Trump/Fonda

This past week it became very obvious that a flailing Donald Trump is trying to save his prospects for re-election with a domestic variation on the time-honored Wag the Dog strategy.

Thomas Friedman writes in the Times:

(I)n a desperate effort to salvage his campaign, Trump turned to the Middle East Dictator’s Official Handbook and found just what he was looking for, the chapter titled, ‘What to Do When Your People Turn Against You?’

Answer: Turn them against each other and then present yourself as the only source of law and order.

Unable to control the pandemic, or to convince the American people that it’s totally cool that 150,000 of us have died, or that countries from Rwanda to Uruguay to Vietnam have handled it far better than we have, Trump has resorted to trying to scare the Dockers off his panicky supporters with a fictional portrait of radical leftists rioting in the streets, a situation only our “law and order” president (you know, the one who’s an as-yet-unindicted co-conspirator in a raft of felonies) can fix.

Is anyone surprised? Only a little. From the very beginning we worried that Trump, faced with the inevitable scandal, would gin up a foreign war to create this kind of distraction. Instead he is doing something arguably worse, in turning armed paramilitary force on US citizens.