Prepare for worse to come from Donald Trump, panicker-in-chief

Editorial: Like a gambler in a casino on a losing streak, the US president has doubled his bet on the fears of white America. It is unpleasant politics, appealing to the worst of the nation’s character

Trump in front of Mount Rushmore on Friday (Reuters)

We get the impression that Donald Trump is becoming increasingly panicky as the opinion polls move against him. He is now 10 points behind Joe Biden, and his net approval rating of minus 15 points is worse than that of any president who won re-election since the war, at this stage in their first term.

Hence his attempt to stoke crude nationalism, with a racist subtext, in his Independence Day speech yesterday at Mount Rushmore. Apparently referring, in part, to the Black Lives Matter protests that have swept the nation since the killing of George Floyd, President Trump said: “Our nation is witnessing a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values and indoctrinate our children.”

This is a rather obvious attempt to divert the election from the battlefield of public health and the economy, on which he is losing, to the culture war that he believes he can still win. After all, it worked for him last time. Up against the anodyne liberalism of Hillary Clinton, he fought a ruthless and simple campaign, promising to build a wall along the Mexico border and to defend America from immigration and immigrants.

But now he is fighting as the incumbent, defending a record that is looking worse by the day. His weakness was never going to be ideology but competence. For many Americans it did not matter for a long time that their president was spouting demonstrable falsehoods from the rostrum or tweeting fact-checkable untruths from his phone. As long as the economy was booming and Mr Trump was their identity politician, the president had enough of a base to secure re-election.

Then came the coronavirus, and people could observe in their own workplaces and neighbourhoods that things were not going well. When they looked to the White House for leadership, too many of them could see only an angry man shouting at clouds.

Like a gambler in a casino on a losing streak, Mr Trump has doubled his bet on the fears of white America. It is unpleasant politics, appealing to the worst of the nation’s character and history. “Angry mobs are trying to tear down statues of our founders, deface our most sacred memorials and unleash a wave of violent crime in our cities,” Mr Trump said, conflating a reasonable desire for order with the defence of Confederate statues and other symbols of segregation.

We fear that there is worse to come. As Mr Trump grows increasingly desperate, we cannot expect him to be constrained by the unwritten norms of decency and civility without which the written constitution of the US cannot function.

And November is still four months away. We hope that in that time, the state governments, although they are unlikely to get much help from Washington, manage to control the virus. Politics is not predictable, but we suspect that a significant section of Mr Trump’s former support has been alienated by his manifest incompetence in handling the public health emergency.

We very much hope that there are simply not enough likely voters in America who can be swayed by a nationalist message, with such overtones of racial division, to make up the ground Mr Trump has lost before the election.