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Trump is fighting the wrong war
https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/511215-trump-is-fighting-the-wrong-warThey say generals always fight the last war. So do some politicians. President Trump is making a bid for re-election in a country ravaged by pandemic, recession and racism. So what’s he doing? He’s fighting the culture war — a war that started more than 50 years ago.
The strategy worked for him — barely — in 2016, when he defeated Hillary Clinton, a liberal icon of the 1960s generation. Trump is re-running his 2016 campaign by stoking the racial divide and sounding the battle cry against immigrants (“Finish the wall!”). He calls Joe Biden a “puppet of the militant left,” tweeting, “He has been brought even further LEFT than Crazy Bernie Sanders ever thought possible.”
As a result, the Trump campaign is rallying voters on the far right fringe and on the far left fringe. But it’s failing to address the concerns of the vast majority in the middle — principally the pandemic that has cost the lives of more than 162,000 Americans. That’s a lot more than the number of Americans killed in the wars in Vietnam, Korea, Afghanistan and Iraq combined.
The coronavirus is Trump’s Vietnam. It will bring him down just as the war in Vietnam ended the political career of Lyndon Johnson in 1968. The difference is that LBJ became obsessed with Vietnam, whereas Trump would like to ignore the pandemic. “The president got bored with it,” a Republican operative told the New York Times. Asked by an Axios interviewer about the staggering death toll from the pandemic, Trump responded, “It is what it is.”
The strategy worked for him — barely — in 2016, when he defeated Hillary Clinton, a liberal icon of the 1960s generation. Trump is re-running his 2016 campaign by stoking the racial divide and sounding the battle cry against immigrants (“Finish the wall!”). He calls Joe Biden a “puppet of the militant left,” tweeting, “He has been brought even further LEFT than Crazy Bernie Sanders ever thought possible.”
As a result, the Trump campaign is rallying voters on the far right fringe and on the far left fringe. But it’s failing to address the concerns of the vast majority in the middle — principally the pandemic that has cost the lives of more than 162,000 Americans. That’s a lot more than the number of Americans killed in the wars in Vietnam, Korea, Afghanistan and Iraq combined.
The coronavirus is Trump’s Vietnam. It will bring him down just as the war in Vietnam ended the political career of Lyndon Johnson in 1968. The difference is that LBJ became obsessed with Vietnam, whereas Trump would like to ignore the pandemic. “The president got bored with it,” a Republican operative told the New York Times. Asked by an Axios interviewer about the staggering death toll from the pandemic, Trump responded, “It is what it is.”
