James Campbell: Strategic Trump is no fool on policy
He might have come to politics late but Donald Trump’s actions, including his latest tweets against Democratic congresswomen, show he is a quick study, writes James Campbell.
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Donald Trump may or may not be racist, but he is certainly no fool when it comes to politics.
Last Sunday, he tweeted the suggestion that “Progressive” Democrat Congresswomen who originally came from countries whose governments “are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world” should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”
Cue outrage all around the world. From north of the 49th parallel, Justin Trudeau tut-tutted “this is not how we do things in Canada” while in London the outgoing Prime Minister Theresa May’s official spokesman said the President’s comments were “completely unacceptable”.
It goes without saying Jacinda Ardern wasn’t impressed either.
More surprisingly even Boris Johnson, thought the comments were a bit much — the same Johnson who as recently as 2002 was peppering his newspaper copy with references to “crowds of flag-waving piccaninnies” and Africans’ “watermelon smiles”.
The tweets were “completely unacceptable” Johnson said: “If you are the leader of a great multiracial, multicultural society you simply cannot use that kind of language about sending people back to where they came from … that went out decades and decades ago and thank heavens for that”.
What our Prime Minister made of Trump’s remarks is unknown but asked about them on Tuesday, Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack went so far as to say “well, the fact is you’re not going to agree with absolutely everything everybody says” before hastily qualifying this shocking outburst of lèse-majesté with the observation that “overall, President Trump is a strong leader” and “there’s no greater friends of Australia than the Americans”.
You could argue of course that foreign leaders have no business commenting on what is, at the end of the day, a domestic political matter. Moreover, in more cases than not, international condemnation rather tends to help the leader under attack as people naturally rally behind the home team when it’s under attack from foreigners. But the US is not just any country, it’s the world’s most important nation and has, for most of its history, put itself out there as the summit of human achievement to which lesser nations ought to emulate.
The bully pulpit, as Theodore Roosevelt, called the power of the presidency, is heard not just in the US, but all around the world.
When the US President starts sounding like a schoolyard racist, it matters, especially at a time when governments around the world are acutely alive to the electoral potential of demonising minorities. To take an example, almost at random, this week the Economist reported that in the Indian state of Assam, the ruling government, allied to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has declared four million mostly Bengali-speaking residents to be foreigners and is in the process of forcing them to prove to tribunals they have the right to live there.
In “most cases there is no evidence that they are anything other than Indians too poor and uneducated to navigate the bureaucracy of citizenship”, yet scores have been hauled off to internment camps while Modi’s home affairs minister calls them “infiltrators” who will be thrown into the sea.
After reading Trump’s tweets this week, would any Indian politician expect any criticism on this subject from Washington?
But as I said, this isn’t to say that what Trump tweets isn’t smart politics. Describing it as a “cold, hard strategy” former adviser to president Barack Obama, David Axelrod, said his “deliberate, racist outburst” was an attempt to “raise the profile of his targets, drive Dems to defend them and make them emblematic of the entire party”. Axelrod is surely correct and it’s easy to see why.
“The Squad” as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, christened herself and her three buddies, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, are the moderate Democrats’ worst nightmare.
Ocasio-Cortez, the author of the Green New Deal is a self-declared socialist. Omar is a Muslim of Somalian heritage who described US politicians’ support for Israel as being “all about the Benjamins, baby”, while Pressley is a champion of reparations for descendants of slaves. Tlaib is a socialist who has long-backed boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel.
As Axelrod said, Trump understands if he can make these four “emblematic” of the Democratic Party, it will hurt it a lot. And it should be remembered that the opportunity to do this only arose because of public divisions between “The Squad” and the more moderate Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi. The fear among some Dems is that remaking the party in their own image is more important to them than beating Trump in 2020.
In recent days, Obama’s former chief of staff made this fear explicit when he complained to the New York Times “we fought for years to create the majorities to get a Democratic president elected and re-elected, and they’re going to dither it away … they have not decided what’s more important: Do they want to beat Trump or do they want to clear the moderate and centrists out of the party? You really think weakening the speaker is the right strategy to try to get rid of Donald Trump and everything he stands for?”.
By intervening in this fight Trump has weakened Pelosi and raised the profile of her enemies. He might have come to politics late but The Donald is a quick study.
— James Campbell is the Herald Sun’s National Politics Editor
james.campbell@news.com.au
@J_C_Campbell
Originally published as James Campbell: Strategic Trump is no fool on policy