Mayors across the United States have rejected Donald Trump’s election-season depiction of their cities as awash in violence, and media coverage of peaceful protests in Portland and elsewhere has belied the president’s claims of widespread “anarchy”.
But for Americans who mainly consume conservative media, Trump’s latest evocation of an “American carnage”, with “a shocking explosion of shootings, killings, murders and heinous crimes of violence” is as plain as the news flashing across the screen.
The stars of conservative cable TV programs and the biggest conservative news sites and social media accounts have echoed and amplified Trump since he declared himself “your president of law and order” in an appearance outside the White House in early June.
Over the last week, however, alarm over the security of America’s cities has intensified on the conservative airways.
“These vicious, violent, hate-filled, anti-American protesters are also attacking federal buildings,” Rush Limbaugh said on his radio show last week. “How many stores and parks and statues and public buildings have been destroyed recently by rioters?” the Fox News host Tucker Carlson asked last month. “Reign of street terrorists”, the conservative radio host Mark Levin tweeted with a story about the removal and defacement of statues and monuments.
The Republican senator Tom Cotton, who has been calling for a military crackdown in US cities for two months, found a welcome outlet this week for his message on Sean Hannity’s Fox News program, one of the country’s most-watched.
“If federal troops are brought in and then – of course the mayors and the governors, they’re not stopping the anarchists, and there’s chaos in the streets … and then they have to fire to protect themselves or others, who gets the blame for that?” Hannity asked, describing a scenario in which troops fired on protesters.
“Well ultimately the blame lies with the criminals,” Cotton replied.
Political analysts see Trump’s efforts to create the impression of widespread social unrest which only he can solve as part of a long-shot re-election strategy. Trump trails rival Joe Biden by double digits in polling averages including in key swing states.
Conservative media could help Trump to create an impression of chaos – at least for their conservative audience. Media consumption habits have shown strong correlation with basic world outlook. An Axios-Ipsos poll published on Tuesday found that a 62% majority of Fox News watchers believe that statistics tracking US coronavirus cases are overblown, while 48% who reported no main news source thought so. Only 7% of CNN and MSNBC watchers thought so.
Trump has blamed Democrats for creating the climate of chaos he relies on conservative media to help him amplify. “I’m going to do something – that, I can tell you,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office this week.
“Because we’re not going to let New York and Chicago and Philadelphia and Detroit and Baltimore and all of these – Oakland is a mess. We’re not going to let this happen in our country. All run by liberal Democrats.”
US mayors have disputed that depiction, urging the Trump administration to stop treating protesters like criminals and accusing the White House of an “abuse of power”.
Mayors from 15 of the largest American cities addressed a letter to the attorney general, Bill Barr, and the acting homeland security secretary, Chad Wolf, on Monday.
“The murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis sparked a national uprising and reckoning,” the letter said. “The majority of the protests have been peaceful and aimed at improving our communities.
“Where this is not the case, it still does not justify the use of federal forces. Unilaterally deploying these paramilitary-type forces into our cities is wholly inconsistent with our system of democracy and our most basic values.”
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
