Far worse than Nixon

MANY HAVE compared the protests and violence that have consumed America to the conflagration of 1968, which saw the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy and race riots in many cities. None has done so more enthusiastically than Donald Trump.

As the demonstrations against George Floyd’s asphyxiation began to boil in Minneapolis, the president warned that any looters would be shot, using a phrase synonymous with the violence of half a century ago. Emerging from his White House bunker he declared, “I am your president of law and order,” an echo of Richard Nixon campaigning for election that year. “SILENT MAJORITY!” Mr Trump tweeted in a reference to Nixon’s success—and his hopes of emulating it in November. Could the riots help him do so?

They might. The similarities between the dark days of 1968 and today’s partisan, racial, economic and health ruptures are manifest. Pledging to smash rioters has been a winning tactic for Republicans even beyond Nixon’s defeat of Hubert Humphrey. And Mr Trump does not need a majority to win. Given Republicans’ structural advantage in the electoral college, he may need only 46% of the vote, or three points more than his approval rating.

The self-regarding havoc he unleashed in Lafayette Square this week launched his effort to bridge that gap. The administration sent riot police to charge a crowd of peaceful protesters and journalists there in order to clear a path for Mr Trump to be photographed grimly unsmiling, holding a Bible outside a riot-damaged church. The scene took your columnist back to distant assignments in Jakarta and Kinshasa. The administration’s subsequent effort to disperse the bruised and angry remnants of the crowd with the downdraught from a low-flying helicopter took him back to Baghdad. It was deplorable state thuggery. Yet so long as Mr Trump can point to violence by the protesters, of which there has been plenty, including widespread looting and the wounding of four policemen in St Louis, such made-for-TV strongman tactics could work for him. On Fox News that same night, Tucker Carlson, a privileged Washingtonian with a nose for white anxiety, castigated the president for his “weakness” against “the mob”. Mr Trump—watching, no doubt—will have heard that as a political opening.

Yet here are two reasons why his chance of emulating Nixon may be worse than he hopes—starting with the fact that he has much less in common with him than he thinks. Nixon ran as the challenger to a two-term Democratic rule so beset by troubles that Lyndon Johnson had had to abandon his run for another term. The war in Vietnam looked hopeless and the protests it had stirred implacable. When Nixon urged Americans to “vote like your whole world depended on it”—his campaign slogan—he was not only warning of racial grievance but an era of American supremacy that seemed to be slipping away. If any non-partisan American believes that to be the case now, he would logically conclude Mr Trump had failed to arrest the decline; or else blame him for it.

A more skilful politician, as Nixon most certainly was, would try to head off that vulnerability. Even running as an angry challenger, indeed, Nixon’s pitch to America was incomparably more expansive than Mr Trump’s. He leavened his scare tactics with paeans to the “youth of today [who] can change the world!” In a much whiter, more overtly racist country than America is now, he was also far subtler in his race-baiting. Perhaps the most emotive of his 1968 campaign ads, in which he called for “an honest look at the problem of order in the United States”, featured images of marauding white peaceniks, not blacks. Even by today’s standards, a voter deeply concerned about racial inequality could conceivably vote for Nixon. Mr Trump, who suggested black footballers engaged in peaceful protest should be deported and non-white congresswomen “go home”, might seem more of a stretch.

The second reason he may not emulate Tricky Dicky is more positive. It is that his Democratic opponents appear to be constructing the majority he cannot—and the righteous anger behind the protests will probably help them. Over the past four years the share of Americans who correctly say the police are likelier to use excessive force on a black than a white detainee has almost doubled. This liberal shift is a reflection of Democrats’ tightening embrace of racial justice, a response to Mr Trump, and has been evident in the diverse crowds coming out to protest.

Even in Washington, with its large black population, around half the protesters are white. Nor are they the “radical-left anarchists” Mr Trump has decried. In the crowds kneeling and chanting outside the White House this week, Lexington has chatted with young professionals, entrepreneurs and parents with young children. Morgan, a twenty-something aerospace engineer with a Bible under her arm, had been on the streets for the best part of two days, to demand justice for George Floyd and pray with cops and fellow protesters alike. The national capital is a liberal place. But this is not the only indication that Mr Trump’s efforts to rewind history risk fast-forwarding its judgment on him.

Activating history

With that in mind, he might consider the cautionary fate of a different forebear: his fellow impeachee, Andrew Johnson. An intemperate racist, wont to compare himself to Jesus, Abraham Lincoln’s unworthy Democratic successor campaigned for the 1866 mid-terms by warning that America was heading for another civil war. He blamed “radical Republicans”. But the voters decided that he, by blocking the emancipation of former slaves and stirring his supporters to riot, was the likeliest cause of conflict.

The Republicans won with a landslide big enough to override his vetoes. This allowed them to ratify the 14th amendment to the constitution, granting “equal protection of the laws” to all. It is a tragedy, demanding protest, that this has not yet been achieved. But the past week’s events have perhaps brought it closer.■