Donald Trump is still sometimes depicted as impulsive and unpredictable. But this view is mistaken. There is method – albeit an evil method – in his madness. His behaviour in the build-up to next week’s US midterm elections highlights this side of the president. He has been consistent and unscrupulous in pursuing it. Fearing that voters will elect an anti-Trump Congress on 6 November, he has made a clear choice to use hate and division to bait and provoke his opponents into a backlash which, he hopes, will energise white voters to support Republican candidates at the polls.
At least three of Mr Trump’s actions this week can only be adequately explained by this strategy. In the first, he has ordered 5,200 active duty American troops to the US-Mexico border. The objective here is not to respond to a crisis – several thousand National Guard are already there, as well as border police – but to create one. Mr Trump wants to make a show of force against a caravan of migrants from Central America, which he has mischievously described as an invasion and which he has falsely said contains “unknown Middle Easterners”. Not only is this claim untrue, but the caravan itself is daily shrinking in size and it is still in southern Mexico, weeks away from reaching the US border. Mr Trump is using his nation’s troops as partisan political props.
The second example of Mr Trump’s cynicism is his response to the slaughter of 11 Jews in Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue. On Tuesday, as the first dead from the synagogue gun massacre were being buried, Mr Trump was preparing to visit Pittsburgh in the teeth of widespread opposition. Many families of the victims, along with Pittsburgh’s mayor, asked the president to stay away. Pennsylvania’s two US senators, and congressional leaders of both parties, chose not to accompany Mr Trump. But he was undeterred. He preferred to barge in and grandstand on a day of private grief. Why behave this way? Not because he is a national uniter, as other presidents have tried to be at such moments, but because he is a divider and a provoker.
This week’s third determination to create a crisis and to use it to frighten white voters to the polls came in an interview released on Monday. Mr Trump has chosen this moment to try to end the right to American citizenship of babies born in the United States to non-citizens. Mr Trump is himself the son of an immigrant mother, the US constitution has recognised this birthright for over 150 years, and it is doubtful he could simply order the change as he pretends. But the president could not be clearer about his darker intentions. He is determined to do everything to make immigration – and that means race – the explicit centrepiece of these elections.
Everything Mr Trump will say over the next seven days will be dedicated to this hate-filled strategy. Even the exceptions prove the rule. After Christine Blasey Ford alleged that Brett Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her, Mr Trump called her a credible witness. Days later, he mercilessly mocked her at a political rally. Now the same pattern has been repeated after pipe bombs were sent to Democratic politicians. Mr Trump initially condemned the attacks as despicable. A day later he complained that “this ‘bomb’ stuff” had got in the way of Republican mobilisation. The true Trump does not hide for long.
Mr Trump is consistent, not inconsistent. He seeks to be the president of some of the people, not all of them. A man who hates half of his country has no right to call for a unity that he does not believe in and which, in a heartbeat, he is ready to trash and mock.