WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump’s pattern is now familiar: He makes a stunning assertion, on Twitter or impromptu. The head scratching begins.
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump’s pattern is now familiar: He makes a stunning assertion, on Twitter or impromptu. The head scratching begins.
Was he serious? Was he trying to distract from other negative news?
Allies are left to shrug their shoulders and brush off his remarks. Some regularly claim to have not read or heard them.
A public numbness sets in, to the point that even Trump’s most ardent political opponents have difficulty summoning outrage.
But this week the president offered a statement that stood out, even among many that have put Trump’s branding iron on the office.
His standing with the public flagging amid myriad crises, Trump floated on Twitter the prospect of delaying the Nov. 3 election — a suggestion more in line with autocrats who try to quash the public’s ability to vote than with the head of the world’s leading democracy.
It was a tweet that mattered, and couldn’t be ignored, even by many Republicans who have long given Trump a pass.
It mattered because it amounted to a stunning attack on the underpinnings of American democracy — on the notion that a nation that has held free and fair elections in the midst of wars, pandemics and the Great Depression might not be capable of doing so when it’s Trump’s political career that is on the line.
“Most presidents have leaned very hard in the other direction, even when times were tougher than now,” said William Galston, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution.
Indeed, Abraham Lincoln pressed for an election in 1864 when the Civil War was raging and his prospects for victory looked bleak, though he ultimately benefited in part by making it easier for soldiers in the field to vote. An election was also held on time in 1944, with incumbent Franklin D. Roosevelt claiming victory in the midst of World War II.
But Trump does not appear to have the same attachment to the tenets of American democracy as his predecessors.
