taj Mahal was finally acquired by another company, Fullmer found employment
there as a bartender. But in contrast to the times under Trump, he says he was
treated decently as an employee. "The difference is like night and
day," he says.
This year,
Trump’s incompetence hit him a second time. Because Trump didn’t take the
pandemic seriously, infection figures rose to dizzying heights. Atlantic City’s
casinos had to close and Fullmer has been furloughed ever since. The only thing
he has left for the president is anger.
Republicans
Won’t Revolt
So far, no
high-ranking Republican politicians have turned their backs on Trump. The only
issue on which several senators have contradicted him is masks and how to
contain the virus. He doesn’t need to fear a revolt against him in the
Republican Party. Even if some members of the House and Senate are worried they
will be voted out of office along with the president this autumn, they don’t
dare to oppose him because he’s still highly popular at the grassroots level.
But a small
group of Republicans have turned their back on Trump and the party, and have
been fighting fiercely. The most prominent anti-Trump organization is the
Lincoln Project, which is run by former Republican campaign strategists and
floods the net with videos aimed at the president.
"Something’s
wrong with Donald Trump,” one video informs. "He’s shaky. Weak. Trouble
speaking. Trouble walking.” The whole thing is interspersed with footage of the
president holding a glass to his mouth with two hands or walking down a ramp at
the West Point Military Academy on shaky legs. "We’re not doctors, but
we’re not blind,” the narrator says. "It’s time we talk about this. Donald
Trump is not well."
Donald and
Melania Trump at Mount Rushmore, where the president described a nascent
"far-left fascism.” Foto: Andrea Hanks / ZUMA / picture alliance / dpa
Normally,
Trump is the one casting doubts about the physical and mental health of his
political opponents. His Democratic Party challenger Joe Biden has never
stooped to that level, but the Lincoln Project has no qualms about doing so.
"We
have become a social movement,” says Mike Madrid, a Republican political
adviser and one of the founders of the Lincoln Project. That may sound slightly
overblown, but the figures seem to back Madrid’s claim. More than 10,000
supporters attended the group’s first virtual town hall meeting two weeks ago.
But aren’t
they just Trump haters who wouldn’t vote for the president, anyway? "We
know from the data we have collected that a third of the people who support us
are committed Republicans,” says Lincoln Project CEO Sarah Lenti. During the
past quarter, the group raised $16.8 million, mostly from small donors, she
says.
The Lincoln
Project’s videos are having an effect, too. At a major event in Tulsa, Trump
spent 14 minutes explaining why he was walking down the ramp so slowly at West
Point. Nothing could have shown as clearly how concerned his is about
accusations that he has anything but perfect health.
It may also
have something to do with the fact that the Lincoln Project videos are as
direct and aggressive as Trump is with his opponents. "Michelle Obama has
said the Democrats will not stoop to Trump’s level,” says Madrid. "That
was a tactical error. If Trump wants to go down to gutter level, we will welcome
him there."
"It’s
the Economy, Stupid!”
Even if
only a small percentage of people change sides or stay away from the polling
booths in contested states like Wisconsin or Arizona, it would be enough to
impede Trump’s re-election. The fact that Biden is the Democratic candidate
makes it easier for moderate Republican voters to oppose Trump, especially now
that the president has lost his most important campaign argument: a booming
economy. Before the coronavirus struck, unemployment in the U.S. was at 3.5
percent, the lowest it had been since the 1960s.
Things were
also looking up for Africa Frasier. The 42-year-old mother of three was
promoted last year to head a Family Dollar supermarket in North Charleston,
South Carolina, she explains, with great pride. She had separated from her
partner "for the better,” as she puts it, and moved into a new home in the
spring with enough space for her children, Kayla, 13, Bobby, 12, and Angelo, 5.
The rent was cheap, the school was good and there was decent childcare. "I
had my life under control,” she says.
It was the
life of a single mother on the lower end of the American middle class, but
things were looking promising. Then the virus struck and schools closed. She
had to reduce her workload to take care of her children, but her employer
refused. This left her with no choice but to quit her job, she says. Like
millions of other Americans, she has few savings and was living from paycheck
to paycheck. As of May, she has no longer been able to pay the $700 a month in
rent on the house. Her landlord is trying to evict her now and Frasier will
have to go a court appointment in July. "If we get kicked out, I don’t
know what will happen next,” she says.
Poll
tracker Micah Cohen: "Trump is down by enough that it would take a
historically huge polling error for him to win again like in 2016."
Foto: Dina Litovsky / Redux / laif
According
to estimates by the Aspen Institute, a prominent American think tank, around 20
million renters in the U.S. could be facing eviction between now and the end of
September. Even though the U.S. government has imposed a partial moratorium on
evictions and foreclosures during the crisis, those restrictions end this week.
Other important aid measures are also threatening to run out soon.
"It’s
the economy, stupid,” is probably the most famous piece of American campaign
wisdom, reflecting the belief that no candidate can prevail against poor
economic figures. The remark is allegedly attributable to James Carville, the
political strategist who helped steer Bill Clinton’s successful election
campaign in 1992 against George H. W. Bush. The latter’s failure to get
re-elected actually had more to do with the global recession than with
Clinton’s strength.
Bush Sr.
was the last U.S. president to fail to land a second term. Trump could be the
next. Carville, still a sought-after politician commentator, recently said in a
television interview that he was certain Trump has "no chance” of
re-election in November.
A Fast
Crash, Slow Recovery?
Trump’s own
people know that he won’t prevail without a dynamic recovery to the economic
crash caused by the coronavirus. That’s why Trump is now commenting on
better-than-expected labor market figures from May and June with his
characteristically aggressive and calculated optimism. Speaking in front of the
White House just a few weeks ago, Trump predicted that the U.S. economy would
take off again with a "big bang.” "This is better than a 'V’,” he
said. "This is a rocket ship.”
Better than
a V? It has become common to compare the course of the economy to the shape of
letters. The "V” stands for a quick restoration of growth; the "U”
for a longer period of stagnation before the subsequent upswing; and an
"L” for a prolonged period of economic suffering.
Michael
Boskin, an economist at Stanford University, has added another option – the
Nike swoosh, representing a fast crash and a slow recovery. Boskin, who still
believed at the end of February that Trump should "win easily” based on
the economic situation at the time, now sees "greater than normal
uncertainty” in the forecasts because "the speed of economic recovery is
dependent on the health situation.”
And it
looks bad right now. In recent weeks, the U.S. has been setting sad new records
for infections on a daily basis. "The economy can't really recover as long
as so many people are or are getting sick," says Boskin. However, he also
points out that voters still have more confidence in Trump than they do in
Biden when it comes to the economy.
And there
is indeed an economic scenario that could yet save Trump: If the president and
Congress extend their emergency aid and stimulus payments beyond July and the
economy picks up again in time for the election. Boskin considers that to be
"possible, but unlikely.” The U.S. labor market did grow in June by an
astonishing 4.8 million jobs, but that’s still 15 million jobs fewer than in
February.
The
Congressional Budget Office (CBO), a bipartisan federal budgetary agency in
Washington, estimates that the U.S. economy will not fully overcome the
pandemic until 2028. The agency is forecasting that the unemployment rate,
currently at 11 percent, will remain at a higher level than before the crisis
until 2030.
Trump Will
Have To Hope for a Miracle
So, Trump
will have to hope for a miracle -- or for his opponent to stumble. Probably the
greatest weakness the Democrats have right now is their own presidential
candidate. Biden is 77 years old and already has two unsuccessful bids to
become the Democratic presidential nominee behind him. Each time, he managed to
stumble over himself. The fact that he got so far this time has less to do with
Biden’s skills than with the fact that the man who is called "Uncle Joe”
within his party is the person the most people could live with as the
Democrats’ candidate.
And that’s
still no guarantee that he can prevail against Trump, who has proven more than
once that he knows how to put up a fight.
Africa
Fasier had to quit her job when her employer refused to let her work less to
care for her children. Foto: Leslie Ryann McKeller / DER SPIEGEL
Trump’s
great skill has always been his ability to massively divide the country. That’s
also likely the calculation behind the police operations in American cities.
Not a day
has passed in recent weeks without Trump calling on his supporters to join the
culture war against a purported "leftist mob” which, together with Biden,
wants to "wipe out our history” and "defame our heroes.”
In his now
infamous 4th of July speech at Mt. Rushmore, Trump even went so far as to claim
"there is a new far-left fascism” on the rise in America and that he’s the
only one who can stop it. He said the leftists are not only determined to tear
down statues of generals from the South who once defended slavery, but also
those of historical presidents like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson
because they had themselves been slave owners.
It sometimes
seemed like Trump’s primary interest was statues: He announced the creation of
a statue park and said he wanted to use some of the statues at his campaign
rallies. These days, however, on
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