Donald Trump calls himself the law and order president. That's quite a stretch. Tony Burman writes that 2020 is beginning to look like 1968, when Richard Nixon branded himself the "law and order" president. 1968 was the year
when America’s crucial fault lines — the battle over civil rights, the disastrous Vietnam War, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, the youth revolution and more — exploded seemingly at once. The aftershocks both in the U.S. and the world at large reverberated for decades afterward.
But 1968 was also a year that carried with it the accumulated burden of a decade of crisis.
Beginning with the shock of John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, these were years of spreading race riots in major American cities, a violent counter-reaction by police and security forces, the growing despair of the Vietnam War and the collapsing presidency of Lyndon Johnson, who was being challenged from within his own Democratic Party.
Now things are different:
As much as [Trump] portrays the protesters in the streets as “left-wing anarchists,” the opposite is proving true. They have been overwhelmingly diverse — and peaceful — and recent polls indicate that two-thirds of Americans support them.
Trump is under increasing attack from quarters that have, until now, been notably mute, such as former defence secretary James Mattis, who said this week that the president was “the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people … Instead, he tries to divide us.”
The crises are piling up on each other:
They include the fallout from a collapsing economy, the urgent need for adequate health care, the cry for racial justice, and the damage from Trump’s policies that have seriously worsened income inequality and the climate crisis.
Nixon was the outsider accusing the government of betraying its citizens. This time, Trump is the government:
Increasingly, polls suggest that Americans believe Biden is far better suited to deal with these problems than the incumbent.
So — assuming, of course, that Americans can keep Trump’s storm troopers off the streets between now and the inauguration of a new president in January — there may be life after Trump.
The end is nigh. And Trump knows it.
Image: treehugger
