Shomporko Desk:-President Donald Trump is painting a tragic representation of what Joe Biden’s America may resemble, asserting crime and disarray would assault networks should the former vice-president win the White House in November.
“Irony is way down the list of things that President Trump worries about,” said Robert Spitzer, a political scientist at the State University of New York College at Cortland whose research focuses on gun politics and the American presidency. “He’s going to the old playbook – bid to the feelings of dread of Americans and afterward partner those apprehensions with the Democratic Party, in particular Joe Biden.”
Trump’s endeavour to cast Biden in that light follows an example seen all through his administration, where he endeavours to move duty, regularly to President Barack Obama, significantly over three years in the wake of getting to work.
With echoes of Richard Nixon’s law-and-order campaign in 1968, Trump is trying to energize his conservative base while also making an appeal to a small patch of undecided voters by posing the question: Which man will keep you safer?
By leaning hard on select scenes of violence, Trump is banking on that unrest continuing. But the protests could wane. Violent crime around the U.S. has been on a downward trajectory for the better part of the last three decades.
Lanae Erickson, a senior vice-president for social policy and politics at the centre-left think-tank Third Way, said Trump’s attempt to use the Nixon playbook and tap into anxieties about the crime is odd given that, unlike Nixon in 1968, Trump is already in the White House.
“Trump is the incumbent, so if bad things are happening right now, they get blamed on him,” Erickson said. “I don’t know how he can persuade voters that it’s Joe Biden’s fault.”
Trump has tried to paint Biden as a captive of his party’s most liberal elements who have called to dramatically reshape policing in America.
His campaign has aired advertising in battleground states that show a woman calling the police for help as an intruder breaks into her home and getting a voice recording informing her that, because the police have been defunded, no one is available to take her call.
The Republican president recently tweeted a warning to “Suburban Housewives of America” that “Biden will destroy your neighbourhood and your American dream.”
“No one will be SAFE in Joe Biden’s America!” Trump declared.
Trump has tried to argue that Biden, at least implicitly, would condone unchecked violence.
Last week, Trump said he’d like to flood Chicago, which has seen a 51% increase in homicides and a 47% increase in shootings compared to the same time last year, with “50,000 or 75,000 people” and “solve it like you wouldn’t believe.”
But Trump said he wouldn’t do it because of a lack of co-operation from the city’s leadership.
Biden, as a senator, played a key role in writing the 1994 crime bill — tough-on-crime legislation that critics say fueled mass incarceration.
During the primary, fellow Democrats repeatedly criticized Biden over the bill. His criminal justice proposal reverses some key provisions of the crime bill. He has also apologized for supporting some policies in the 1990s that he now recognizes were harmful, such as sentencing disparities between crack and powder cocaine.
While Biden does not support defunding police departments, the push in some left-leaning big cities to drastically overhaul police budgets could put him in a difficult position, Scharf said. The majority of Seattle’s nonpartisan City Council, for example, has publicly embraced calls to cut the city’s 2021 police budget by half.
That makes it crucial that Biden become more proactive in laying out his vision for the reinvention of the modern police force to prevent Trump’s anti-police jabs from sticking, Scharf added.
“You don’t want this to turn into your Willie Horton moment,” said Scharf, referring to George H.W. Bush’s 1988 campaign’s effort to tie Democratic Gov. Michael Dukakis to a convict who raped a woman during a weekend furlough. “If he’s not proactive, Trump could turn this into Biden’s Achilles’ heel.”
Photo credit: AP Photo/Andrew Harnik, File
News source: The Associated Press
