You’d have to squint to survey the national political landscape and find any remnant of the public-health and economic crises that imposed (and continue to impose) severe hardships on millions of Americans. That issue has been overtaken by the new national focus on nationwide protests and the debate over necessary policing reforms. That’s a discussion in which Republicans are generally only bystanders.
Democrats in Washington have turned their attention away from yet another phase of economic relief for struggling businesses and individuals and toward police reform. The press has devoted nearly all its attention on the now global protests against police violence in America’s largely Democrat-led urban centers. An intraparty feud has broken out among Democrats over whether local police forces can be reformed at all or if they should be abolished entirely.
Amid all this, Donald Trump and the GOP he leads seem the only ones interested in unequivocally affirming the majority view in America that violence in all its forms is never justified. What’s more, this turmoil is occurring against a backdrop of economic recovery. Economists had expected the unemployment rate to rise to almost 20 percent at the end of May. Instead, it declined from nearly 15 percent to just over 13 percent. Despite the unrest in the streets, a historic and ongoing economic crisis, and a deadly outbreak that remains a source of anxiety for millions of Americans, Donald Trump finally has something to talk about that isn’t manifestly awful.
And yet, despite all this, Trump’s political position is deteriorating.
Recent surveys suggest the president’s job-approval rating has declined to the point that the gap between those who approve of his performance in office and those who don’t is once again in the double-digits. Head-to-head polls testing the matchup between Trump and Joe Biden indicate that the race is slipping away from the president. Since last December, the incumbent’s average support in public-opinion polling has been stable—ranging between 42 and 44 percent of respondents. Biden’s is marginally more volatile, but averages between 47 and 50 percent. What’s more, as the news cycle has veered away from pandemic-related stories and toward protesting and violence in America’s cities, Biden has performed better while Trump’s numbers haven’t moved.
Why is the president—the self-styled “law-and-order” candidate—seemingly unable to capture the support of voters for whom this kind of instability is unacceptable? Perhaps, in part, because Americans see Trump more as an agent of chaos than a force for order.
The president spent a week of unrest promising to address it in ways that are politically untenable when they’re not outright unconstitutional. Last week, he promised to deploy uniformed American soldiers to states that had declined to call up the National Guard. To do that, he would have to federalize the National Guard by invoking extraordinary legal powers provided to the executive in a time of genuine national emergency, which would be subject to legal challenges from the governors that resisted. Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed.
As of today, the violence that characterized demonstrations across the country last weekend looks to have dissipated, so the window to invoke these powers has essentially closed. Among Americans for whom the protests needed to be defused with compassion, diplomacy, and deference to the concerns voiced by the protesters, the president seemed only to be making a volatile situation worse. By threatening military action he could not deliver, Trump communicated only impotence to his supporters and menace to his opponents. As of this writing, roughly two-thirds of Americans oppose Trump’s handling of the protests—that’s a level of consensus that surely includes a significant number of likely Trump voters.
Second, Trump has tried to leverage the political opportunities this moment affords him in such a sloppy fashion that it only reinforced how ill-suited he is to the task of restoring a sense of national comity. For example, an NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey released over the weekend showed Biden beating the president by 51 to 26 percent on which candidate can best unite the country. Even though Trump maintained an edge over his opponent on pocketbook issues—who would better handle the economy and get Americans working again—Biden retains a sizable lead over Trump in a general-election matchup. Even in crisis, the economy is not the sole determining issue for voters.
That poll also found that eight-in-ten voters believe the country is spinning out of control, which dovetails with other surveys that show a spike in the number of respondents saying the country is on the wrong track. These are conditions that rarely benefit the incumbent.
But just because Trump is unable to capitalize on tensions within the Democratic coalition does not mean that Republicans writ large will be similarly victimized by circumstance. The GOP is replete with state-level elected officials who have performed well throughout both the pandemic and the protests. From lockdown to phased reopening to restoring order on American streets, Republican governors across the country used their authority judiciously and in ways that have been vindicated by events. If Republicans are looking to strike a contrast against the fractiousness overtaking the Democratic coalition, it may be found in the nation’s Republican-held governorships. The president does not seem capable of delivering.
