Trump Is Terrified of Losing

Read: What Trump doesn’t understand about the suburbs

Trump is at his most comfortable when stoking crises; this is the man, after all, who began his administration by warning of “American carnage.” In an election in which he is at a disadvantage and suddenly facing the terrifying prospect of becoming a loser, harping on fears of racialized violence helps put him back in his comfort zone. It’s the campaign equivalent of a security blanket.

The trouble is that there is next to no data that support the notion that, amid the crises the country is currently facing, suburban women are clamoring for protection of the right to redline, living in fear of urban violence encroaching on their suburban paradises, or prioritizing confederate monuments over disease prevention. Rather, the data suggest the near opposite. As Emily Badger and Nate Cohn of The New York Times recently summarized, as of June, 59 percent of suburban voters disapproved of Trump; even more disapprove of his stances on race, and 65 percent “had a favorable view of the Black Lives Matter movement.” In other words, suburban voters not only disapprove of Trump and prefer Biden to him, but they specifically don’t approve of his performance with respect to the very racial issues on which he wishes to court them. In fact, they express considerable sympathy for the supposed foe he is trying to pit them against.

Trump is not wrong to try to recover his support among white suburbanites; indeed, he cannot possibly win without doing so, at least to some degree. But appealing to them on the basis of positions relatively few of them hold and issues on which majorities disapprove of his performance makes little sense.

But it’s not as though Trump is reading this data and coming up with a responsive strategy. Rather, the strategy derives from Trump’s crude habits of thinking: He has a long history of assuming that other people hold the same prejudices that he does. A white Justice Department lawyer who sued Trump Management Company in 1973 for discrimination against Black tenants later recalled Trump commenting to her, “You know, you don’t want to live with them either.”

Andrew Ferguson: Trump’s attempt at an un-Trumpian image

The same dynamic is at play in his suburban fearmongering today. He believes at some deep level that the white suburbanite must share his attitudes—even if she is too cowed by cultural mores to admit it. Because he is not capable of training his instincts to respond to reality, the fact that he wants her to see him as her champion means that she must actually do so.

Except that, in fact, the data offer a better window into the reality of voter attitudes than do Trump’s instincts. And the election will be held on November 3, with mail-in voting allowed in many jurisdictions. The glimmer of reality that entered the White House remains just a glimmer—enough to change the quality of Trump’s denial but not yet enough to shake him awake. Of course, this assumes that anything could.

Quinta Jurecic is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and the managing editor of Lawfare.

Benjamin Wittes is a contributing writer at The Atlantic, the editor in chief of Lawfare, and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.