The Party of the Aggrieved

The protests have become a rallying point for the right, encouraged by talk-radio and Fox News personalities such as Laura Ingraham, Jeanine Pirro, Tucker Carlson, and Brian Kilmeade. The anti-social-distancing rallies are drawing comparisons to the early days of the Tea Party movement.

Stephen Moore, who serves on Trump’s economic council to reopen the country, said, “So this is a great time, gentlemen and ladies, for civil disobedience. We need to be the Rosa Parks here, and protest against these government injustices.”

Even if one believes that some of the measures being put in place are too restrictive, this is hardly a Rosa Parks moment. The protesters, for their part, are not distinguishing themselves by making finely calibrated points about epidemiology or offering up more refined social-distancing plans. They are lashing out in frustration and in anger, frustration and anger that is being incited by the president and many—although not all—of his acolytes on the right.

TRUMP’S EAGERNESS to light the fuse is nothing new; it’s simply the latest manifestation of the president’s disordered mind, which I have written about before. He finds satisfaction not in resolving conflict, but in increasing it. That has been true for much of his life and all of his presidency.

In the midst of a lethal pandemic, Americans are striving for social cohesion and solidarity. They may yet achieve it, but if they do, it will be in spite of this president, not because of him. Trump is doing everything in his power to divide us, to keep people on edge, mistrustful and at one another’s throats. To that end, he will even cheer on people who are violating his own administration’s social-distancing guidelines.

Read: How the pandemic will end

But there is also method to Trump’s madness. From the moment he took office, the president has pursued a base-only strategy. Rather than trying to win over converts, Trump has decided his path to victory in November lies with inflaming his base, keeping his supporters in a state of constant agitation, even if that requires framing “a complex science/policy debate as evil oppressors vs. heroic victims,” in the words of the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt.

And so the president is acting the only way he knows how, but also in a way that resonates with the base of the party. He has succeeded in creating, at least among some significant number of his supporters, an almost cultlike attachment. The response to COVID-19, then, is acting like a CAT scan on the American right. What it reveals is alarming and, for those of us who have been lifelong Republicans, dispiriting.

I need to add, though, that it’s far too simple to say that what occurred with Donald Trump in 2016 and since was a “hostile takeover” of the GOP. Trump—the only known con artist, conspiracy monger, and pathological liar in the 2016 GOP field—gave the base of the party what it wanted, even as he toxified it, amplifying all the worst tendencies of the American right. To what degree Trump fundamentally changed the Republican Party, and to what degree he simply personified what it was becoming, is an impossible question to resolve. What we do know is that the base of the GOP and Donald Trump have now merged. There is no separation. (Trump’s approval rating among Republicans is 93 percent, according to Gallup.) The GOP is as much Donald Trump’s party today as it was Ronald Reagan’s party in the 1980s.