RSN: FOCUS: Frank Rich | What Trump Will Do to Win

12 June 20

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12 June 20

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FOCUS: Frank Rich | What Trump Will Do to Win

Frank Rich, New York Magazine
Rich writes:

fter the most transformative week the country has seen during his presidency, Donald Trump’s public approval is slipping in a wave of new polls, and a number of prominent Republicans have begun to publicly withhold their support. Have we reached a turning point?

“Trump is flailing like an overturned turtle,” wrote the Times columnist Jennifer Senior last weekend, hoping against hope like many of us that maybe, just maybe, this time is different. There is no shortage of evidence. Trump has lost white eminences of the NFL like Roger Goodell and Drew Brees. He has lost the Episcopal and Catholic leaders of Washington after the photo op in which he manhandled the Bible much as he did those women he bragged about grabbing on the Access Hollywood tape. And he adds further proof daily, if any were needed, that he has lost his mind. A man who feels he gets away with lying about anything up to and including the weather thought America would disregard video showing troops under his administration’s order violently attacking peaceful protesters in front of St. John’s Church. Trump thought we’d look at a video of burly Buffalo cops pushing over a rail-thin 75-year-old protester in broad daylight and still buy into his theory that the victim was an “Antifa provocateur” who staged the bloody cracking of his own skull.

No wonder that yesterday the flailing, overturned turtle had his lawyer demand that CNN retract and apologize for a poll showing him with a 38 percent approval rating and 14 points behind Joe Biden. Calling bad news “Fake News” wasn’t enough to curb his anxiety anymore.

But as grim as things may seem for (and to) Trump, if there’s one lesson we can learn from American history — from all of it, from the birth of the nation to this very minute — is that white supremacists will fight with everything they’ve got to preserve their power. And they have done so successfully more often than not, Robert E. Lee’s surrender notwithstanding. Though Trump is trailing in all legitimate polls — if not always by as large a margin as in CNN’s — those same surveys show that one data point hasn’t changed: He retains the near-total loyalty of his own party. His approval rating among the GOP rank and file in CNN’s poll is 88 percent. It’s nearly unanimous among Republicans on Capitol Hill, Mitt Romney and (occasionally) Lisa Murkowski excepted.

Trump knows he has that base’s blessing to run a full-out white supremacist campaign. He isn’t wasting any time. Even as NASCAR banned the Confederate flag yesterday, he declared that he would refuse to rename American military bases named after defeated Confederate leaders. Trump also announced yesterday that he would not only hold his first pandemic rally on June 19 — Juneteenth, the holiday commemorating the end of slavery — but would do so in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where, in 1921, rioting whites massacred as many as 300 people and incinerated all but a block of the city’s prosperous black neighborhood. This isn’t any old racial dog whistle, it’s the screech of a pack of vicious dogs like those Trump threatened to sic on Black Lives Matter demonstrators.

Of course, Trump doesn’t know Tulsa’s history, but those around him do — including Stephen Miller, who, at one point according to reports this week, was being tasked to write a Trump speech on racial relations. Miller and his cohort would also know that Ronald Reagan had set the GOP template for such a political provocation in 1980, when he opened his general election campaign by giving a speech on “states’ rights” in the same Mississippi county where three civil rights workers had been notoriously slaughtered during the Freedom Summer of 1964.

Reagan won in a landslide. Trump can’t and won’t repeat that history in 2020. The current numbers suggest that he can’t eke out his narrow Electoral College victory of 2016. But there is another way to win that doesn’t require getting the most votes — and it’s the same way that the forces of white supremacy have always won. You suppress black votes. If you can do that, you don’t have to care what CNN pollsters say.

What happened in Georgia’s primary election this week is as handy a preview as any of what’s in store. Georgia is turning blue. It has an anomalous two Senate seats up for grabs this year, when Mitch McConnell’s slender majority is on the line. It may be in play in the presidential contest as well. Since 2018, when Stacey Abrams lost Georgia’s governorship by 55,000 votes in a midterm election blighted by voter suppression, some 700,000 new voters, many young and nonwhite, have been added to the rolls.

The white supremacist party’s game plan to counter that threat was made clear this week: utter chaos. There was a breakdown in voting machines (purchased from a vendor with close ties to the Republican governor, Brian Kemp) that centered on black neighborhoods in Atlanta (including the one where Martin Luther King grew up), and a breakdown in mail voting that led to even Abrams herself receiving a defective ballot.

This is just a glimpse of what will be a national effort. Trump and his party will use any means they can to abridge the right to vote — whether it be this week’s vote by the Republican-majority senate in Iowa to restrict mail ballots, or White House inaction on Russian election interference, or the administration’s ongoing enabling of a COVID-19 second wave that can be exploited to sow further chaos into the electoral process right through Election Day.

Trump may or may not be at the tipping point. The country is.

The resignation of James Bennet from the New York Times’ Opinion section, alongside similar turmoil in other newsrooms, seems to mark a recognition at the highest levels that many of the inherited conventions of mainstream journalism are out of step with the times. Moving forward, what do they need to do to refocus?

I agree with the press analysts, among them Ben Smith of the Times, that the greater issue raised by this institutional debacle is not the question of what opinion pieces should be published, but the broader one roiling the news operations of all major mainstream media in the Trump era. As David Roberts of Vox put it succinctly, these newsrooms are “habituated to a notion of ‘objectivity’ that makes telling the real story impossible.” The real story that gets short-changed is not the administration’s bottomless corruption that the press, often led by the Times, has often exposed with first-rate investigative reporting, but is, in Roberts’s term, the “racialized authoritarianism” of the Trump movement. As the Times reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones said last weekend, news organizations “are really struggling to cover in a way that appears to be nonpartisan a kind of political landscape where one political party has in many ways gone rogue.” By targeting journalism itself as an enemy, Trump and his party have mocked and destabilized the press’s traditional “two-sided” approach to news coverage and have been relentless in exploiting its weaknesses with propaganda and distracting, provocative stunts.

The truth is that neither the Times nor any other news organization has ever been scrupulously “nonpartisan.” Just look at how 99 percent of the mainstream press tilted its news coverage to lend credence to the Bush administration’s fictional case for war in Iraq. Decisions about what’s important and what’s not are made daily. The Times (and not just the Times) was similarly flummoxed by the racialized authoritarianism of Nazi Germany during World War II, and relegated the Holocaust to tiny articles on inside pages.

Perhaps more Jewish editors with clout in the newsroom would have made a difference then. Certainly more black editors would make a difference now. This week the Times’ chief White House correspondent wrote a piece aptly comparing Trump to the virulent segregationist and presidential candidate George Wallace in 1968, but then threw the “other side” a crumb by ahistorically asserting without evidence that Trump “does not share Wallace’s most extreme positions.” A news story that abutted it in the print edition that day described the Republican “Southern strategy” as being an effort by which “candidates sought to win over onetime Democrats by portraying themselves as tough on crime and disorder.” Perhaps a different editor might have asked why, perchance, this strategy was called “Southern.”

A non-racial issue that illustrates the press’s dilemma involves covering Trump’s tweets. They are covered profusely, but with rare exceptions — his tweet about the Buffalo demonstrator being a prominent one — they are played as side shows to the larger narrative of administration and congressional events. But don’t we know by now that these tweets are the main events for this presidency and its base? When the president of the United States repeatedly accuses a television personality of murder or tweets out a video attacking the memory of George Floyd before 80-million-plus followers, that is banner-headline news, not to be lost in the middle of a news story or to go unmentioned on a Sunday morning talk show. Somehow we’ve fallen into the habit of normalizing such actions by filing them away under the heading “that’s just Trump being Trump.”

Make no mistake that the big winner of the Tom Cotton debacle was Tom Cotton in particular and Trumpism in general. The Times’ disowning of his incendiary opinion piece has allowed him and the usual suspects on the crybaby right to liken the paper to Mao’s China and the groupthink of PC college campuses. Some of the loudest voices sounding this gong were at Murdoch outlets like Fox News and the Wall Street Journal, who allow only occasional and ineffectual liberal dissenters (remember Alan Colmes?) to sully their party line. They don’t even pretend to give a damn about “both sides” as they enforce their own political correctness.

Mitch McConnell’s former chief of staff, Josh Holmes, told the Washington Post that Cotton has emerged at the top of front-runners for the GOP presidential nomination in 2024. Whatever happens to Trump in 2020, his white supremacist cause isn’t going anywhere, and Cotton’s rise fulfills my long-held nightmare that its next leader will be far more effective than his predecessor.

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FAIR: Media Acknowledge Drive to Defund Police—but Seek to Blunt Its Radical Edge

View article on FAIR's website Media Acknowledge Drive to Defund Police—but Seek to Blunt Its Radical Edge Julie Hollar Corporate media are typically loath to cover protests (at least, those not of the right-wing variety), as years of FAIR analysis can attest. But the remarkable ongoing nationwide protests against racism and police brutality have not only drawn widespread media coverage, they've shifted the national conversation on public safety. In the little more than two weeks since George Floyd's brutal death at the hands of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, the idea of defunding the police was mentioned on the nation's TV networks and in its national newspapers at least 300 times. In the entire year preceding that, it was mentioned exactly twice (Washington Post, 1/10/20; CNN, 6/22/19)—both times using the specter of police defunding as a political weapon, and completely disconnected from any activism advocating for it. Today, nearly every major outlet has published an article attempting to explain what "defund the police" means—and most are treating the call with seriousness rather than derision. This remarkable shift comes as media outlets have become increasingly critical of the widespread violence by police departments across the country against nonviolent protesters, and against journalists themselves (FAIR.org, 6/9/20).  This reporting on protester demands is a welcome change, and a testament to the power of nonviolent popular uprising. The public's perception that crime was rising when it was actually falling (Pew, 11/16/16) was a media failure. It's important to remember that media have been complicit in the steady increase in police budgets over the years. While violent crime has dropped dramatically since the early 1990s, people have consistently reported for the past 20 years that they believe it is increasing. (See Gallup and Pew research.) Media have played no small role in those misperceptions. The New York Times, for example, mentioned "homicide" or "murder" in 129 headlines in 1990, when the city's murder rate was 31 per 100,000. In 2013, when the rate had plummeted to 4 per 100,000, it ran more murder headlines—135 (HuffPost, 3/16/15). And newspapers have long been cheerleaders for expanded policing, like the discredited "broken windows" strategy of ramping up policing of low-level offenses in the hopes of having an impact on violent crimes (FAIR.org, 7/3/16). As Josmar Trujillo has pointed out (FAIR.org, 2/12/16), in the wake of the 2014 protests over the police killings of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner in New York City, reporters and pundits steered the national conversation on police reform toward the idea of "community policing"—a term as agreeable-sounding as it is vague, and which in practice typically means more police, and more reliance on police for community problem-solving—exactly the opposite of what protesters were (and still are) calling for. Today, even as ideas for police reform that barely surfaced in corporate media in the past are becoming part of the mainstream conversation, media continue to try to steer that conversation away from its radical edge. Are we sure this is the Washington Post (6/9/20)? "It makes sense to consider changes to ways of doing things that were never optimal but have seemed, until now, so baked-in as to be beyond questioning." First, the remarkable: The Washington Post editorial board (6/9/20)—not known for its friendliness to revolutionary ideas—called the "provocative slogan...a welcome call to reimagine public safety in the United States." The editorial asked whether police really ought to be responding to mental health emergencies, dealing with homelessness, and funding local governments by "extracting fees from citizens," and opined that "onlookers are rightfully alarmed at plans to slash social services while sparing police budgets." The Los Angeles Times editorial board (6/8/20), which, as it openly acknowledged, "has consistently backed the expansion of the LAPD," argued that the city government's proposed 8% cut to the police budget should be "the beginning of a larger rethinking of the mission and scope of the LAPD," and that the city should stop "treating the LAPD as the answer to all public safety problems." At the same time, the paper clearly attempted to stake out limits on the debate, dismissing local organizations' call for a 90% police budget cut—with the funds redirected to community services and investment—as "extreme." At the Baltimore Sun, the editorial board (6/8/20) weighed in with ambivalent support that served to defang protester demands. "Defund the Police: Not as Scary (or New) as It Sounds," read the headline, under which the board explained: Here in Baltimore where the post-Freddie Gray police reform efforts have barely taken root, there’s an urgency to addressing police misconduct and criminal justice disparities (as well as broader societal inequities that transcend policing) but not necessarily to fundamentally changing course. They concluded: "This much is clear: Defunding is not an anarchist’s plot so much as a continuation of reform efforts, many of which have proven effective." Editorial support for protester demands, however tepid, was hardly uniform. The ever-reliably right-wing Wall Street Journal editorial board (6/8/20), for instance, held fast to fear-mongering under the headline, "Defund Police, Watch Crime Return,"  and many big local papers likewise pushed back against calls for police budget cuts (e.g., Chicago Tribune, 6/10/20; San Francisco Chronicle, 6/9/20; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 6/8/20). "Experts Say Not So Fast" (6/7/20), on the other hand, may be the most Washington Post–y headline ever. There are plenty of other examples of journalists and pundits throwing cold water on protester demands. Under the headline, "Protesters Hope This Is a Moment of Reckoning for American Policing. Experts Say Not So Fast," Washington Post reporters (6/7/20) warned hopeful protesters that "Floyd's killing might not be the watershed moment that civil rights advocates are hoping for." Elsewhere in the Post (6/7/20), a team of reporters describing the defund police movement framed the dilemma facing politicians: Officials face a politically fraught decision about how to respond, weighing whether to stand with protesters who are demanding an extreme overhaul at the risk of jeopardizing public safety and taking authority away from police officers in communities that have sought more protection against violent crime. So to “stand with protesters” means “jeopardizing public safety”—thanks for clarifying, Washington Post! But this pat framing contradicts some of its own sources, who attempted to explain that calls for defunding the police are not calls for abandonment of public safety, but rather reinvesting in resources that will enhance public safety without the threat or use of force—and not such that “someone just flips a switch and there are no police,” in the quoted words of sociologist Alex Vitale, but over time. It also quoted Minneapolis City Council president Lisa Bender, who explained the majority's decision to disband the city's police department: It’s our commitment to end policing as we know it, and re-create systems of public safety that actually keep us safe…. Our efforts at incremental reform have failed. Period. The paper countered these views with several law enforcement voices, like acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf, who called the idea of defunding police "an absurd assertion"—and it's those voices that come through in the paper's "neutral" reporting voice. Further down, the reporters wrote: Though a popular rallying cry at a tense moment, defunding police departments is not always what residents really want, and the issue of just how many officers to put in neighborhoods is complex, particularly in areas with high rates of crime. As evidence of what residents "really want," the paper pointed to a forum in Washington, DC, about how to ensure children and teenagers have safe routes to and from school after students were killed on their commutes. Students said they wanted more officers to patrol their routes, but they also said they hated walking out of their school buildings in the afternoon and seeing police cars parked outside. That's the whole point: what people "really want" is safety from violence, but for many, the sources of that violence include the police. When increased policing has always been the only solution given serious discussion in media, most people have had no way to even have a conversation about how to keep safe without having to rely primarily on a force trained in the use of militarized, violent tactics—which leaves them with seemingly contradictory and impossible responses to questions of public safety. Black Lives Matter has moved public opinion on racism and police violence nearly as much in the past two weeks as it has in the past two years--but Chris Cillizza (CNN, 6/8/20) is here to tell them how politics really works. CNN's Chris Cillizza (6/8/20) devoted a recent column to the rhetorical question, "Is 'Defund the Police' a Massive Political Mistake?" Cillizza's main evidence is a series of tweets by Donald Trump about the "Radical Left" and "Law & Order," and his campaign's farcical attempts to link Joe "Shoot 'Em in the Leg" Biden to the Defund Police movement. The "heart of the problem," Cillizza argued, is that while "it is likely that what most people involved in these protests want is not to take all money away from police departments and get rid of cops," but rather "an examination of the budgets for police departments and a look at the increased militarization of local law enforcement," Trump will destroy the nuance of that call. In fact, "defund the police" means different things to different people saying it, but for nearly all of them it means much more than "looks" and "examinations." They point out that reform has been tried in many places—including Minneapolis, where Floyd was killed—to no effect, which is why alternatives to policing are needed. But after watering down their demands, Cillizza's solution to the problem he laid out isn't using the power of journalism to make sure the conversation doesn't succumb to Trump's efforts. Instead, he advocated for politicians to likewise water down calls for deep, systemic change: Democratic leaders need to change the conversation to be about reforming police departments and re-allocating some resources for more community building and less militarization. By asking protesters to be less bold, to not overreach, Cillizza adheres to one of corporate media's most important roles: placing limits on the acceptable and the possible. Many of those calling to defund the police do mean exactly that. While nearly every outlet has been quick to ridicule the idea of defunding the police entirely as ridiculous—parroting the message coming from police themselves—police abolitionists are indeed pushing people to envision a world where police (and prisons) as we know them are obsolete. Chicago Reader (8/25/16) on police abolitionist Jessica Disu: "In light of relentless police violence against black people, she says it's clear that 'our police is not working—we need to replace it with something new.'"  Taking away 90% of the LAPD's budget, as local activists have demanded, is essentially police abolition. As Mohamed Shehk of the abolitionist organization Critical Resistance argues: Those in power work very hard to make us believe that imprisonment and policing are natural, but we know the opposite to be true. These systems had to be put in place, and must be constantly reinforced and legitimized to the point that we are made to believe that our society will descend into chaos if they don't exist. In reality, the prison industrial complex is responsible for the chaos that many people experience through separation, destabilization and state violence, especially in Black, Indigenous and communities of color. Communities past and present have long used practices of resolving harm and conflict without relying on punitive measures, like caging or policing. There are many communities today who by default address conflict themselves because they simply don't trust the police—for good reason. More and more people have been exploring and practicing restorative and transformative justice models to hold people accountable for harm committed, many of which are inspired by Indigenous and non-Western practices and values. Harm and conflict predate cops and cages, will outlive them, and communities ultimately will continue to have creative ways of addressing and overcoming them. In a lengthy exploration of police abolition in the independent Chicago Reader (8/25/16), activist Mariame Kaba explains to reporter Maya Dukmasova that the abolitionist project is not just about police, but the whole prison industrial complex, and that it requires rethinking entire systems of crime, punishment, property and social relations: "Abolition is not about changing one thing. It's about changing everything, together." Media wave away this possibility as absurd, but how to move beyond the US’s racist, shockingly violent criminal justice system is a discussion our country not only can but desperately needs to have. Research assistance: Loretta Graceffo

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