Front Burner - Donald Trump’s re-election strategy

Episode Date: September 1, 2020

“No one will be safe in Biden's America.” Donald Trump painted a calamitous picture of a Democrat-led U.S. as he accepted the Republican nomination on Thursday. Speaking for more than an hour, Trump also misrepresented his COVID-19 response before a crowd of around 1,500 people - few wearing masks. As the 2020 election campaign begins in earnest this week, CBC Washington correspondent Paul Hunter and senior Washington editor Lyndsay Duncombe join us to explain what Trump’s framing of ongoing national crises means for his re-election strategy, and whether he can beat the polls again.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. My fellow Americans, tonight with a heart full of gratitude and boundless optimism, I profoundly accept this nomination for President of the United States. The U.S. officially has its November ticket. For the Democrats, Joe Biden is locked in.

And on Thursday, Donald Trump accepted the Republican nomination. is locked in, and on Thursday, Donald Trump accepted the Republican nomination. This is the most important election in the history of our country. At no time before have voters faced a clearer choice between two parties, two visions, two philosophies, or two agendas. The campaign starts in earnest this week, and Trump faces real tests of his leadership, from protests over the police shooting of Jacob Blake to fallout from Hurricane Laura in the South

and the devastating impact of COVID-19 in the U.S. Over 180,000 people have died of coronavirus in the country. Today, I'm joined by two colleagues from our Washington bureau, correspondent Paul Hunter and senior editor Lindsay Duncombe, to talk about what this all means for Trump's chances at re-election. I'm Josh Bloch. This is FrontBurner. Hello, Paul, and hi, Lindsay. Hey, Josh. Hello. So Thursday night, we saw Trump accepting the nomination on the White House lawn,

basically, you know, using his office as a campaign stage. Gathered here at our beautiful and majestic White House, here at our beautiful and majestic White House, we cannot help but marvel at the miracle that is our great American story. And then afterwards, there were fireworks that went off and a cover of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah played. Lindsay, based on what we saw at the convention, what else is Trump doing that's changing what we usually expect from a U.S. election campaign? Well, in many ways, this is just the continued violation of norms that have happened throughout Donald Trump's presidency that have become so common you don't even notice it. It wasn't just the fact that they were at the White House. It wasn't just the fact that they were at the White House in this convention. There was also a naturalization ceremony, making people citizens in the White House on tape played.

There was a moment where someone was given a pardon as part of this reality show that really was the answer by the Republicans to a pandemic convention. The other unusual thing was that Mike Pompeo, Secretary of State, delivered a speech from Jerusalem. I'm speaking to you from beautiful Jerusalem, looking out over the old city. I have a big job. Something that, again, blurred those lines between the activities of government and political activities that really have a lot of Democrats upset. But it remains to be seen how much of a difference that makes with the votes that Donald Trump is trying to get. And I think that's the key consideration on the Trump side of things, which is that no one really cares. But most, you know, Jane and Joe voter in America probably can't explain the Hatch Act, which governs all the things that

many of the things that Lindsay just talked about. You know, they talk about outrage fatigue. There's so much stuff to worry about or to think about with Trump that things like this, and yet the power of it, I mean, he looked presidential with the White House behind him, right? Well, so last week's convention seemed to really focus on these two main stories. The first one was this idea of Trump as an empathetic and a moderate figure. Of course, the other story we heard was a darker story about how Democrats would destroy America. And I want to start there. You know, all week we heard how anarchists and looters were destroying Democrat-led cities

and how a Biden presidency would really make things worse. The speech by former Fox News host Kimberly Guilfoyle comes to mind. Rioters must not be allowed to destroy our cities. Human sex drug traffickers should not be allowed to destroy our cities. Human sex drug traffickers should not be allowed to cross our border. The same socialist policies which destroyed places like Cuba and Venezuela must not take root. Paul, what was the strategy there? My view is that the Trump campaign for a very long time presumed that the campaign would be about the healthy economy. And that, poof, gone with the pandemic.

So what else have we got? How about fear? Your vote will decide whether we protect law-abiding Americans or whether we give free reign to violent anarchists and agitators and criminals who threaten our citizens. So paint a picture of the potential for anarchy in the streets, including, by the way, in the suburbs. Paint a picture of the government taking away your guns, of further down on a separate tack, abortion issues and other things that the other side will bring, the dirty socialists. But by and large,

it's about fear. Let's bring the McCloskeys on, the couple from St. Louis that brought out guns and pointed them at peaceful demonstrators marching by their place in the suburbs of St. Louis. That is the picture the Trump campaign seems to want voters to think about. When you go into that ballot box again, you've got to make a decision. What kind of America do you want? Do you want one where rioters and looters, as speaker after speaker put it, are going to threaten your house? Think about that. Forget everything else. It's powerful. President Trump is the law and order president. Now, presidential leadership is not guaranteed. It is a choice. This election is a battle for the soul

of America. Your choice is clear. And that is a tactic that has worked for Republicans previously. You know, you saw it all the way back to Nixon, to Reagan. So I pledge to you, we shall have order in the United States. The difference with that, though, is those, they weren't incumbents. They were going up against someone from a different party who was in the White House. Donald Trump is saying the country needs fixing, and yet he's been the president for four years. So you will not be safe in Joe Biden's America is the tagline we heard over and over. Joe Biden is not a savior of America's soul. He is the destroyer of America's jobs and if given the chance he will be the destroyer of American greatness.

The reality is what we're watching play out is happening in Donald Trump's America. However, if you are inclined to like Donald Trump and to be susceptible to that message of fear and safety, it has the potential to be very powerful among voters in key states. And they really painted him as this tolerant and moderate leader. I mean, Trump's only black cabinet member, Ben Carson,

said in his speech that Trump wasn't a racist. They could not be more wrong. Years ago, Jesse Jackson gave Donald Trump an award for the economic opportunities he created for black people. Our president, Donald J. Trump, believes in the people. He is one of us. And you had Ivanka Trump coming out and saying she saw the pain in her father's eyes

when he received updates about the pandemic. I mean, it really felt they were making an effort to paint him as an empathetic figure. I want to tell you the story of a president who is fighting for you from dawn to midnight. When the cameras have left, the microphones are off, and the decisions really count. Lindsay, tell me more about that strategy. Well, particularly with the racial outreach,

I think that that's an acknowledgement of the moment where we are in the United States right now. acknowledgement of the moment where we are in the United States right now. And by bringing out Tim Scott with an effective sort of typically establishment, reasonable in many ways sounding speech at the end of the first night, Nikki Haley, the former ambassador to the U.N., a long time rising star in the Republican Party. America is not a racist country. This is personal for me. I am the proud daughter of Indian immigrants. My father wore a turban. My mother wore a sari. Really, the strategy appears to be to give people who have doubts about the accusations doubts about the accusations about Donald Trump's racism, a sort of an out, a way to not potentially think about that when they are going to cast their ballot. Simultaneously,

it's happening with coded language, things that very much feel like racial dog whistles coming from, as Paul mentioned, the McCluskeys sitting in their couch there too. So there's two things that need to happen if Donald Trump is to get out of the polling hole he's in behind Joe Biden. He needs to get that base out to the polls, energized, volunteer, despite the pandemic, they need to vote in key places. And he also needs to reach beyond that base. So simultaneously, there was red meat. And then there was the flip side of that, which is, but Donald Trump isn't as bad as the Democrats are making him out to be. No one, I'm being a bit facetious here, but no one who voted for Hillary

Clinton last time is going to vote for Trump this time. So the pool of voters Trump has at his disposal are those who got him to the White House in 2016. And that's it, right? The path to victory for Trump, get every last single solitary voter from so-called Trump nation out to the polls, vote for me. So what about the ones who've drifted, the so-called soft middle for whom, you know, Joe Biden, he's not offensive. I can, you know, because I've heard that Trump is a misogynist and that he's a racist and I can't really go to the office tomorrow and say that I voted for the guy. But that's where, did you see the crowd that went up on stage? All the women, all the people of color.

It's like it gives permission for those people who were kind of looking at Uncle Joe as maybe an inoffensive place to park my vote this time to say it's okay to go back to Trump. And I say very modestly that I have done more for the African-American community than any president since Abraham Lincoln, our first Republican president. And I have done more in three years for the black community than Joe Biden has done in 47 years. The other thing I'd say is that, you know, I've talked to a number of Republican women and for that matter, black Republican voters who say to me, forget the rhetoric. What matters is what he does.

Growing up in the deep South, I've seen racism up close. I know what it is and it isn't Donald Trump. Look at what he's actually doing. The tweets don't really matter. Definitely decreasing the taxes and making business ownership and creating more jobs, especially lowering the black unemployment. That is huge. You know, one woman was telling me, don't judge me by my body parts. That doesn't direct how I vote. What matters is what Trump does. There are no monolithic voting blocks necessarily for women or for black Americans. And there are a number of, you know, plenty of people who say, well, look, unemployment continued to go down up until the pandemic. Pandemic sort of changed a lot of things, obviously.

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listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. Six million Americans have contracted COVID-19. Some 182,000 Americans have died from the virus. The United States has been the hardest hit country in the world. How did Trump characterize the pandemic during the convention? As a success, which I think might be surprising to those of us who've been watching it all play out. In fact, Larry Kudlow, one of the early speeches in the convention, talked about the coronavirus pandemic in the past tense.

Hardship and heartbreak were everywhere. But presidential leadership came swiftly and effectively with an extraordinary rescue for health and safety to successfully fight the COVID virus. I mean, there was much lauding of the fact that everyone who needed a ventilator got one. Continued talk about banning travelers, exaggerated language, misleading language about how this administration has handled the coronavirus pandemic. And when the China virus hit, we launched the largest national mobilization since World War II. We developed from scratch the largest and most advanced testing system anywhere in the world. It defies a bit of reality, but that's sort of what these things do. And they do it effectively on this stage. You know, if you had woke up and hadn't been around and turned on the TV, you'd think that this had woke up and hadn't been around and turned on the TV,

you'd think that this was the most successful response of any nation, absolutely applauding what Trump and his team did. One of the things that I just don't understand is the willingness for so many just to want to believe him. And that drives them now. You know, after Trump's speech on Thursday, we were walking back from the White House and we walked past one of the exits from the South Lawn and the crowd was kind of streaming out. And we all saw the crowd without the masks, right? Sitting shoulder to shoulder. Well, maybe I just sort of was walking through a particular blob of people. But as they exited the White House, they all had masks on. And it's like, what,

did you have them in your pockets? And if that's true, you chose not to wear them when you were sitting in front of Donald Trump. And what does that mean? And on camera. And on camera. It's as if they don't want to do anything against him, was the message that I took away from that. It's bizarre. Don't you think, Paul, one of the things that struck me in that speech, where largely he read on the teleprompter for more than an hour, was the time when the president turned to the White House and said, What's the name of that building? the White House and said, what's the name of that building? But I'll say it differently. The fact is we're here and they're not. We're here and they're not. Us and them. Yeah, us and them. And that's one of the things that Trump has been so effective at doing. And people who support the president their identity is

wrapped up in it he's their guy this is their country and their country is at stake he's not afraid to go after hard issues Trump was a voice of freshness I mean he was so different than establishment politicians. We stand for the flag, we stand for security in our country and in the valley, and we stand for everything that our president's doing for us. I remember back when I went to a rally in Minneapolis, I interviewed people who study political psychology. And one thesis goes, the worse things get, the more people double down on their views, because to turn around now would mean admitting you were wrong.

Well, despite that, I mean, Trump is trailing in the polls by eight points right now behind Biden. He, you know, has a record over the past four years of what a Trump presidency would look like. How likely is it that, you know, you think he could convince enough Americans to give him a shot at another four years of what a Trump presidency would look like, how likely is it that, you know, you think he could convince enough Americans to give him a shot at another four years in the office? I think I have long believed that opinions are baked in on this one, that we could have the election tomorrow and it'll be pretty much what we're going to see in November, right? Again, didn't we say all that in 2016, right? Right. I looked back at the polls from 2016,

and in late August, it was Trump trailing Hillary by seven points. We can remind ourselves that we really only have to look at a handful of states, you know, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania. But when we talk about Wisconsin, you know, to go back to fear, we see what's been happening there lately lately and nobody knows how that will play. And, you know, what comes in October, the old the old October surprise. I'm of the view that the October surprise came March 10th with the pandemic. But it's, you know, I.

Oh, Paul, it's 2020. There could be very many more surprises coming our way. September surprise, October surprise. September and a half. There may be several. Lindsay, what do you think? I mean, do you think Trump can pull off another victory? I don't think we can count anything out at this point

because there are so many things about how this election will take place that we don't know. We've never had voting in a pandemic. We have never seen a president push back on mail-in votes and voting the way that we've seen. And there's also this sense from journalists and pollsters, they don't want to get it wrong again, so everyone is hedging their bets. And what will that do to democratic motivation? Will it turn out in such a force that there is an overcorrection here because nobody is

taking anything for granted? So it all just makes for a really unpredictable and really volatile lead up to the election. Facetious comment number two, I will be surprised if turnout is less than 100 percent. Obviously, that's not going to happen. But if there was ever an election in America, where I think Americans on both sides of the spectrum, know that they have to get out and vote a because he's our guy or B because we want him out. And indeed, that is the ballot box question, right? It is Trump, thumbs up or thumbs down. I don't think people are going to say, Joe Biden inspires me to get out and vote. Democrats and people who will go vote for Biden,

what inspires them to get out and vote is Donald Trump because they want to vote him out. Based on what we saw at the Democratic and Republican conventions, what does that say about what the next two months might look like? What is this campaign going to look like heading into November? Ugly. Yeah, nasty. Like, seriously. And, you know, we both sighed. It's, it's, uh, you know, it's, it's such, it's so polarized and the, on the other side of never getting back what we had

is you can smell it in the air. It's like even setting aside the tone of the campaign, I don't know what's going to happen election night. You know, we talk about mail-in voting, right? The numbers would suggest that the majority of voters who cast their ballots by mail are going to be Democrats who wear masks and who don't want to line up at polling stations. And the minority would be people who support Trump. scenario of Trump winning on election night or declaring victory before all the votes are counted because so many more votes that are being mailed in are for Biden. And so Trump gets up and stands at the podium and says, thank you. Here we go. Four more years. We've won. And then like three days later, they've opened all the mailbags and someone says, actually, Biden won. Meanwhile, Trump's been planting the seeds for weeks and months about the rigged election and don't let

them take it away from you. And it would just play out. What do you think is going to happen in this country then? It's not going to be election night. It'll be election week, election month, as we wait for those ballots to be counted in the fallout. And the question is, what will happen with Trumpism going into the future? We saw evidence of Donald Trump Jr. in his speech and others really trying to grasp onto that mantle. Even though this is very much about the man and the personality, this has created a huge rift on the right side of the American political discussion that is not going to go away, regardless of whatever happens on election night. Well, we will watch this closely. Thank you both for your insight into this.

My pleasure. Yeah, it was fun. Before we go today, an update on Canada's efforts to secure COVID vaccines. Today, I can announce that the government of Canada has signed two new agreements with Novavax and Johnson & Johnson to reserve millions of doses of the vaccines they're developing. On Monday, Trudeau said both candidates are showing promising results, and if the vaccines are ultimately approved, the combined deals are good for up to 114 million doses. Canada has already secured millions of doses of vaccine candidates from two other U.S. companies, Pfizer and Moderna. Trudeau also announced yesterday that Canada is increasing its own capacity to make vaccines.

The federal government will spend $126 million to expand a manufacturing facility in Montreal. That's all for today. I'm Josh Bloch. Thanks for listening to FrontBurner.