Why the divider in chief embraces culture wars

The following article by James Hohmann with Breanne Deppisch and Joanie Greve was posted on the Washington Post website September 25, 2017:

Trump: Fire NFL players who kneel during national anthem

THE BIG IDEA: The most fitting slogan for Donald Trump’s populist campaign, which continues nearly a year after the 2016 election ended, might be “us against them.” I don’t know Latin, but I do know that what we saw from the president this weekend is the opposite of e pluribus unum. He is the divider in chief.

Trump, who was a developer before he became a reality TV star and then a politician, has long been a builder of straw men. Everyone knows that he trades on controversy, but his chaotic approach to governing also depends on constantly presenting the American people with false binary choices.

Picking a fight with professional athletes who kneel during the national anthem, a controversy from last year that had mostly blown over, is just the latest example.

During a Friday night rally in Alabama, Trump said that players like former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick –  whose protest last season was intended to draw attention to police violence against African Americans – are disrespecting the country. “Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, ‘Get that son of a bitch off the field right now, out. He’s fired. He’s fired,’” Trump said.

Emboldened by the raucous applause that line got, Trump followed up with a dozen tweets on this subject over the weekend. He retweeted an activist calling for a boycott of the National Football League. He said the “League should back U.S.” He disinvited the Golden State Warriors from coming to the White House to celebrate their NBA championship because “Stephen Curry is hesitating.” Then he announced that the Pittsburgh Penguins have agreed to come celebrate their Stanley Cup championship. “Great team!” Trump tweeted. He continued to fixate on this theme through late last night:

Trump talks about the world in black and white terms: You’re either with him or against him. He’s been around long enough to know that this is a time-honored form of civil disobedience, but he recognizes that his base hates such displays. So Trump is using the bully pulpit of the presidency to seize a political opening that might keep his core supporters from losing faith in his leadership.

He is also looking for distractions. Trump went all-in last week on the Cassidy-Graham health-care bill, which could fail this week. The candidate he endorsed in Alabama could go down in a GOP primary. Puerto Rico has been ravaged by a hurricane, and there are mounting questions about the federal response.

This is part of a pattern. Trump is still campaigning against Hillary Clinton as a foil because he wants conservatives to judge him against her, not on his own merits. He called her “Crooked Hillary” during his Friday rally in Alabama. “Lock her up,” the crowd chanted. He didn’t stop them. At this point, what difference does she make?

Facing blowback over his false moral equivalency after the violence in Charlottesville, Trump embraced the cause of preserving historical statues. He sought to frame this national conversation on terms most favorable to him: It was not about whether to keep Robert E. Lee’s statue or other shrines to Confederate generals who took up arms against the United States to defend the institution of slavery. Employing the fallacy of the slippery slope, Trump warned that George Washington and Thomas Jefferson statues would come down next if statues to Stonewall Jackson are taken down. “Sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments,” he tweeted. “So foolish!” (It’s hard to believe this was just five weeks ago.)

Trump has described anything less than a border wall as “open borders.” Fixing Obamacare has never really been on the table for Trump. He’s often presented the choice as repealing the law vs. a Bernie Sanders-style public option. There’s never a happy medium.

— Picking fights with people like Kaepernick is Trump’s modus operandi. He thrives on feuds, and he likes setting up binary contrasts between himself and others. Think about his attacks on people like Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, and Khizr Khan, the Muslim father of an American soldier killed in Iraq.

— Trump allies see the NFL spat as the perfect wedge issue. The president relishes culture wars that rile up his “forgotten man” base and telegraph that he’s on their side against the elites. Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said from the White House podium two weeks ago that ESPN should fire “SportsCenter” host Jemele Hillfor calling Trump a “white supremacist.” There are plenty of dynamics here — race, political correctness, media bias — where all sides are ready to dig in. Trump wants himself right in the middle of this so that he can signal to his base that he’s picked a side, and it’s now us vs. them.

A similar dynamic was at play when Trump attacked the Broadway musical “Hamilton” last November after the cast read a statement to Mike Pence celebrating diversity:

It should be noted in this context that many of the people who have drawn Trump’s greatest ire are strong and successful professional women who challenge the archaic gender norms that the 71-year-old often seems nostalgic for, from Megyn Kelly and Carly Fiorina to Cher, Rosie O’Donnell, Whoopi Goldberg, Katie Couric, Ronda Rousey, Ariana Huffington and, of course, Clinton.

In the next three months, you can take it to the bank that POTUS will start speaking again about “the war on Christmas,” another trumped-up issue that plays well with conservative evangelicals who feel like they are losing their hold over American culture. It’s about respect vs. disrespect. The way he tells it, there is no room for accommodation.

Decrying “political correctness” whenever he gets in a pinch has long been Trump’s favorite straw man.

— Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.), who earned a doctorate in history from Yale, put his finger on what Trump is trying to do:

— Tony Schwartz, who ghostwrote “The Art of the Deal” for Trump, identifies what he believes are deeper origins for the president’s divisive behavior: “To survive, I concluded from our conversations, Trump felt compelled to go to war with the world,” Schwartz wrote in an op-ed for The Post this spring. “It was a binary, zero-sum choice for him: You either dominated or you submitted. You either created and exploited fear, or you succumbed to it … This narrow, defensive outlook took hold at a very early age, and it never evolved. ‘When I look at myself in the first grade and I look at myself now,’ he told a recent biographer, ‘I’m basically the same.’ His development essentially ended in early childhood.”

— This scorched-earth strategy has taken a toll on Trump’s image, but it has also kept his core supporters relatively loyal.

A Washington Post-ABC News poll published Sunday finds that most Americans already see Trump as a divisive figure. “Overall, Trump’s image continues to be negative, with 39 percent of Americans approving and 57 percent disapproving of the president’s job performance,” Scott Clement and Philip Rucker report. “More broadly, more than twice as many Americans say Trump is doing more to divide the country than to unify it, 66 percent vs. 28 percent. The margin is significantly more negative than those recorded for Obama and Bush; at most, 55 percent of Americans said Obama or Bush was dividing the country.”

“Among registered voters who identify as independents — a group Trump won by four percentage points in last year’s election — 62 percent say Trump has done more to divide the country than unite it,” per Scott and Phil. “Among Republican voters, however, about 6 in 10 say Trump is making strides toward unity. Still, confidence in Trump as a unifying force has declined even among those in his party. While 9 percent of Republican voters in a poll last November by The Washington Post and George Mason University’s Schar School had expected that Trump would divide the country, the new Post-ABC poll finds 31 percent of Republicans say Trump’s actions are dividing the country today.”

Sen. Joe McCarthy (R-Wis.) presides over a 1954 hearing of the Senate Investigations Subcommittee. (Associated Press)

— Has Trump finally met his match? In many ways, as Sasse warned, the NFL players who kneeled yesterday played into Trump’s hands. The president wanted them to react the way they did, and this story dominated the weekend. But the size of the protest, and the surprising level of solidarity from fans and owners, was also reminiscent of what happened after Joe McCarthy went to war against the Army.The demagogue from Wisconsin got away with pushing around dozens of relatively weak individuals before 1954, but he overreached when he took on one of the most favored institutions in public life. With Ike’s support, the Army fought back. And Americans took the Army’s side. At long last, has Trump no sense of decency?

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