One of the most potent arguments against restoring Donald Trump to the presidency is centered on the chaos and tumult of the former president’s tenure in the White House. Among the undesirable conditions that voters disapproved of in the Trump years, foremost were the regular eruptions of political violence in the streets, only some of which were directly attributable to the president’s supporters. But all of it, Democrats assured Americans, was an outgrowth of Trump’s vituperative style. Once he was gone, the bitterness, the factionalism, and the violent street action would similarly fade away.
It hasn’t quite worked out that way, has it? An outpouring of antisemitic agitation punctuated by episodes of terroristic violence has highlighted the degree to which the chaos incepted in the Trump years was not attributable to Donald Trump’s conduct alone. Jewish business owners are being targeted and terrorized. Visibly Jewish pedestrians — indeed, children — are being assaulted. American citizens are being told to practice their faith quietly and in private, and pusillanimous liberal-leaning municipalities are canceling the celebration of Jewish rituals lest they attract the attention of a psychopathic mob.
The executors of this intimidation campaign may not be dyed-in-the-wool Democrats themselves, but no one is at all confused about where their political sympathies lie. Their slogans, their hand-written signs, the cities in which they organize, and the political actors to whom they appeal for redress — all are on or of the political Left.
Only the most motivated observers can pretend that they don’t notice the delicate dance in which Democratic lawmakers are engaged in their effort to avoid making examples of their own. Americans know precisely who Democrats are calling out when they craft generalized condemnations of antisemitic sentiment abroad while doing their best to avoid naming the members of Congress who retail those sentiments. The left-wing organizations that hem and haw when confronted with evidence that Hamas brutalized, caged, and raped Israeli women before murdering them are responding to political incentives about which no one is confused. The revolt against voguish DEI initiatives on American campuses that lacquer rank antisemitism with a pseudo-academic gloss is a revolt against left-wing ideational inclinations. We all know this.
Democrats can count on some of their partisans to ignore the evidence of their own eyes. But if Joe Biden and his allies believe they can persuade or cajole everyone else into subordinating their present apprehension to hypothetical concerns about a second Trump administration, they’re kidding themselves.
Politically, the chaos and anti-egalitarianism in American streets confront Democrats with a real threat. What are the arguments Democrats made against Trump’s style of governance in 2020 that hold up today? Can they say that Trump presided over a deteriorating international threat environment? They can, but the argument won’t hold up compared with this president’s record. They cannot say that the economy under Trump was worse or that it exacerbated displeasing societal inequities — not in contrast to today’s conditions. And now, Democrats run the risk of being deprived of any rational claim to the notion that their party’s tenure in the White House muted the violent and menacing tendencies the far-left activist class exhibits in the streets.
The current spate of antisemitic violence and terrorization risks pushing American voters toward a conclusion that Democrats desperately want them to avoid drawing. Apart from terrible and destabilizing events like the January 6 attack on the Capitol, the chaotic and violent street action of the Trump years was largely attributable to Trump’s opponents. It wasn’t Trump fans rioting in the streets of nearly every major American city in the summer of 2020. It wasn’t Trump voters writing apologia for violent demonstrators who assaulted their political opponents but only with the best of intentions. It wasn’t Trump’s defenders who lionized the bloody work of the so-called “anti-fascist action” shock troops. Trump’s presence in the White House might have gone some way toward animating these violent demonstrators, but his absence from political office hasn’t cooled their passions.
Democrats will do their best to prevent voters from drawing these conclusions by invoking the violence committed by Trump supporters. You won’t hear an argument from me on that score. The bloodletting on the steps of the Capitol, in Charlottesville, Va., and elsewhere is a blight on the former president’s record. But the balance of terror has undeniably shifted to the left. In the end, voters may conclude that the violence and chaos against which Democrats inveighed was theirs all along. That is deadly.