Front Burner - Trump’s response in an unprecedented time

Episode Date: June 3, 2020

Demonstrations across the US protesting the death of George Floyd are coinciding with a global pandemic and an economic crisis. And it’s a moment when many Americans are calling on the president for leadership. Keith Boag, a longtime political correspondent and a contributor to the CBC on US politics, joins us to talk about how Donald Trump is responding to this critical moment — and what lies ahead as the November election date looms.

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. Hi, I'm Pia Chattopadhyay. Hi, I'm Pia Chattopadhyay. People across the United States are protesting the death of George Floyd,

a black man in Minneapolis who died after a white police officer kneeled on his neck for nine minutes. Police are responding to those mostly peaceful demonstrations with rubber bullets, tear gas, and physical violence. Simmering in the background of all of this, of course, is a virus that's killed more than 100,000 Americans and skyrocketing unemployment across the country. We're talking levels not seen since the Great Depression. And it's a moment when many Americans are calling on their president for leadership. As we speak, I am dispatching thousands and thousands of heavily armed soldiers.

Today, how Donald Trump is responding to this critical moment and what lies ahead as the November presidential election date looms. My guest today is Keith Bogue. He's a contributor on US Politics for CBC, and he was a CBC political correspondent based in Washington, DC for many years. This is FrontBurner. Keith, hi, welcome back to FrontBurner. Thank you, Pia. Nice to be back. I want to go back to Monday. When President Trump gives a speech in the White House Rose Garden, what was the thrust of his speech?

The thrust really was, I'm a tough guy, and I'm not going to put up with any of the stuff we've been watching on television anymore, and anybody who disagrees with me is a weakling. That was essentially it. And then he more or less suggested that he had the power to override state jurisdictions and use military force there if they weren't doing what he felt they should be doing. I mean, that's a questionable proposition to begin with. But all of it was tough guy stuff.

Then I will deploy the United States military and quickly solve the problem for them. There wasn't any reaching out to the other side. There wasn't any, we have to understand what's going on here. There wasn't any, let's look at the root causes of what's going on. It's we've got to protect ourselves against the population that is exercising the right to civil disobedience, but extending it to violence. We have to protect ourselves in military fashion. It was a very,

very, shall we say, bellicose, belligerent speech. So we'll talk more about the propositions he made, whether he can actually legally do them, whether he might do them. But before we get to that, Keith, so as the president is outside on the lawn making this speech, around the same time, protesters are gathering outside the White House. Stop the police! Stop the police! And just remind us, what do federal law enforcement officers do as a response to the demonstrations?

So, if you've never been to Washington, you might have been fooled by watching cable television into believing that the demonstrations were right outside the White House. They were not. An entire park, Lafayette Park, separated the demonstrators from the White House. And they were demonstrating peacefully. So there really was no reason to react against them. They weren't an imminent threat. They weren't throwing bottles or sticks, stones, whatever you want. They weren't acting in any kind of violent way whatsoever. But then suddenly, you have these mounted police

officers and others coming at them to push them back. There's these kind of smoke bomb things fired at them. There's tear gas fired at them. And it makes no sense. Later, the excuse would be that it was getting close to curfew and they had to shut it down. But what we learned was really going on was that they were preparing the way for the president to walk across the street and through the park to a small church. That's a very famous church in America. It's called sometimes the president's church. And he wasn't going there to worship. He wasn't going there to see the damage that had been done to it overnight. He was going there strictly for a photo op. He stood in front of the church.

He had a Bible with him. Great country. That's my thoughts. It's not going to take long to see what's going on. It's coming back. It's coming back strong. It'll be greater than ever before. He held the Bible up. He didn't want to say anything about it. All he had in mind was the photo op of him standing in front of this church with the Bible. And for all of that, they apparently took away people's right to civil disobedience, bullied them out of the streets and fired tear gas at them.

And some of the church leaders and other religious leaders have been very critical of the president for what they say he did there, which was to use religion and holding up a Bible as a photo op and a prop. Without permission, as a backdrop for a message antithetical to the teachings of Jesus and everything that our churches stand for. We align ourselves with those seeking justice for the death of George Floyd and countless others through the sacred act of peaceful protest. And part of seeing Trump on Monday come out was a change. The speech came after a period of absence from the president as the crisis really started ramping up towards the end of last week and in the weekend. At a time, Keith, I think it's safe to say here, and correct me if I'm wrong, that any other president of the past in the United States would have been trying to guide the country through this.

What was Donald Trump doing during these crucial few days? You're right. Most of his reaction to these extraordinary events was through Twitter. And he famously on Friday tweeted that, you know, when the looting starts, the shooting starts, which many people viewed as incendiary comment to make in a very tense and delicate situation. But nevertheless, that's how we heard from him. That was a term coined by a racist political figure in Miami. You tweeted, when the looting starts, the shooting starts. How would you know that phrase and not know it's racially charged history?

Well, I've heard that phrase for a long time. I don't know where it came from, where it originated. I view that phrase as... In 1967, the Miami police... Well, I don't know. I've also heard from many... So it has all kinds of implications and ugly history surrounding it. Trump claims to have been unaware of all of that. Frankly, it means when there's looting, people get shot and they die. And if you look at what happened last night and the night before, you see that. It's very common. And that's the way that was meant. And that's the way I think it was supposed to be meant. Maybe just like the fact that it rhymed.

But nevertheless, there were plenty of people who knew exactly what that meant, even if the president wasn't one of them. 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. So getting back to this, what you said was a proposition. Others have seen it as a threat he made to the various states and their governors, that if they weren't willing to, you know, do what it takes to quell this violence, including calling up the National Guard, that he would,

under some section of the Constitution, deploy the United States military to various states. Can he actually do that? You know, it seems unlikely that he can do that. The United States military is not supposed to be used domestically. It's not supposed to be used to enforce the laws in states. Now, the states can invite the president to use power to bring military equipment and manpower into a state, and they have done that under some crisis situations. But the president does not appear to have the authority to do that on his own. He does not appear to have the authority

in particular to override a state government, a governor or legislature that does not want that presence there. And so there is great doubt as to whether there is any real meaning to what he's threatened to do. I want to ask you about one other thing, because Monday, there have been so many turning points in the last, frankly, a number of weeks, but Monday was a big one. And critics have said, and they have long accused Trump of this, but really they said, like, just look at this moment. Trump is tinkering with authoritarianism. Some say it's more than tinkering. Is that a fair assessment of what's going on? Well, I think it's an assessment that people have made under different circumstances time and time

again through his presidency. When you have an accumulation of evidence that shows the president acting beyond what is really the authority of a president where he's asking that that people defer to his judgment whether it be other politicians or the states or sometimes the court or the justice system it doesn't seem like an irrational or unreasonable thing to believe that that that that he has authoritarian tendencies and under pressure he exercises them and behaves in an authoritarian manner. That sounds like a reasonable conclusion. This is a perfect segue to about what I want to ask you about next, because you have covered the United States and Washington and lived there for a very long time, Keith.

You know this, that country, as well as anyone, really, I would argue. So tell me from where you stand, as you look at the United States of America, and Washington, DC, and the killing of George Floyd, the protests, the police response, the violence, what this moment in America looks like right now to you?, characterize it. Well, I mean, it's an extraordinary moment because the United States has never been anything through anything quite like this. You know, it's modern times and you have a president behaving in a way that belongs to another time entirely. His view of the country, his view of race relations is often like that. What is very unusual about this particular moment in history is that he is now trying to stabilize the situation based on a reputation as being someone who destabilizes situations, right? I saw a tweet of his last

week, an extraordinary tweet that I'd never seen an incumbent politician ever say before. He said, time for a change. Just think about that. The incumbent president of the United States in this moment says it's time for a change. I don't know how you run on that as an incumbent, but, you know, he may be right, but a lot of people will think that the time for a change is a time for a change in the White House. is a time for change in the White House. People love to draw analogies and comparisons to past events and times. And one of the ones that's being drawn,

one of them that's being drawn right now in the United States is like, it's sort of 1918 and 1968 paired together all at once. 1918 being a pandemic leading into 1919 and 1968 being, you know, really the height of the civil rights movement. They said they were there to protest the war, poverty, racism, and other social ills.

Some of them were also determined to provoke a confrontation. And many people are drawing comparisons to that time. 1968, Richard Nixon, and they're drawing comparisons between Trump and Nixon. And I gotta say, I know the broad, might know the broad strokes of Nixon and Trump comparisons, but help me out. What's the parallel? Okay, so 1968, Lyndon Johnson's actually still in the White House. It's an election year. And the election year is being framed in some of the ways that we're seeing right now. You have violence from street protests and riots that have to do with race, that have to

do with the Vietnam War. Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, 39 years old and a Nobel Peace Prize winner, and the leader of the non-violent civil rights movement in the United States was assassinated. It had to do with the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, all heading towards a convention to elect someone to replace the president as the nominee in the Democratic Party. That's the 1968 Chicago Convention for the Democrats. Members of the Youth International Party, Yippies, they called themselves, converged on Chicago. Very famous for all the violence and street fighting that broke out all around that. So I think that's what people are thinking about. But the comparison is apt in only a limited number of

senses because Donald Trump is not Richard Nixon in terms of his political position. Donald Trump is, in fact, Lyndon Johnson. He's the guy in the White House. He's the one who's presiding over this disorder. Richard Nixon at the time was the person who was challenging that, promising to return stability to the country. And he was using, you know, clever rhetoric that was racially divisive about law and order, about how he would be the president to restore all of that. It is time for an honest look at the problem of order in the United States. Dissent is a necessary ingredient of change. But in a system of government that provides for peaceful change, there is no cause that justifies resort to violence.

But I guess the point is that I think it's an important difference that Trump is actually the owner of this crisis. He's not the one saying, I'll come in and fix it. He's trying to tell you that he's going to be able to fix it, even though it all happened on his watch. Mr. Nixon is appearing in the doorway now, preceded by members of his staff and members of the secret service. And as you say, Nixon goes on to win that election. And so I guess there's an argument to be made that Nixon's strategy, although not the incumbent, at least in part worked. And here we are again, where the law and order appeal is being bestowed upon Americans. I am your president of law and order

and an ally of all peaceful protesters. But in recent days, our nation has been gripped by professional anarchists. And it's playing out. Do you think it works this time to use that approach? We have seen massive amounts of peaceful protests across the United States, and that is not to say there hasn't been violence by the police,

and that is not to say that there has been isolated incidents of violence by some protesters, but overall, it's been peaceful. I don't know whether it will work this time. I can think of arguments why it wouldn't. One of them we've already discussed, Trump is the incumbent president. It's just not credible for him to campaign on a time for change. I think it's also important to note that this is a very singular event, the killing of George Floyd. In this situation, there's no ambiguity about what happened happened and I think America got a glimpse

into something that at least some Americans have been in denial about and that is the reasons that people, that African-American people feel they have to be fearful of police and authority and I think that that's a very different thing from 1968 and Nixon as well. And finally I think the country is very different from then. I think that, you know, clearly demographically, the makeup of the country is not as overwhelmingly white as it was in 1968. And I think that there almost necessarily has to be a consciousness that things are not ever going to go back to the way they were in 1968 or prior to that. And that if we want to be able to have a stable and peaceful future, we need to deal with these problems now. And I think that's a very

effective argument for someone like Joe Biden, who will be challenging Donald Trump in the election to make. Going to get to Joe Biden in just a sec, but I'm going to let the 1968 comparisons run out and just stick with 2020 and say this. Coronavirus, unemployment that's reaching Depression-era levels, protests that we haven't seen the likes of in a generation plus. Does President Trump have a plan here? His plan, I think, is the same plan as 2016. He is, you know, I mean, there has been this debate for since 2015 and before, it began with the birtherism and so on.

Is Donald Trump a racist? I don't see that as a relevant question, because the evidence that he's a racial opportunist is fairly conclusive. And what I mean by that is that he has never shied away from exploiting the racial tensions in the country. He, in fact, is drawn to that. He knows, he understands them, he knows how to exploit them, and he does. I think that his plan for re-election this year is simply to do the same. And I think that's why we were seeing the kind of behavior that we saw yesterday, And it's why he has never shown any indication that he really wants to broaden his base. And that's the big question. What happens in November, five months from now? Is his base big enough? And will they turn out and gave a speech of his own, responding to Trump.

We can be forgiven for believing the president is more interested in power than in principle. The president held up the Bible at St. John's Church yesterday. I just wish he opened it once in a while instead of brandishing it. If he opened it, he could have learned something. What kind of indication did Biden give about how he might approach a moment like this? Were he president right now? Well, it was a stark contrast. And it a sad way it plays to one of Biden's greatest strengths which is is empathy and compassion in a dark moment like this every day millions of people and millions

not at the moment of losing their life but in the course of living their life are saying to themselves I can't breathe it's a wake-up call to our nation, in my view. It's for all of us, and I mean all of us. He draws upon his own personal experiences, having lost a daughter who was a child, having lost his first wife in an accident, having lost his grown-up son to cancer just a few years ago. He has experienced an awful lot of pain, and before he ever entered this political race, ago, he has experienced an awful lot of pain. And before he ever entered this political race, I mean, people would refer to him as almost like a guru of understanding other people's sorrow and being able to reach out to them. And so, you know, I don't want to suggest that he's exploiting this moment, because I think it evidently comes naturally to him. But I think that many people

would look at that and say, that's what a president is supposed to do at this moment. And I think that that coming, what I think is fairly close to the election is something that can be an enduring image of Joe Biden. You know, the reality is, Keith, we love talking about presidents and prime ministers, but a lot of the change people are talking for in terms of policy exist at state levels and municipal levels. And many of those states and municipal governments are run by Democrats. Is this a, well, how big of a political partisan moment is this in the United States? You know, I think the entire Trump presidency to this point has been a huge political partisan moment. There is a thing called negative partisanship. And let me kind of explain it to you with a couple of examples, if you don't mind. One is you may often hear people compare the enthusiasm of Trump supporters, they compare it

to like a cult. And it frightens people who believe that even though the polls show that Biden should have an advantage in this race, Trump has this kind of loyalty that he can draw upon. And they look at the enthusiasm for Biden and they find that it doesn't quite match what Trump has. In a world of negative partisanship, I don't think that matters. What matters is the negative partisanship of people who want to turn out to vote against Donald Trump, and they don't care who's on the Democratic ticket. turnout to vote against Donald Trump, and they don't care who's on the Democratic ticket. I don't know whether Donald Trump is capable of recognizing that because he has such an outsized self-image, right? But that, I think, is a very important reality for understanding the political dynamic right now. The other part of it is very closely related to that. Donald Trump excites both bases.

He gets them both motivated to vote. But the Democratic base is somewhat larger than the Republican base. So every time Donald Trump stands up in the Rose Garden and says something that his supporters love and his opponents are outraged by, I think that might amount to a net loss for him. I think that oddly but understandably, the best weapon the Democrats might have in November is Donald Trump. Keith, it's always good to get your analysis on this stuff. And it's nice to have you back on the podcast. Thanks a lot.

Thank you for inviting me. Enjoyed it. Before we go today, I want to play for you a moment from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's daily press briefing yesterday. Our CBC colleague Tom Perry asked the Prime Minister about his reaction to President Trump's actions on Monday. Here's what Trudeau said, including his silence. You've been reluctant to comment on the words and actions of the U.S. President, but we do have Donald Trump now calling for military action against protesters. We saw protesters tear gas yesterday to make way for a presidential photo op. I'd like to ask you what you think about that, and if you don't want to comment, what message do you think you're sending? We all watch in horror and consternation what's going on in the United States. It is a time to pull people together, but it is a time to listen.

It is a time to learn what injustices continue despite progress over years and decades. But it is a time for us as Canadians to recognize that we too have our challenges. That black Canadians and racialized Canadians face discrimination as a lived reality every single day. There is systemic discrimination in Canada. Which means our systems treat Canadians of colour, Canadians who are racialized differently than they do others. It is something that many of us don't see, but it is something that is a lived reality for racialized Canadians.

We need to see that, not just as a government and take action, but we need to see that as Canadians. We need to be allies in the fight against discrimination. We need to listen, we need to learn, and we need to work hard to fix, to figure out how we can be part of the solution on fixing things. This government has done a number of things over the past years, but there is lots more to do, and we will continue to do that, because we see, we see you, we see the discrimination that racialized Canadians live every single day. I'm Pia Chattopadhyay. Thanks for listening to FrontBurner. We'll talk again tomorrow.