A Divider, Not a Uniter, Trump Widens the Breach
By PETER BAKERSEPT. 24, 2017
President Trump boarding Air Force One at Morristown Municipal Airport in New Jersey on his way back to the White House on Sunday. Credit Tom Brenner/The New York Times
WASHINGTON — Over the course of just 17 hours this weekend, President Trump assailed John McCain, Chuck Schumer, Stephen Curry, the National Football League, Roger Goodell, Iran and Kim Jong-un — the “Little Rocket Man.” And that was on his day off.
While football players knelt, locked arms or stayed in their locker rooms during the national anthem in protest on Sunday, any notion that Mr. Trump may soften his edge, even under the discipline of a new chief of staff, seemed fanciful. While he has restrained himself for brief stretches, his penchant for punching eventually reasserts itself.
Never in modern times has an occupant of the Oval Office seemed to reject so thoroughly the nostrum that a president’s duty is to bring the country together. Relentlessly pugnacious, energized by a fight, unwilling to let any slight go unanswered, Mr. Trump has made himself America’s apostle of anger, its deacon of divisiveness.
His denunciation of what he called unpatriotic sports stars protesting racial injustice by not standing for the national anthem clearly cheered supporters at a rally in Huntsville, Ala., on Friday. For his admirers, his attacks on entitled elites can be bracing and invigorating, finally giving voice to grievances they consider long ignored. Whether by design or not, they also distract from other matters, in this case another looming legislative debacle as his health care bill faces defeat in the Senate.
In his brief career as president and a candidate for president, Mr. Trump has attacked virtually every major institution in American life: Congress, the courts, Democrats, Republicans, the news media, the Justice Department, Hollywood, the military, NATO, the intelligence agencies, the cast of “Hamilton,” the cast of “Saturday Night Live,” the pope and now professional sports. He has attacked the Trump administration itself, or at least selected parts of it (see Sessions, Jeff), and even the United States of America (“you think our country’s so innocent?”).
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“The Trump credo seems to be so many people to attack, so little time,” said Peter Wehner, a former strategic adviser to President George W. Bush and now a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
Garry Wills, a historian who has studied other presidents, said, “No one else fires off omnidirectional personal insults in such fire-wheel fashion.” The exceptions seem to be President Vladimir V. Putin in Russia and white supremacists in Charlottesville, Va.
OPEN GRAPHIC
“I don’t think his intention is to be divisive,” said Christopher Ruddy, the chief executive of Newsmax Media and a friend of Mr. Trump’s. “He wants to be viewed as strong but also someone who speaks the truth as he sees it and not afraid what the establishment says about it. He enjoys a fight and a challenge, so that may play into some of this.
“My own view,” he added, “is that he should adapt Floyd Mayweather’s boxing style — hold most of his punches for big opportunities, and tire out your opponents for a win in later rounds.”
Intentional or not, many of his most divisive comments charge directly into one of the most delicate issues in American life, race, whether it be his attacks on illegal immigrants, his “both sides” equivocation after the racial violence in Charlottesville or now his blasts at African-American football and basketball stars like Mr. Curry, the Golden State Warriors player who said he did not want to visit the White House for a traditional champions ceremony.
Speaking with reporters before boarding Air Force One on Sunday, Mr. Trump insisted race was not the issue. “This has nothing to do with race,” he said. “I never said anything about race. This has nothing to do with race or anything else. This has to do with respect for our country and respect for our flag.”
To his supporters, Mr. Trump’s approach does not necessarily seem polarizing so much as animating. In an us-and-them world, he is speaking to a part of the country that has long felt ostracized by those who seem to have everything, whether it be Washington politicians or high-paid sports stars.
“These attacks sound divisive to the people outside that ‘us’ — and Trump’s ‘us’ is a lot smaller than most presidents’ — but not to those inside it,” said Nicole Hemmer, a scholar of conservatism and social movements at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center.
“There’s a larger politics of grievance at work,” she added, and “the base’s desire for Trump to be tough and combative” is one seen in other presidents, if less often and openly. Richard M. Nixon appealed to the “silent majority,” and Bill Clinton castigated an African-American rap star named Sister Souljah to reach out to disaffected white voters who had fled the Democratic Party.
Mr. Wehner, however, said Mr. Trump seemed to “draw a kind of psychic energy” from conflict. “We’ve never had a president who so relishes producing animosity and hate among Americans, and who does it so consistently, so gleefully and so intentionally,” he said. And when there are no obvious targets, he added, Mr. Trump goes in search of them. “He seems to have a psychological need to keep everyone around him on edge and at each other’s throats.”
Open appeals to division, while increasingly common on the campaign trail, have been rarer in the modern White House. Ronald Reagan presented a sunny optimistic view of America as a “shining city on a hill.” The first George Bush called for a “kinder, gentler” America. Mr. Clinton vowed to “repair the breach” of partisanship. The younger Mr. Bush promised to be a “uniter, not a divider.” Barack Obama declared that “we are not a collection of red states and blue states; we are the United States of America.”
None of them fully lived up to those ideals, and at times each of them appealed to division in the conduct of his presidency or campaigns. The elder Mr. Bush’s election was remembered for the racially charged debate over the furloughed murderer Willie Horton. The younger Mr. Bush’s critics complained that he impugned their patriotism for criticizing his national security policies, while Mr. Obama’s opponents complained that he regularly questioned their motives and talked down to them.
In 2015, Gallup found that the second Mr. Bush and Mr. Obama were the most polarizing presidents in modern times, as measured by the gap between how Republicans and Democrats saw them. At that point, Mr. Obama held six of the top 10 years of that polarization index and Mr. Bush the other four.
But neither Mr. Bush nor Mr. Obama overtly aspired to division on a routine basis. A Washington Post-ABC News poll found that 66 percent of Americans believe Mr. Trump has done more to divide the country than unite it; at their peaks, no more than 55 percent said that about Mr. Obama or Mr. Bush.
Mr. Trump seems unbothered by that and in that sense may be a president who suits his era better than his predecessors. He is a divisive president for a divisive time.
“We know previous presidents pursued political strategies that exploited racial divisions in our country,” said Ellen Fitzpatrick, a history professor at the University of New Hampshire. “We know Nixon had his enemies list. But the public whipping up of this sentiment in mass campaign-style rallies with the crass language Trump used in Huntsville has no precedent I am aware of.”
H. W. Brands, a biographer of Reagan and other presidents at the University of Texas at Austin, said other presidents were tactically divisive. Andrew Jackson pilloried the moneyed classes, while Theodore Roosevelt inveighed against the “malefactors of great wealth.” Franklin D. Roosevelt blamed the stock market crash on the “money changers” and said he welcomed their hatred of him.
“Trump’s divisiveness looks different,” Mr. Brands said. “It appears more impulsive and more a matter of simply stirring the pot. It makes sense from the perspective of one who has long sought to attract media attention. There doesn’t seem to be any larger purpose. I really can’t see what he hopes to win by taking on the N.F.L.”