Donald Trump prays George Washington will be next.

I was afraid that the moment had come; age had beaten me down and I had become a curmudgeon. When a New York Times story the other day read "Activists in San Francisco last week toppled a statue of Ulysses S. Grant, the former president who led the Union army to victory," my reaction was that it was time for people to step back and take a deep breath. In the four weeks since George Floyd was murdered, the widely-embraced public protests over systemic racism in law enforcement and the killing of Black men and women by police officers had given way to protesters defacing and tearing down statues of past presidents of the United States.

 Pedestal where the statue of Ulysses S. Grant once stood.
Photo: Yalonda M. James / The Chronicle

I understand the argument; Grant was a slaveholder. So were many of the authors of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. The FAQ page at Mount Vernon explains that George Washington became a slaveholder at age 11. None of this has been a secret. It is part of our history, and will always be part of our history. The unique power of this moment is not in tearing down those images, but in the willingness of a large part of the country to confront that history in a way we haven't before.

Then Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser bailed me out. Faced with protesters clamoring to remove the statue of Abraham Lincoln at the Emancipation Memorial, Bowser argued that the city should go through an appropriate public process to determine the fate of statues, and “not have a mob decide they want to pull it down.” Her words summed up my sentiments, I am not pro-statue as much as I am anti-mob – to use her formulation – and believe that public process is essential to pluralistic democracy. Perhaps agreeing with her doesn't mean I have not become a curmudgeon, but I felt better knowing that at least there were two of us.

The simple truth is that my reaction had nothing to do with being anti-mob or pro-statue, it is that I am anti-Trump. Perhaps more than anything, I am also opposed in this fragile moment to doing anything that may provide Donald Trump a foothold to regain the momentum in his reelection bid.

June has been a very bad month for Donald Trump. For most of the year, Joe Biden held a small but steady lead over the President in the FiveThirtyEight national polling average. A five point lead in national polls, however, does not necessarily translate into a victory in the Electoral College, so while Biden consistently held a small lead in the polls, Trump stubbornly held an edge in online betting markets.

By the beginning of this month, Trump's campaign began to visibly falter. Public outrage over the brutal killing of George Floyd, broad support for the ensuing public protests, and then Trump's gassing of protesters in Lafayette Square and his St. John's Church stunt contributed to a dramatic shift in the political landscape. While Trump intended his show of force on Lafayette Square to bolster his credibility as a "law and order President," it had the opposite impact. In particular, his actions provoked harsh reactions from a number of the nation's most senior military figures, led by his former Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis. Americans across the political spectrum had to be particularly unsettled by the rebuke issued by retired Marine four-star General John Allen, which began: "The slide of the United States into illiberalism may well have begun on June 1, 2020. Remember the date. It may well signal the beginning of the end of the American experiment."

Two weeks ago, the Trump campaign threatened to sue CNN for publishing a poll that showed the President down by 14 points. While the CNN poll appeared to be an outlier in the moment, by the time Trump arrived home from his failed Tulsa rally last weekend, the CNN results had been validated by no less than Fox News, whose poll showed the President down by 12 points. The highly regarded New York Times/Siena College poll released this week mirrored the CNN numbers, showing Trump trailing Biden 50 to 36 percent, with the President losing support across all demographic groups. This week, the Wall Street Journal editorial board piled on with a scathing denunciation of both his lack of any coherent campaign message and inability to meet the moment of multiple crises facing the nation.

Trump arrives home from Tulsa
Photo: Patrick Semansky/AP/Shutterstock

Even as Joe Biden has built a sizable polling lead over the past few weeks – reflected in a 62 to 39 lead in online trading – a dangerous hubris has emerged that belies the inherent volatility of the race. Four weeks ago, the race was a dead heat. For the two months prior to that, Donald Trump appeared to have more paths to victory than Biden, as he held a steady advantage in many, if not most, of the swing states viewed as critical to the outcome in the Electoral College. While current polling shows that Biden has gained an upper hand in the race, ongoing questions surrounding the Democratic Party's Election Day get-out-the-vote infrastructure, compounded by the inherent uncertainties of how the pandemic will impact turnout, lend a greater than normal degree of uncertainty as to how poll numbers will translate into Election Day results. Suffice it to say, we are several months before the November election, and as good as this week's polling looks, the outcome is far from certain.

From the point of view of the Trump campaign, images of the CHAZ occupation in Seattle and protesters tearing down statues of U.S. Presidents is nothing less than manna from heaven. With the economy in tatters, rising Covid-19 hospitalizations in Florida, Arizona and Texas, and public opinion widely derisive of Trump's management of the triumvirate of crises playing out across the nation, protesters going after Abe Lincoln and George Washington – to say nothing of images of the White Jesus – may well offer Donald Trump's last, best hope for regaining the electoral advantage he had just one month ago.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had it right a few months back, when she observed – with barely concealed disdain – that it is a peculiar product of the structure of our democracy that she and Joe Biden are in the same political party. It is a structure that has not worked out well for progressives over the years. In 1992, they supported Bill Clinton, only to see him sign into law welfare reform, the crime bill, and financial deregulation, each anathema to progressive views. Eight years later, enough progressives abandoned Al Gore for Ralph Nader to give the country eight years of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and the two longest wars in the nation's history.

A bit over four months from now, one party will win the White House while the other will be devastated, wondering how things went so wrong. Whether or not Democrats win may well depend on how seriously progressives take their role as coalition partners over the coming months with a presidential candidate whom they do not particularly like. In particular, I fear that it may also depend on whether those who are tearing down statues in cities across the country realize that their actions may well hurt Joe Biden and Democrats in November, and offer Donald Trump his last, best hope of winning reelection.

Follow David Paul on Twitter @dpaul. He is working on a book, with a working title of "FedExit! To Save Our Democracy, It’s Time to Let Alabama Be Alabama and Set California Free."

Artwork by Joe Dworetzky. Check out Joe's political cartooning at www.jayduret.com. Follow him on Twitter @jayduret or Instagram at @joefaces.

A light at the end of the tunnel?

In the wake of public protests this week surrounding the brutal killing of George Floyd, the statue of former Mayor Frank Rizzo was unceremoniously removed from the plaza across from Philadelphia City Hall. Earlier this year, Delbert Africa was released from prison after serving a 42-year sentence. Rizzo and Africa will be forever linked in the history of the City of Brotherly Love, and provide a reminder of the sordid history of the treatment of Blacks by police in America as a matter of both public policy and political exigency.

Delbert Africa being beaten by police in Philadelphia
Philadelphia Inquirer, August 9, 1978

When Kathy and I moved to Philadelphia in 1978, one of the first images we saw on TV was of City police officers beating up Delbert Africa – a member of a Black liberation group called MOVE – and then dragging his limp body across the sidewalk by his dreads. Race was an ever-present reality of daily life in Philly at the time, and the images of confrontations between the police and MOVE members suited then-Mayor Rizzo just fine. A former cop who rose to power feeding off the pride and resentments of his core supporters across Philly's white ethnic neighborhoods, Rizzo was a tough guy's tough guy, and images of police brutality – almost exclusively against Blacks – only burnished his image. The fact that Blacks faced unequal treatment before the law was not something people seriously questioned in Frank Rizzo's Philadelphia, it was simply in the air. It was a fact of life. If a car was pulled over on one of the city's main arteries, you expected the driver to be Black. Driving While Black, it was called. Not derisively, just an observation of the reality on the ground.

By 1978, racial injustice was on its way to becoming part of the platform of the national Republican Party. Not an overt policy, like strong national defense, free markets and low taxes, but one of those quiet exigencies of political strategy, designed to attract the same voters that made Frank Rizzo an icon of the era. Rizzo and the other tough guys of the time – from Alabama Governor George Wallace and Birmingham police chief Bull Connor to Chicago's Mayor Dick Daley – were Democrats. Dating back to the Civil War, the Democratic Party had been the party of southern white power, Jim Crow, and tough guys – with apologies to Teddy Roosevelt – while the GOP was the party of the Emancipation Proclamation, of Reconstruction, and of commerce, from Wall Street to Main Street. Beginning with FDR's New Deal and Truman's integration of the military, racial loyalties began to shift, as Black voters, historically loyal to the GOP that had led the fight against slavery, began to migrate to the Democratic Party, where they found themselves in uncomfortable coalition with southern segregationists and the KKK.

After losing the presidency in 1960 to John F. Kennedy in a squeaker, Richard Nixon determined to resolve that uneasy coalition within the Democratic Party, and in doing so improve his own electoral prospects in 1968 and 1972. In the first half of the decade, Republicans in Congress voted nearly unanimously for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, while southern Democrats uniformly sought to block their passage. By the end of the decade, Nixon's Southern Strategy – designed to win southern Democrats to the erstwhile Party of Lincoln – had begun the complete remapping of the political landscape to what we see today.

The transformation of the Republican Party overseen by Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, ultimately laid the groundwork for the Trump presidency. Nixon strategist Kevin Phillips described the political realignment underway in Nixon's 1968 campaign in his 1969 book The Emerging Republican Majority. The era of "Yankee silk stocking" Republicans was over, Phillips told the New York Times at the time. "From now on, Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote, and they don't need any more than that... The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That's where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats."

Nixon did it because it worked. By 1972, the Republican and the Democratic parties had traded positions on issues of race from a decade earlier, as southern Democrats and a large share of northern urban ethnic voters – Frank Rizzo's base – shifted their support to the GOP in presidential elections and away from a national Democratic Party that had moved to the left. With the GOP's history as the party of civil rights firmly in the rearview mirror, Richard Nixon defeated George McGovern by 18 million votes. The political landscape had been upended, and the notion that the GOP was the party of Abraham Lincoln became an historical artifact.

Over the ensuing decades, Republican presidential candidates followed the script, cloaking racial appeals in what campaign strategists would call "dog whistles" – language that the targeted voters would understand but would not offend the sensibilities of traditional, pro-civil rights Republican voters. For Ronald Reagan, running in 1980, that meant talking about "states rights" in speeches, while tossing in seemingly off-hand comments about strapping young bucks and welfare queens for good measure. For the erstwhile silk stocking Republican George H.W. Bush, it meant signing off on the Willie Horton attack ad in 1988. For George W. Bush in 2000, it meant the smearing of John McCain with charges that "he had fathered an illegitimate black child" in order to win the critical South Carolina primary. In 1986, Frank Rizzo changed his party registration to Republican.

Lee Atwater, a campaign advisor to George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan explained the evolution of race in presidential politics in a 1981 interview. "You start out in 1954 by saying, 'N----r, n----r, n----r.' By 1968 you can’t say 'n----r' – that hurts you, it backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff.... Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes... totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… 'We want to cut this,' is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than 'N----r, n----r.'" Atwater would die of cancer in 1991 at the age of 40, leaving the role of dean of GOP political strategy to his mentor and collaborator Karl Rove.

Racism is like crack, or at least it has proven to be for the Republican Party. Over the years, there have been Republican leaders who have tried to steer the party off its reliance on racial dog whistles as a core election day turnout strategy. In 1996, Bob Dole – true to his Kansas roots – and Jack Kemp tried to restore civil rights Republicanism. A decade later, in 2005, during the era of George W. Bush "compassionate conservatism," RNC Chairman Ken Mehlman formally apologized for the Southern Strategy at a national conference of the NAACP. Then, in 2013, a much publicized RNC Election-Autopsy Report argued that the party had to fundamentally change its focus and message to appeal to Hispanic, Black, Asian, and gay Americans.

To no avail. In 2016, eschewing dog whistles for a megaphone, Donald Trump set all pretense aside. His core voters, the ones who show up at rallies, wear MAGA hats, and carry semi-automatic rifles to protests, are the political descendants of those Richard Nixon targeted a half-century ago. For fifty years, genteel, politically correct Republicans have kept them at a distance – like uncouth white trash relatives that they were embarrassed to be seen with in public – only to draw them close as election day approached with promises of pork rinds, guns and judges. But Donald Trump is not George Bush; he viscerally connects with their resentments. They have embraced him as their own unlike any Republican in memory, and Trump has every intention of keeping it that way. His "law and order" strategy for the upcoming fall campaign is intended to turn back the clock to the 1968 Presidential race, integrating elements of both Richard Nixon's law and order theme and George Wallace's harsher, more direct racial appeal.

A civil rights demonstrator being attacked by a police dogs in
Birmingham, Alabama in 1963 (Bill Hudson/AP)

The challenge Trump faces as he does his best to mimic southern segregationists George Wallace and Bull Connor with tweets about shooting looters and sicking dogs on protesters is that a half-century has passed. When Richard Nixon started the GOP down the racial road, the nation was 85% non-Hispanic white, while today it is barely 60%. That decline is a central factor in the resentment of the Trump base – the feeling that they are losing their country – but, in a democracy, the realities reflected in the shifting demographics of the country can only be evaded for so long.

There was nothing phony about Frank Rizzo's tough guy swagger; he was part of the country's  long tradition of tough guy police chiefs, mayors and governors. But as much as Donald Trump might admire old time tough guys at home and present day thugs abroad, that era is over in America. He is no tough guy; he is just a former playboy cyberbully who wants to play a tough guy on television. Using chemical agents to disperse peaceful protesters on Lafayette Square, his faux-junta march from the White House to St. John's Church, and his stage-managed, I-am-a-strongman photo op with a Bible held aloft were the antics of a weak, desperate man seeking to change the subject from the physical, economic and spiritual carnage that have swept the nation on his watch.

Perhaps his strongman gambit will work with his base, and no doubt the usual coterie of evangelical leaders will stand by him. But the blowback from a wide range of religious, military and civic leaders has been harsh and swift. Some of the reactions to George Floyd's murder, and the President's response to the ensuing protests, have been particularly noteworthy, including a harsh rebuke of the President's antics from televangelist Pat Robertson, and a change in tone from Rush Limbaugh that offered the prospect of a sea change in the political landscape.

Limbaugh, the senior voice of conservative talk radio, has been dismissive of the "Hands up, don't shoot" movement from day one, maintaining the politically-correct stance on the right that the notion of systemic police misconduct is a fabrication of the left. The video of Floyd being slowly killed on a Minneapolis street corner, however, shook Limbaugh up, leaving him with a sense that something was very wrong. "I have been distressed, heartbroken, angry... over the treatment of George Floyd..." he told his listeners this week. "He didn’t lose his life. It was taken from him. He was murdered for no possible explicable, justifiable reason. It was just sickening..." 

The police beating of a Black man was sickening back in 1978, and, as Rush told his followers, it was sickening this year. This time, however, there is hope that change is possible. As much as the President will continue to try to turn episodes of looting to his political advantage, the world has changed and precious few people seem to think otherwise.

Follow David Paul on Twitter @dpaul. He is working on a book, with a working title of "FedExit! To Save Our Democracy, It’s Time to Let Alabama Be Alabama and Set California Free."

Artwork by Joe Dworetzky. Check out Joe's political cartooning at www.jayduret.com. Follow him on Twitter @jayduret or Instagram at @joefaces.