Democratic gaffes are gifts to Trump
So Democrats have no room for error if they are to remove the most dangerous president in memory. And yet, in the past few days, prominent Democrats have made the kind of unforced errors that Trump and his attack dogs will pounce on, fairly or not.
Start with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). What was she thinking when on Monday she went to get her hair done at a San Francisco salon and was caught on camera without a mask? Her spokesman says that the salon told her that it would permit one customer at a time, but the rule in San Francisco is clear: Only on Tuesday did the city allow salons to reopen — and then only for outdoor service. Moreover, San Francisco mandates masks in all businesses. Pelosi flouted both edicts.
Pelosi defends herself by saying she took off her mask only briefly to get her hair washed. She further argues — and her stylist backs her up — that the salon owner, Erica Kious, nursed a grudge against her and set her up. This is given credence by the fact that Kious — who is apparently irate that her business has been closed down by the coronavirus — popped up on Fox News to accuse Pelosi of hypocrisy.
Tucker Carlson and the rest of the Trump attack machine predictably went to town. Donald Trump Jr. tweeted with trademark illiteracy: “Nancy Pelosi is the Mary Antoinnette of the 21st century,” misspelling both the first and last name of the 18th-century French queen. Kevin Roose of the New York Times noted on Wednesday night that Pelosi’s haircut was “by far the biggest story on Facebook right now”: “13 of the top 25 top-performing link posts on US Facebook in the last 24 hours (and 4 of the top 5) are about it.”
Never mind that Pelosi has been a paragon of responsibility compared with Trump, who not only almost always appears in public without a mask but holds public events, such as his acceptance speech on the White House lawn, that are likely to spread the novel coronavirus. The right-wing media don’t care about consistency. They simply want to play a game of “gotcha!” Pelosi walked right into their trap.
So did New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D). He was understandably irate about Trump’s threats to defund New York and other cities that the president ludicrously accuses of harboring “anarchists.” But the governor went too far on Wednesday night when he told reporters: “[Trump] can’t have enough bodyguards to walk through New York City. Forget bodyguards. He better have an army if he thinks he’s going to walk down the streets in New York.”
By implying that Trump would not be safe in the streets of his hometown, Cuomo played into the president’s charges that Democrats are encouraging violence. This is monstrously unfair when, from Biden on down, every major Democrat had condemned violence, whether it comes from the left or right. Trump, by contrast, can’t even bring himself to condemn the right-winger who has been accused of killing two people in Kenosha, Wis. But, again, Trump doesn’t play fair — and Cuomo should not be helping to advance the president’s mendacious narrative.
The same goes for D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D). What on Earth was she thinking by publishing on Tuesday recommendations from a committee that wants to “remove, relocate or contextualize” various monuments — including the Jefferson Memorial and Washington Monument? By Tuesday evening, the D.C. government had taken down the portion of the report concerning federal monuments — over which the city government has no jurisdiction anyway.
But the damage had been done. Bowser’s actions appeared to many to confirm Trump’s 2017 prediction that the removal of Confederate monuments would result in the removal of monuments to Washington and Jefferson: “You know, you really do have to ask yourself, where does it stop?”
In fact, it’s not hard to draw a sensible line. As the eminent Jefferson biographer Annette Gordon-Reed told The Post: “Contextualizing these monuments makes perfect sense. Removal, particularly of the Washington [Monument] and Jefferson Memorials, does not make sense, given the formative role they both played in the founding of the United States.” But Bowser’s report allows Trump to draw attention away from his own appeals to racism and try to scare White America about the Democrats’ supposedly radical — actually sensible — agenda.
Democrats repeatedly say that the 2020 election is the most important in our lifetimes and that defeating Trump is essential to protect our democracy. They are right. But they need to act like it. With only 61 days until the election, Democrats cannot afford to make in-kind campaign contributions to Trump.
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