Trump’s Bet on Polarization
With the customary revitalizing cry of “Four additional years!” a dispersed crowd invited Donald Trump toward the beginning of the Republican Party show in Charlotte, North Carolina. The event competed — and perhaps lost — for television ratings with coverage of the arrival of Hurricane Laura and the repercussions of anti-racist mobilizations in Wisconsin, where a young African-American was shot in the back by police and two protesters were killed by armed civilians.
Despite the pandemic, the Republican show, which was directed by former Trump employees from his reality show host days, was not a canned product from start to finish. Nor were there speeches recorded an impromptu home set. The stages were divided between the auditorium with the classic lectern, many American flags in the background and almost no audience, and the White House itself, which was simply used by the president as a campaign asset.
The exclusive protagonism was of Trump and his family. Melania Trump was the moderate voice of the family. She empathized with the relatives of the more than 180,000 deaths from coronavirus. She acknowledged in her way that racism is a problem and that the past needs to be “looked at” and ended up making a dispassionate defense of her husband, whom she publicly said she preferred to keep away.
In each of the four days that the convention lasted, there were some Trump who dedicated themselves to highlighting the figure of the current president, transformed into a kind of “superman” of U.S. imperialism, speaking to an audience mostly composed of already convinced voters. “Visionary”, “the richest man in the world”; “the guardian of America” and the “bodyguard of Western civilization” were some of the definitions of the speakers in Trump’s political and personal inner circle.
This not only shows Trump’s egocentrism, which is a psychological and political trait but above all that since 2016 the Republican Party has completed its transformation into the “party of Trump”. As Bill Kristol, a neoconservative and militant of the anti-trump front, summarized, “It’s not the Republican Party anymore. It’s a cult of Trump. So it was no surprise to anyone that traditional figures of the Grand Old Party, like George W. Bush (the last living former Republican president), did not participate, if only out of courtesy and to keep their forms. And that many Republicans in the conservative moderate wing of the political center have decided directly to campaign for Joe Biden-Kamala Harris’ Democratic ticket.
From the political point of view, there was nothing outside of the Trumpeter’s script. Formulas such as America First and MAGA (Make America Great Again) continue to dominate the discourse, synthesizing Trump’s protectionist, and relatively isolationist orientation. Down to earth, these general slogans are translated into a brutal anti-China campaign, and into a unilateral reaffirmation of US imperialism, a cocktail of commercial wars and sanctions, to conjure up the hegemonic decline of the United States.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo recorded a message from Jerusalem, where he is on a diplomatic mission allegedly discussing with Netanyahu a more aggressive policy against Iran. Pompeo vindicated the Trump administration’s foreign policy, particularly its hostility to China, the withdrawal of the nuclear treaty with Russia, and the assassination of General Suleimani. Almost simultaneously, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper published in the Wall Street Journal an article (“The Pentagon Is Prepared for China”) with a belligerent tone, citing the National Defense Strategy of 2018 that raised China to the rank of main strategic danger for US imperialism and announcing military coordination with Australia, Japan and other countries of the region.
In a scheme of concentric circles, the convention’s objectives were first to consolidate and motivate the hardcore of Trump’s electoral base. And secondly, to target niches that can make a difference as backward sectors of the old white working class of the “swing states” that did not go to vote in 2016; and a fundamentally female and conservative middle-class affluent electorate from the suburbs (the famous “Soccer mom”) that in the 2018 mid-term elections leaned towards the Democratic party.
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Donald Jr. (the president’s oldest son) claimed that the coronavirus pandemic was a “courtesy” of the Chinese Communist Party to ruin the economy and with it the prospects of a second term for his father. And he put the election in terms of a trade-off between “church, work, and school” versus “rioting, looting, and vandalism. His girlfriend, the effusive Fox News broadcaster, spoke out against Joe Biden’s “socialist agenda” (sic). While a Cuban businessman representing the Florida worms said that Trump is “fighting the forces of anarchy and communism.
Although by far, the first prize was disputed by a collection of “freak” characters, fighters in the “culture war” that the extreme right feels called upon to fight in defense of American values. Among them were adherents of the conspiracy theory QAnon (Q- Anonymous) according to which there would be a network of pedophiles formed by liberals, democrats, and officials: among the suspects appear Obama and Bill Gates (this theory reached sectors of the “ant quarantine” in Argentina). There were also the McCloskeys, a couple of factors from Missouri, who threatened anti-racism protesters with guns. And the granddaughter of Billy Graham, the iconic evangelical right-wing pastor who spoke out against transgender baths. These sectors continue in the line of Steve Bannon, strategist, and ideologist of the 2016 Trump campaign and the extreme right-wing populist “international” (Bolsonaro, Brexit, etc.) arrested for a scandalous fraud with the funds to build the famous wall on the border with Mexico.
In addition to the hardcore, the convention especially targeted evangelical Christians, who voted 81% for Trump in 2016 and continued to be a staunch supporter, with a rabid campaign against abortion. And above all, to conservative women, from a particular “right-wing feminism” promoted by Ivanka Trump (the president’s beloved daughter) and the first lady, which poses the oxymoron of claiming the right to choose gender oppression.
So far, averaging different national polls, Biden has a 9-point lead, although as we know the key to winning the election, which is indirect, is not the popular vote but the composition of the electoral college.
Trump’s electoral strategy is to present itself as the alternative to “chaos” and try to prevent the November 3 election from becoming a referendum on the last months of his presidency, dominated by the ravages of the coronavirus, the economic recession, and the mobilizations against racism and police violence.
In the context of a deep political crisis, the bipartisan Republican-Democrat continues to function almost in a mirror: the Democrats are raising the specter of fascism to justify voting for the neoliberal Biden as the lesser evil against Trump. And the Republicans raise the specter of “socialism” to consolidate the conservative base.
However, the elections that served as a diversion from the mass rebellion that broke out after George Floyd’s assassination may at the same time open up a scenario of crisis. If Trump were to lose by a narrower margin than that predicted by the polls, it cannot be ruled out that he will not agree to recognize the result. The warnings about fraud and the attempt to prevent postal voting feed this hypothetical scenario, which would call into question the legitimacy of the next government are none other than the main imperialist power. And if he wins, a second Trump term would have the potential to deepen tendencies toward political radicalization.