Gail Collins: Bret, we’re in this horrific pattern — something terrible happens and then the president makes it worse. When he told the governors they had to “dominate” protesters so they wouldn’t look like “a bunch of jerks,” it made me think of a delinquent 14-year-old telling his gang to get ready for a rumble in the cafeteria.
Bret Stephens: Gail, that’s as perfect a description of this president as any that’s ever been written.
We knew from the moment Donald Trump won that we were destined for a national crisis like this one. It’s what you get when you elect someone who specializes in division, denigration, diminishment and debasement. He’s incapable of summoning the better angels of our nature. He makes everything worse because he personifies our despair — whether it’s despair over what we’ve become as a nation, or despair over the loss of hope that we can do better.
And yet I’m left with the sinking feeling that he’s going to find a way to profit from all this politically.
Gail: We can’t know where we’ll be in November, but I’m pretty confident there’s a national hunger for something … better.
Bret: I hope you’re right, and that Americans haven’t completely forgotten what it’s like to have leaders we trust and admire, whether it’s F.D.R. or Ronald Reagan. Wasn’t it George Santayana who said, “Those who forget the James Buchanans of the past are doomed to repeat them”?
Gail: President Trump probably has the worst-president-in-history thing wrapped up. Every time there’s a new crisis I’m floored by his ability to turn it into a story about him, him, him.
When he was responding to George Floyd’s death I really did not expect him to point out how many votes he got in Minnesota in 2016. This inability to divorce anything in world affairs from himself just makes me crazy. Maybe even crazier than he is. That’s the Trump genius.
Bret: There’s something to that. He has the bully’s instinct for baiting people. I suspect he’s secretly delighted that Twitter has decided to add fact-checks and warnings to his tweets: It will prompt him to do everything he can to provoke Jack Dorsey and make him look like the kind of censorious, hypocritical, wellness-obsessed Bay Area billionaire leftie that Trump’s base (along with plenty of the rest of us) loves to hate.
Gail: Trump Versus Twitter Guy isn’t exactly Lincoln-Douglas.
Bret: Not even Kennedy-Nixon.
What’s much worse — both because it’s objectively bad and because it serves Trump so well — is the rioting and violence. It remains to be seen who, exactly, is behind the most violent acts, whether it’s white-nationalist infiltrators or left-wing Antifa types or someone else. Whatever the case, they diminish the moral force of the cause of standing up to police violence and hand Trump the law-and-order card he longs to play. As the president put it on Monday, as only he can, “I am your president of law-and order.”
All this has a very 1960s feel, Gail. When I watched the footage on Saturday of the launch of two astronauts from Cape Canaveral and then watched the governor of Minnesota call out the National Guard, it seemed like a flashback to Detroit in 1967. Is the comparison apt?
Gail: Yeah, Detroit had terrible job loss in 1967 and Minneapolis, like almost every American city, was watching jobs evaporate from the coronavirus.
Bret: Right, and the long coronavirus lockdown has probably increased the strain and exacerbated the explosion. I also think there’s been a ’60s-like cultural revolution over the past five years that has radically altered the conscience of one part of the country and radically alienated the conscience of another (and left people like me floating somewhere in between). You see it in attitudes toward law enforcement, much as you saw it in attitudes about the Vietnam War. Lots of people have concluded that the police are systematically racist, others that they are civilization’s last line of defense.
Gail: The profession of law enforcement has gotten a lot more sophisticated over the last 50 years and good police departments are inclusive and less tolerant of racism.
But anyone who was deluded enough to believe the bad old problems aren’t still around only has to look at that video of a white police officer with his knee on George Floyd’s neck, staring stonily at the civilian who’s filming the whole ghastly thing.
Bret: It’s one of the most upsetting and appalling images of the last decades, even worse than the beating of Rodney King in the ’90s or Bull Connor’s dogs attacking protesters in Birmingham in the ’60s. What I find especially horrifying are the other police officers who hold Floyd while ignoring the bystanders pleading for George Floyd’s life, as if nothing much were going on.
It’s a profound wake-up call to those of us, mostly white, who almost never experience this side of law enforcement. It shook me to my core.
Gail: Almost every modern president has faced a racially charged urban upheaval like Minneapolis. None of them were particularly successful in calming things down. But Donald Trump may be the first one who went out of his way to make things worse, tweeting about shooting looters and using “vicious dogs” on protesters.
Bret: This is the season when the moral catastrophe of the Trump presidency has come most fully into view. As our colleague David Brooks pointed out the other day, whatever your partisan feelings about Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush or Barack Obama, they brought us together after disasters like the Challenger explosion, the Oklahoma City bombing, 9/11 or the Sandy Hook massacre. They appreciated the moral weight of their office and knew they had higher duties than to their own vanity or political ambition.
Trump is congenitally incapable of rising to these kinds of occasions. Empathy is a word he can’t define, compassion an emotion he can’t experience, humility a virtue he can’t comprehend and kindness an act he will never undertake.
Gail: Things are so fraught right now I hate to drop down into practical politics, but Amy Klobuchar’s prospects for a vice-presidential nomination are cooked, right? She was a prosecutor in Minneapolis and never really did much about police misconduct issues.
Bret: And maybe Kamala Harris’s too, given her own prosecutorial background. On Klobuchar, I wish I could say you’re wrong. Underscore “wish.”
Gail: I know she was a favorite of yours. Any other vice-presidential prospect you favor? Just give me an update and then we’ll go back to Trump.
Bret: Well, it pains me to say this, but Elizabeth Warren’s chances just got a lot better: Her case is that she can help save capitalism from itself by fighting against all the inequalities of American life. And Stacey Abrams’s chances improved too, as a way for Biden to signal that he will heal racial divisions and unrest.
Gail: Every day feels like a Biden ad now. While Minneapolis was in turmoil, Trump came out to address reporters. And very, very low as my opinion of our president is, I did not expect him to ignore the subject entirely. But he just talked about … China. Then walked off without answering any questions.
I’m in awe of Trump’s China obsession. It’s second only to his Obama obsession. Really, if something bad is going on he’ll blame one of those two. Sometimes both. I was sort of impressed by the way he managed to celebrate the space launch — only good news of the entire week — by taking credit for rescuing NASA from Obama neglect.
But I’m still interested in why he seems to feel that blaming everything on China works. You have a way better sense of foreign affairs than I do. Give me an analysis.
Bret: The tinpot leader’s instinct is always to find someone else to blame for whatever misfortunes befall the country. But in China’s case, that someone else happens to be exceedingly blameworthy.
There’s no question Beijing’s initial cover-up in Wuhan helped the virus spread. Now it is behaving tyrannically when it comes to the people of Hong Kong. It is treaty-bound to honor the principle of “one country, two systems.” But it has constantly tried to undermine the city’s civic freedoms, which is what sparked last year’s massive demonstrations. This time around, China’s leaders figured the world was too preoccupied to try to stand in the way of their attempts to impose draconian limitations on Hong Kong’s long-held rights of speech and public protest.
Any American president would be bound to respond somehow. The problem we have is that Trump has squandered so much of America’s moral capital, and behaved so obsequiously with despots like Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdogan, that his words just don’t carry the weight of former presidents. And the same goes for crises at home.
Gail: So you’re saying that even when he’s right, he’s wrong? Sounds like a perfect campaign slogan.
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