Freedom According to Trump

In his 2016 election campaign, Donald Trump more than once implied that his supporters perhaps would have been right to take up arms if so-called crooked Hillary were elected president. The following year, in August 2017, in the face of violence in Charlottesville, VA, during organized protests in memory of Civil War Confederacy troop leader Gen. Robert E. Lee, the newly elected president’s lukewarm reaction seemed again to defend the positions championed by the nebula of far-right groups that make up the alt-right.*

For several days now, Trump has fallen back on these same tendencies, giving his blessing to demonstrators, a noisy minority rebelling here and there against stay-at-home measures put in place in the fight against the coronavirus pandemic. And it was the same with his tweet on Friday that, in all caps, not only made a call to “liberate Virginia,” but also to “save your great 2nd Amendment” regarding the right to bear arms, a right he doesn’t avoid saying is “under siege.”

It is not surprising that by fomenting frustration, Trump relies on impulses that did not hinder his election in 2016: his unsubtle anti-establishment populism; his xenophobic and incendiary promotion of liberty; and a quite dangerous and inconsiderate call to arms. Except that in this instance, there is something truly desperate about his strategy. Disarmed, given an economy that is crumbling and a rate of unemployment that has more than doubled in a month, the man is losing one of his principal campaign arguments. It is not by chance that Monday night he resorted to new immigration measures, announcing a suspension of green cards and visas for temporary work.

The challenge for the Western world now is to emerge from an induced economic coma while containing the risk of a second pandemic wave. Trump is facing this challenge in an essentially partisan way, while the situation presents issues that are over his head. This spreading virus requires thinking that is capable of evolving and of learning useful lessons for the future of the world: social and economic lessons for the ravages among the poor, middle class, and small business; health lessons with respect to the effects of confinement and the pressing question of collective immunity. The United States is in such a state of confusion that it is difficult to believe the federal guidelines for the gradual exit from the crisis, unveiled last Thursday, will help states to act in a more coherent way.

But the highly organized protest movements, very much to the right on the ideological map, that have erupted in approximately 15 states from Michigan to Texas have more or less to do with these concerns. The sign of one protester in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, read, “Jesus is my vaccine.” In the minority, they are clearly removed from most Americans who, according to polls, are far from sweeping the threat of the coronavirus under the rug. With the evangelical right predictably playing a leading role at the heart of the Republican Party, it would be wrong to minimize these protests.

Nor must we underestimate the capacity of the far right to influence public opinion. On Saturday, in Austin, Texas, to the cries of “Fire Fauci,” conspiracy theorists Alex Jones and Owen Shroyer led the protest, the latter having notably maintained that the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012 was a hoax orchestrated by the government to damage Second Amendment defenders. They see, above all, a war against the so-called tyranny of the State in the stay-at-home orders. Moreover, as many observers remind us, the tea party was also a minority movement before it came to exert a heavy and lasting influence on the Republican Party. This is said without wanting to be alarmist.

Trump is inciting his base on the verge of a second term, all the while making a superhuman effort to present himself as competent during his daily press conferences. Meanwhile, the pandemic is spreading from the cities to the suburbs to the country. Restrictions are easing here, notably in the southern Republican states, but not everywhere. Trump is not the man for the situation, and it is more frightening than ever to think that he is also the president of the country that is our immediate neighbor.

*Editor’s note: Alt-right refers to a white nationalist movement.