This week, a video circulated on social media showing former U.S. President Donald Trump speaking at a public event, including a clip of him attacking Chris Christie, former New Jersey Governor and Republican rival seeking the party’s nomination for the 2024 election, in uncivil terms. Mr. Trump responded to an audience member who allegedly described Mr. Christie as a “fat pig” and commented on his appetite as well as amplified the abusive phrase several times. In doing so, the 45th President has once again dragged the bar for civility in an election campaign down to the nadir that it was at in 2016 and again in 2020 — both elections that Mr. Trump led for his party.
While the past eight years of Mr. Trump the President and presidential candidate have witnessed his multipronged attacks on his political opponents, minorities of all hues, women, and even other nations — famously alluding to Mexicans as drug dealers, criminals, and rapists — the true death of civility in the modern era of American politics began during the term of his predecessor, Barack Obama.
In a sense, the very presence of Mr. Obama, the country’s first ever non-white President, in the White House seemed to trigger an avalanche of resentment from White America, an unfortunate spectacle to which I had a ringside view while I was posted there as a Foreign Correspondent.
There is little doubt that Mr. Obama was catapulted into the Oval Office on a wave of euphoria and a deep-rooted desire for change, the spirit of which was captured in the Democrats’ slogan for the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections — “Yes we can!” Yet as the epochal times of his first term in office rolled by, and the 44th President dared to seek to rewrite and rid of deadly inequities the DNA of the U.S. health-care system, the triumphalism of multi-ethnic America gave way to the seething hatred of the insecure middle America, including mostly the white, non-college educated, working class demographic of the nation.
Out of this vector of racist bigotry was born the Tea Party, a far-right conservative movement that was willing to eschew political correctness in its entirety to achieve its goal of minimum government — against which it saw Obamacare, as encapsulated in the Affordable Care Act, as a deserving target for its attacks. While its agenda was explicitly political, the Tea Party literally set the stage for the later years of Trumpism by creating a space in the public discourse, howsoever repugnant to progressives, in which the policies of the Obama White House were deemed fair targets as much as minorities were, and racist epithets could be hurled about freely here.
I encountered many a Tea Party member on the election trail in 2012, when mainstream Republican candidate Mitt Romney tried to take on the Obama election juggernaut. All the way from local campaign events in Virginia to the Republican National Convention in Florida, they almost universally sported yellow “Don’t Tread On Me” t-shirts showing a coiled cobra ready to strike.
While their numbers were overwhelmingly comprised of ordinary middle class white Americans – kindly, smiling folk, who had the warmth and civility that one associated with Americans in general – if the conversation were ever to be steered towards Mr. Obama and his policy agenda, the sheer viciousness of verbal attacks on everything he stood for was unexpected, to say the least.
Looking back at the broader arc of the U.S.’s economic trajectory, it is true that Mr. Obama represented the mainstream consensus of global, market-driven development, albeit with healthy policy interventions by governments to correct market failures in some areas. In that sense, in 2016 Mr. Trump successfully led the charge to capitalise on the sense of economic disenfranchisement in white America, which had seen job losses in some sectors that could be linked to the forces of globalised comparative advantage having their way.
Yet it is evident now that that was only one plank of his nativist populism – the other being unhinged racism, dog-whistles to attacks on minorities, brazen anti-intellectualism and a wanton disregard of almost every institution of the rules-based international order, even those that had served U.S. national interests over the years.
Little surprise then that today, as Mr. Trump gears up to a blistering campaign this year and next, he has defied the campaign odds of multiple criminal indictments against him and enjoys soaring popularity in the polls. Indeed, he stands a decent chance of winning the White House and once again leaving his unique footprint on the shifting sands of the American collective psyche.
narayan@thehindu.co.in
