(Don't) Love Thy Neighbor
Trump's most pernicious legacy is turning Americans against each other
This is the first Truth and Consequences column from Tom Schaller, a political scientist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and author of “Whistling Past Dixie: How Democrats Can Win Without the South.”
By Tom Schaller
For the better part of four decades, Republicans touted themselves as the “Daddy Party.” This informal moniker was intended to send a signal to voters that the GOP could be trusted to wield America’s awesome power against the country’s enemies abroad.
Despite its supposed aversion to big government, Republicans exempted one group from its budgetary or regulatory attacks: the military. Years before Donald Trump ran for president, the Daddy Party embraced state power—so long, of course, as the powerful wore uniforms and brandished weapons.
Over four years of his chaotic presidency, however, Trump contorted the GOP’s brand. No longer were Republicans content to look across the oceans for monsters to destroy. Yes, Trump wrapped himself in the trappings of both the military and police, with the demonstrative flag-hugs, military-themed parades, and his march across Lafayette Park to raise aloft a Bible after tear-gassing his own citizens. But Trump’s isolationism abroad changed the Republicans’ tough-love daddy image by turning its violent impulses inward.
Ardent Trump supporters brag that he’s the first president in memory to not start a new foreign war (never mind that he failed to end the wars America continues to fight in the Middle East). Yet so unconcerned were Trump’s America Firsters with foreign threats, the MAGA mob raised nary a peep when he repeatedly bent his knee to the world’s biggest tyrants and bullies, especially Vladimir Putin, to whom Trump cowered on everything from election meddling, bounties on the heads of US soldiers in Afghanistan, and the most destructive cyber-attack ever waged against the United States.
Surrender abroad is merely a side effect of the GOP’s evolved Daddy Party posture. Leaving foreign adversaries for our beleaguered allies to fight allows Republicans to release their pent-up anger in the form of politicized domestic violence, which is why Trump, wittingly or not, ratcheted up old culture wars and invented new ones.
The domestic terrorist attacks on the U.S. Capitol on January 6 were the culmination of this inward shift of Republican rage. After being told for decades by conservative talking heads that liberals, Democrats, Hollywood, the media, gays, Muslims, immigrants, socialists, and other domestic actors were the nation’s *real* enemies, Trump’s GOP unleashed its fury on the homeland. Why fight the Iranians or Russians when there are communists on campus and fascists in the media to cudgel right here in America?
A new CBS poll taken the week after the Capitol attack lays bare the effect of Trump’s reorienting of national security threats from over there to over here. It shows that 54 percent of Americans now say “other people in America” are the biggest threats to the American way of life, compared to just 8 percent who cited foreign actors.
This shift was evident in the flags being waved by the Trump-inspired terrorists who stormed the Capitol. Some carried regular American flags, but far more brandished cultish Trump banners, as well as Confederate, mythical white nationalist “Kekistan,” and Gadsden “Don’t Tread on Me” flags. Even some of the American flags had Trump’s face or name superimposed on them.
Of course, America marches under the stars-and-stripes when it fights aboard. So give the Trump terrorists this much credit: If the point is to overthrow a duly-elected President Joe Biden and hang Mike Pence, it makes no sense to raise Old Glory. (As a reminder of how little the GOP cares about the peaceful transfer of American power, a poll taken way back in 2017 showed that a majority of Republicans would have supported Trump if he postponed the 2020 election.)
Drunk on a Fox News-mixed cocktail of conspiracies and perceived victimhood, the Daddy Party came to Washington with a belly full of seditious fury. Like an abusive father, it turned that rage toward the one set of victims it feels entitled to berate and batter: the American homeland.
Of course, it’s not just Republicans. Now Democrats also see the greatest enemies to America among their own fellow citizens. Democratic members of Congress are expressing increasing fear the their own fellow House Republican represent an existential threat to them. Considering the events of January 6 and the continuing specter of violence at home one can hardly blame them.
Even with Trump in exile in South Florida this legacy lives on in the distrust he helped to sow. Perhaps the most pernicious element of Trump’s impact on the country is that America has become not just a nation of strangers, but one defined by abiding mistrust of our own neighbors.
Jimmy Carter didn't start any wars. Are our memories so short now?
So now some members of Congress want to carry guns into House chambers. We need the House and the Senate to forcefully reject these loonies from their obvious goals to complete their stated objective of the January 6 invasion of the Capitol to kill Nancy Pelosi. Talk about the need for law enforcement!!!