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babylonsister

(171,054 posts) Thu Jun 11, 2020, 07:37 PM Jun 2020

David Corn: Trump Just Showed Us His Core Campaign Message: Chaos In the Streets

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/06/trump-just-showed-us-his-core-campaign-message-chaos-in-the-streets/

Trump Just Showed Us His Core Campaign Message: Chaos In the Streets
“It’s time for this madness to END.”
David Corn
Washington, DC, Bureau ChiefBio | Follow

Chaos in the streets. Looters running free. Rioters threatening you and your family. Anarchists destroying…everything. And there’s only one way to stop the end of civilization: re-elect Donald J. Trump as president.

That’s what Trump’s core campaign message is becoming. While once Trump intended to run in 2020 on the strength of the US economy, he has now shifted to a new narrative: Americans are in immediate danger due to the Black Lives Matter protests that have spread across the nation. Focusing on the limited violence and looting that has accompanied the demonstrations (which have mostly been peaceful), Trump is selling a dark and apocalyptic vision. The end is nigh, unless Trump can deliver the “LAW & ORDER,” he repeatedly vows in his tweets.

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Trump clearly wants to duck responsibility for the civil unrest that has occurred on his watch while positioning himself as the thin orange line between stability and societal collapse. It’s American Carnage, Part II. In this script, protesters are malicious marauders who are heading to your town. And Trump alone can protect you and your loved ones from the angry (black?) hordes. It’s a campaign of fear and loathing. It trades racist dog whistles for bullhorns. As millions of Americans are rising up to demand adherence to the nation’s professed values of justice and equality, Trump is fostering an atmosphere of darkness, despair, and doom. Be scared, my fellow Americans, be very scared, he says. Because then he has a better chance of winning your vote.

This is the message his campaign has begun unleashing in a highly coordinated fashion. “The radical Democrats went off the deep end this week, voicing their full-fledged support for defunding our law enforcement while bending the knee to rioters and looters,” Kimberly Guilfoyle, national chair of the Trump Victory Finance Committee, huffed on Wednesday. Bending the knee to rioters? The intent of that clever phrase is obvious; it equates the demonstrations against police violence to acquiescence to looting. They are all thugs: Colin Kaepernick, Nancy Pelosi, the protesters, and the criminals. “It is vital that we re-elect President Trump to keep Joe Biden and the socialist mob from destroying everything that makes America great,” Mercedes Schlapp, a top strategist for the Trump campaign, proclaimed this week, “Trump is standing up for law and order, while the radical Democrats have refused to condemn violence in our cities and are working to defund the law enforcement officers who have prevented chaos in our streets.”

The buzz words are glaring. Let’s push those buttons: Chaos, mob, law and order. That’s the plan. Trump can no longer politically exploit the economy. He cannot tout (convincingly) his inept response to the coronavirus pandemic that has claimed the lives of over 110,000 Americans. He can only cook up a fictitious threat, incite terror, stir panic—and posture as the strong man who can beat back an imaginary calamity. He is a scared president trying to whip up phantom threats he can then boast of defeating. This is how he is appealing for support. This will likely be a key theme in the campaign rallies he is starting next week, with a kick-off in Tulsa, Oklahoma (where 99 years ago, there was indeed a race riot…with white people destroying a black neighborhood and massacring scores of its residents).

Trump likes chaos. He doesn’t play by the rules. He is not encumbered by truth or by norms of decency. His pitch now is that he can save America from anarchy and disarray. This latest con of his is hardly surprising. Perhaps the more troubling matter is how far Trump is willing to go as president to create the discord that he believes he needs to hold on to power.