[Military sub-plane] :D arcy
Infighting, the core of game of thrones.
Entering 2020, American society is tearing apart like never before.
This tearing, an important phenomenon, is at the moment when the new crown epidemic is raging, the United States is particularly serious, and the current confirmed cases are far ahead of the world. But more and more Americans are starting to oppose orders such as stay-at-home quarantine and wearing masks when going out.
▲ 100,000 people died in your country, and you are still so brave
I salute you as a man
The Democratic governor and Trump, led by New York Governor Cuomo, have fought countless verbal battles from the distribution of ventilators and reagents to whether to restart the economy.
An epidemic that should have been a common resistance for Americans has become a battlefield of partisanship, and people who support both sides have been wrapped up in it.
The resulting discussion of the tearing of American society has aroused great interest among the majority of netizens. Some boil it down to the current prevalence of anti-intellectualism in the United States. Jerry Guo, the owner of B Station UP, released a title called "Why Some Americans Are Particularly "Anti-Intellectual"!" Mostly Trump supporters? The video has also caused a wide discussion on the Internet, you can go to search for it, it is very pertinent.
What is anti-intellectualism? The examples given in the video are those who think that the coronavirus does not exist, some keyboard men who think that Bill Gates will add mini chips to the vaccine and scold him under his social media accounts, and even in the 21st century, there are people who think that the earth is flat...
▲ Ghost only believes. Image source: stheconversation.com
Don't laugh, according to data released by Forbes, only 66% of young people aged 18-24 in the United States firmly believe that the earth is round...
But is it just because Americans are anti-intellectual? Definitely not, there must be complex reasons behind this.
In the eyes of onlookers, why can Chuan Jianguo, who is so invincible, arrogant, extremely conceited and wanton, get the support of so many Americans? Why does he always tweet and shake the air? Why does he always like to say "fake news"? How did American society tear apart to such an extent?
It wasn't until I watched a documentary produced by PBS, "America's Great Divide: From Obama to Trump," that I learned more about these issues. I won't talk about the objectivity of this documentary, but at least it provides another perspective.
▲Image source: PBS
The root cause of all this, in fact, has been doomed since Obama took office in 2008, and the complex political game behind it has played a role in fueling the tearing apart of the United States.
1
The beginning of the tear
Let's go back in time to the 2004 Democratic National Convention. That year, although Obama was not nominated as the Democratic presidential candidate, he had already gained fame and became a rising star in American politics because of his overwhelming victory in the Illinois Senate primary in March of that year.
At that conference, Obama gave his famous speech. He first talked about his own life. His father grew up in a small village in Kenya, his mother was a white man from Kansas, and he himself was born in Honolulu, Hawaii. Emphasizing the power of education, he spoke of his own success in legal and political careers, "In any other country on earth, my story is impossible." ”
▲ Image source: The Guardian
He emphasized the "American Dream." Above all, he sent a signal to unite The United States. "There is no liberal America and no conservative America, only the United States of America!" There are no black Americans, no white Americans, no Latino Americans, no Asian Americans, only the United States of America! ”
He gave the American people hope of healing their wounds. Where did the wound come from?
This "benefited" George W. Bush's tenure. During these 8 years of turmoil, the war in Iraq against non-existent "weapons of mass destruction" has plunged the United States into it. A rift began to appear in American society, and the people were eager to seek change, hoping to find a new direction for the country.
▲Image source: medium.com
And Obama gave people that hope. After that speech, someone predicted that "I saw the first black president."
Extremely talented, charismatic, and adept at motivation, Obama is different from the politicians of the past. "We will eventually bring the changes we need to Washington..." "We are ready to lead this country in a whole-hearted direction..."
In the 2008 U.S. election, Obama desperately conveyed a message of hope and change. But at the same time, it's not just the Democrats who are looking for change.
Republican Sarah Palin made a brilliant appearance, and her words and deeds now seem to be Trump's grandfather.
Sarah Palin.
With that said, with the impression of Trump, you can more or less know what kind of person Palin is. She is conceited, tough, dare to speak, can speak, and most importantly, she is very grounded, and has won the sympathy of many middle- and lower-class voters. She used some people's complaints about the government, the media and other elites to constantly express her contempt for the elite in public, convincing people that they could "take back power" from the elite.
Huge public support made Palin the Republican vice presidential candidate in the 2008 election, along with presidential candidate John McCain, against Democratic candidates Obama and Joe Biden. It turned out to be a fiasco.
Sarah Palin and John McCain (right).
On November 4, 2008, Obama defeated McCain by a voter vote of 365 to 173 and was elected as the 44th president of the United States, becoming the first black president in the history of the United States
Black people as presidents are definitely significant to Americans. Broderick Johnson, an adviser to Obama, recalled a detail of Obama's inauguration when he and his daughter were huddled in the crowd and a white man turned to them and said to his daughter, "Girl, one day you can stand there too, and you'll be president of the United States too." ”
Obama has promised to unite Americans, and many believe he will do. Even those who are skeptical of Obama want to see what the first black president in American history can do.
Obama sent a similar message — that I'm going to unite America, and even if you haven't supported me, I'm going to make a better life for you.
But looking at the time from the perspective of the present, Obama's failure was already doomed. His speech at the election, which later became his famous quote, "Yes, we can!" During his 8 years in office, almost nothing came of it, replaced by "No, we can't!" ”。
▲Sworn in.
On the night of Obama's swearing-in, the leaders of the Republican Party gathered in Washington, they were all high-level party leaders, many of them attended Obama's inauguration, witnessed the spectacle of the crowds at the ceremony, and felt more and more a huge sense of loss, feeling that the Republican Party was completely abandoned.
So what they're talking about is the "offensive" plan, how to put pressure on Obama to take the actions necessary to disagree against any of Obama's bills.
The first conundrum facing Obama is the mess left by the 2008 economic crisis.
2
When mutual aversion becomes the norm
The economy is collapsing, trillions of dollars are being used to prop up Wall Street, america's middle class is angry and discontent with the financial giants is growing.
In the eyes of the people at the bottom, the big banks caused the economic crisis, but they were rescued, and the consequences were passed on to the people. As a result, opposition to Wall Street has also risen one after another.
▲Image source: commondreams.org
Obama must solve the economic crisis perfectly.
Financial big guys, or ordinary people? Obama accepted the adviser's advice that "you should not be too obsessed with designing political effects that affect the fate of hundreds of millions of Americans," and he chose the former without the big banks being punished as they deserve.
American society exploded. Anger and distrust of the government began to rise. The rich messed up the economy and escaped punishment, but every ordinary American suffered the consequences? Unemployment remains high, countless people have lost their homes, and ordinary people feel abandoned.
At this time, the Tea Party movement began to appear. The main players in the Tea Party are right-wingers who advocate conservative economic policies. It was originally developed by opposition from some to Obama's 2009 stimulus recovery plan. Its personnel are overwhelmingly middle-class whites and a minority of white wage earners who are dissatisfied with reality, and they are a right-wing populist social movement launched by some factions of the Republican Party.
Populism began to rise. Those who participate in the sport resent Obama, resent him for taking the side of the rich and powerful and abandoning ordinary people.
But as the economic crisis worsened, Mr. Obama was pushing Congress to pass another resolution— health care reform. Obama wants to reform the existing health care system in the United States to fulfill the promises he made to voters when he ran for president. In the health care reform plan, he proposed expanding Medicare coverage to all Americans, including the uninsured.
But someone starting Obama's health care overhaul would destroy the previous health care system and increase the cost of Medicare for Americans; the federal government has too much power...
Taking advantage of this disagreement, Sarah Palin reappeared and brought with her a new "political weapon"— Facebook. She understands that through social media, it is possible to avoid the media and directly disseminate unprocessed information to the public.
"Turning fiction into facts and lies as truth" began with Palin in the current American political environment. "She's a lot of liars, and she says things that aren't real at all, information she hears from the Internet." Steve Schmidt, a senior aide to McCain's presidential campaign, advised Him to choose Palin as his vice presidential candidate, but he said the same about Palin.
"Death Review Team," a phrase she describes Obamacare reform, went viral immediately after its release on Facebook. The meaning of the "death review team" is that the government is trying to grasp the life and death power of the public through health care reform.
▲ Manga about the "Death Review Team".
Image source: wordpress.com
It seems like such a ridiculous statement, but there are many people who believe it, and the right-wing media has begun to hype it.
The "outstanding" representative of this is Fox News' Glenn Baker, who reached the pinnacle of his career during his Obama tenure. Wesley Lowry of The Washington Post believes that the right-wing media of the time were generally "hysterical" and that "seeing Glenn Baker every day and what he says about the president, you think the country is collapsing."
Glenn Baker has his own unique language expression that maximizes this outrage.
Ben Rod, a former Obama aide, sees Glenn Baker as "the seed of conspiracy theories," "Obama is seeking control of your life," "Obama has a secret plan to do something," or "Obama, a shady man who wants to control every aspect of your life."
Glenn Baker.
There are more and more angry voices on social media such as Facebook, and various talk shows, Fox News, etc. form a right-wing "anger machine". This anger has had a profound impact on the political environment of American society today.
Opponents are numerous, even nakedly racially discriminatory.
▲ Image source: "The Great Divide in America: From Obama to Trump"
Obama's election would have offered hope for racial harmony, but race in his first year in office became central to the American divide.
The arrest of Professor Henry Gates, one of America's preeminent black academics, triggered the first racist upsurge of The Obama presidency.
On July 16, 2009, Henry Gates, a well-known black professor at Harvard University in the United States, returned to his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and forcibly opened the door because the door was locked. A neighbor mistook him for a thief who broke in and called the police. Gates showed police identification identifying him as the homeowner, but was arrested for misconduct by police after an altercation with white police officer James Crowley, a charge that was later dropped.
Henry Gates was arrested.
Obama's response was that the Cambridge police acted foolishly and arrested people when they proved to be in their own homes.
Obama was then labeled anti-police and racist. Glenn Baker said on a news show: "I think this president is exposing himself over and over again and has a deep hatred for white people or white culture... This man is a racist. ”
During Obama's eight-year tenure, the incident caused his polls to fall the most.
Obama had to apologize and do something he could not regret — calling Henry Gates together with the police officers who arrested him and drinking beer. It was ridiculed by the media as a "beer summit".
This is certainly not a positive word, because what Obama has learned through this is that publicly discussing race will only stimulate the forces against him.
▲ Beer Summit.
Obama's inauguration became a symbol of America's transformation from a "white America" to a "more diverse, more nationalized America," and now he is a symbol of national rift.
Health care reform is deadlocked, and the divide with Republicans is widening. On September 9, 2009, when Obama delivered a speech in Congress clarifying that health care reform would not apply to illegal residents, Republican Congressman Joe Wilson yelled at Obama, "You lie!" (You Lie!), controversial.
The disrespectful behavior shown to the president in the House of Representatives shocked everyone, because before that, he would surely be disgraced and resign from Congress. Leaders of both The Democratic and Republican Parties would demand so. Yet the truth is, Joe Wilson raised millions of dollars in campaign money overnight.
▲ You lie! Image credit: NBC
This crazy move is no longer punished, but replaced by rewards.
Obama has since faced the reality that the Republican strategy of opposing him on the day he took office is working. Health care reform can no longer be a bipartisan consensus.
He won't get any vote from the Republican Party. This means that as president, he can't do anything, because the Republican Party will oppose him in anything.
In the early days of Obama's presidency, his desire to unite with the Republican Party was dashed. "He was wrong, that would never happen, the Republicans didn't want to give him any victory, it had nothing to do with reason and logic, they just didn't want to give him victory." Writer Robert Ritchie thinks so.
Obama certainly won't sit still, and he's trying to win over Democratic supporters. The final vote was, 219 votes to 212, and the health care reform bill struggled to pass, with not a single Republican lawmaker voting in favor. This exhausted the first year of Obama's term, but it also seemed to "solve" the Heart Disease of the Democratic Party for decades.
Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act at the White House on March 23, 2010.
Of course, this is not over. Want to force the Republican Party to swallow without the support of a national majority? How can it be. Opponents of Obama, along with the Republican Party, became even angrier, and some even began to call Obama's health care reform a "socialist health care reform."
Basically relying on one-party force to pass the health care reform is destined to become a continuous partisan divide.
3
Trump appears, Obama is not An American?
Anger over Obama has widened, and there have even begun to doubt his identity, believing that Obama's birth certificate was forged and that he was not a U.S. citizen, but a Kenyan citizen. If you are not a U.S. citizen, you cannot be the president of the United States, which is known as the "birth paper movement." The right-wing media began to make a big fuss about it.
Then it caught the attention of reality TV star Donald Trump. At the time, Trump was considering running in the 2012 election, and his political advisers thought he needed a topic that resonated with people, just as the birth paper incident occurred.
Trump brought this time into the mainstream of the public eye, and he repeatedly denounced Obama in public, "Why doesn't he show his birth certificate?" "If he wasn't born in the United States, you can't be president, he may not have been born in the United States...".
Although Obama had already produced his birth certificate during the 2008 election, voices questioning his birthplace have emerged in the right-wing media and continue to ferment.
He had to show more evidence to prove he was American, and the incident gradually subsided. Subsequently, at the 2011 White House Press Dinner, Obama laughed at Trump in front of Trump and in front of a full house of reporters and politicians.
"No one is happier than Trump about the resolution of this birth certificate issue, because he can finally focus on other important questions, like are we a fake moon landing?" ......”
At the White House correspondents' dinner, it is common to be ridiculed. But according to the recollections of those present at the time, Trump's expression was stiff and tormented, in stark contrast to the laughter around him.
▲ The stark contrast between the two, the inner monologue can be made up.
Image source: breitbart.com
Roger Stone, Trump's former political adviser, believes that it was on that night that Trump made up his mind to run for president and "show them." Becoming the president of the United States is Trump's ultimate "revenge".
Before a series of outrages, public opinion surged that the Republican Party clearly saw the change and exploited it. In the 2010 midterm elections, Democrats lost control of the House of Representatives. 87 Tea Party members entered the House of Representatives. What does this mean? He has intensified his opposition to Obama.
Meanwhile, Republican John Boehner became the new speaker, someone obama saw as negotiable and cooperative. After several secret consultations with Mr. Obama, a consensus was reached to cut the fiscal deficit. Why secret negotiations? Because John Boehner didn't want to be seen by his own people, he sneaked in through the back door of the White House at every negotiation.
But the agreement the two discussed did not appear at the Republican meeting, so there would be no majority of Republican lawmakers to agree. It was just John Boehner's wishful thinking. The Tea Party began calling for him to step down.
Obama's response was: "One of the questions Republicans have to ask themselves is, what can they say 'yes'?" ”
The Republican Party's acceptance of Tea Party members, conservative radio host Charlie Sykes argues, has also fundamentally changed the nature of the Republican caucus, a group of hardline members of Congress who are not interested in governing and prefer to frustrate the legislative process again and again. Robert Richie even argues that the Republican establishment did not realize that by allying with the Tea Party, it pronounced its own death, leading to the eventual takeover of the Republican Party by Trump.
Then, the racial question struck again.
On the evening of February 26, 2012, in Sanford County, Florida, 17-year-old black high school student Trevon Martin was shot dead by George Zimmerman, a 28-year-old white, Latino American, while walking in the neighborhood, but was eventually acquitted.
▲ Trévon Martin (left) announced by the media,
Photo of George Zimmerman (right).
As soon as this case came out, it immediately caused an uproar. But before that, Mr. Obama had become too careful not to say too much about race.
But as a black president, or even a president who came to power on the votes of blacks, the community wants him to speak out more. Eventually, a month after the incident, Obama finally confronted it publicly, "If I had a son, he would look like Trevon... We need to gain insight into the reality of what happened. ”
This incident also shows the difficulty and complexity of the first black president in the United States in weighing racial issues. A slight bias is political incorrectness.
Sure enough, Obama's response drew "interpretations" from right-wing media led by Fox News. One of the episodes discussed went something like this: The president's goal was to increase black turnout by inciting feelings of victimization in the black community.
The same rhetoric continues to ferment on the new right-wing Breitbart News Network.
"We are the blog of the Tea Party, and after the financial crisis broke out, we got the support of the working class and the middle class." Brightbard's founder, Steve Bannon, said so.
▲ Steve Bannon, who later became Trump's core think tank figure.
The role of the Brightbard News Network, similar to Sarah Palin's use of Facebook, became the "mouthpiece of anger" for populism. The news release "stimulates fear and division" and is filled with extreme rhetoric about black crime, terrorism, immigration violence, and culture shock, but there are still many fans.
"It looks like walking into some sort of hate club where the site attracts racists, homophobes, anti-Semite groups, etc., really, the worst of us." Every day I'm creating this collective space, where people with that worldview are pumping each other up, looking for people who can validate their own worldview, and I think that's the ultimate goal of website building. Former Bright bart spokesman Kurt Baldra said.
In a torn United States, the divisions are getting bigger and bigger.
By 2012, Obama was seeking re-election, facing an unprecedented situation and falling in the polls.
Obama decided to salvage the decline through debate. In one debate he chanted: "If I say 'the sky is blue, they say 'no'; if I say 'there are fish in the sea', they say 'no'; they feel 'as long as Obama loses, it means we win'..."
In fact, Obama is already disappointed with the way Washington operates, and he no longer thinks the two parties can work together again.
At the same time, the Republican Party is fighting among themselves. The establishment supported their representative, wealthy businessman Mitt Romney, while the Tea Party confirmed that he was out of touch with reality and "did not understand what the American people, especially the Republicans, were thinking."
Romney and Trump.
Yet Romney needs the support of the Tea Party's extremely populist base. So he had to enlist Trump to stand for him. But the Tea Party may have been right, and Romney lost several mistakes in the campaign, and Obama was re-elected.
At that time, Trump had arrived in Boston, preparing to attend Romney's "victory party", and when he heard the news of the Republican defeat, he immediately flew back to New York. Then began to tweet like crazy – "This election is completely fake and clumsy..."
Just 6 days later, Trump applied for the trademark "Make America Great Again," which became the slogan of his later presidential campaign.
Make America Great Again! Image credit: The Drum
He was ready to run for president.
One of the reasons Obama won was that he won the support of Latino voters, and the Republican Party took note of that. After their research, they realized that after 2012, America was changing, and if you want to be in the White House, not just Congress, you have to attract young voters, Latinos, and women.
They found that too many millennials, minorities, etc. rejected the GoV in elections because they didn't think the GOP was inclusive. "We must embrace immigration reform across the board, otherwise the Republican Party's appeal will continue to diminish."
Right-wing media outlets such as Fox News have also softened on immigration. Even Trump said on the show that the Republican Party has made mistakes on immigration, and they have to do something about immigration.
During Obama's presidency, the two parties wanted to cooperate "unprecedentedly."
But new rifts have emerged. This is only bipartisan cooperation, but it does not represent the will of Republican voters. At Brightbard News, founder Steve Bannon began speaking out against the Republican establishment. "We're going to attack the real enemy, and the real enemy is the Republican establishment," he said. ”
Bannon and his website use immigration as a weapon against the establishment, and immigration-hating rhetoric is rife in comment sections. In the United States at that time, conservative voters were not in a good economic situation, and there were always concerns about immigration, and Bannon knew how to use these worries and expand them. Eventually he succeeded, and immigration became the most concerned issue for Republican voters, even more than tax cuts, which were the most self-interested issues.
Led by Bannon, the right-wing media launched a crackdown on then-House Leader Eric Conte to prop up the Tea Party leader. Under the overwhelming public opinion offensive, Eric Conte eventually stepped down and gave the establishment a head start. Bipartisan cooperation to solve the problem of immigration reform ultimately failed.
For the first time in American history, voter bases have abandoned the idea of the Republican establishment. This can only mean that the gap in American society continues to deepen.
Wave after wave, wave after wave. On December 14, 2012, a shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, killed 28 people, including 20 children, and six adults who tried to come forward to help, and gunman Adam Lanza committed suicide on the spot. It was the second deadliest school shooting in U.S. history. Before he went to Sandy Hook Elementary School, he killed his mother.
▲The photos of the victims released by the media, are you shocked to see them?
Image credit: Kveller
This brings us to another controversial issue in American society – gun control. Obama was shocked by the shooting, so he thought it might be an opportunity to pursue Democratic gun control policies.
He wants to legislate for guns and asks Vice President Joe Biden to take the lead. Eventually, the two parties drafted a bill proposing modest changes to the gun laws. Public support is also strong, with more than 91 percent of Americans supporting expanded background checks, 80 percent of Rifle Association members supporting the proposal, and the Republican Party is about to sign it. Everyone thinks the mass shooting will get the United States to face gun control again and make changes.
But how can there be less right-wing media such as Brightbart and Fox News at this time? If "this is depriving law-abiding American citizens of the right to own guns" is quite plausible, it would be magical to simply deny that the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting really happened.
Public opinion is surging and Obama can only watch the key figures of the Republican Party leave one by one, and even some Democrats have retreated. The gun control program was ultimately not approved by a margin of 5 votes.
Charlie Sykes even argues that eighty or ninety percent of Americans have legitimate demands for gun control, but nothing happens. "So, the Republican Party has been held hostage by its voter base, and American politics has been held hostage by the Republican Party."
The immediate shooting of black youth hit the face of those who opposed the ban on gun, and the racial problems caused by it once again pushed Obama to the forefront.
On Aug. 9, 2014, Michael Brown, an 18-year-old black American youth, was shot dead by 28-year-old white police officer Darren Wilson while unarmed. Local police believe Brown was suspected of a robbery, but witnesses said "Brown was not carrying a weapon and had his hands raised."
▲The scene of the crime.
Image source: St. Louis Post-Dispatch
The racial issue is once again spreading tears. The incident sparked several days of local opposition, and even riots, with police dispatching a large number of officers, armored vehicles, and firing tear gas and rubber bullets to try to quell the unrest, and the FBI also stepped in to investigate.
However, the curfew could not control the situation, so the governor dispatched the Missouri National Guard the next day to assist local police in maintaining policing.
Opponents clashed fiercely with the police.
In this regard, Obama still chose silence first. After 5 days, he responded to the public with a "slime and thin mud", but he was not flattered by both ends.
Writer David Remnick recalls that once he interviewed Obama at the White House and asked him questions about race, "His answer was unusual... Alertness, inconsequential, are all clichés to deal with the media, and can hardly be used. As he was leaving, Obama stopped him in the hallway and said, "You have to remember, I'm the president of the United States, I'm not the president of the Black United States." Everyone knows who I am, because I can see my appearance, I am black, but I must be careful when I speak of anything about race. ”
Anger soon spread out over Ferguson. The "Black Lives Matter" movement began to appear online, with people across the country uploading and sharing videos of police killings.
▲ The life of a black man is also a fate.
Image credit: National Affairs
Then there was the tit-for-tat counterattack of the right-wing media.
Then the Democratic Party was hit hard. In the midterm elections of fall 2014, the Senate was also controlled by republicans. Republicans have defeated Democrats in every red and blue state, including many of the states on which Obama had previously won. This time it was the Democrats' turn to start feeling hugely lost.
Both houses of the Senate and the House of Representatives are controlled by republicans, meaning that Obama is more constrained, and the Republican Party can more easily oppose him to do anything.
For 6 years, Obama has been fighting fear, anger, and tearing with promises such as "hope and change" and "bipartisan cooperation." At this point, Obama finally gave up on attempts to promise these promises.
Pressed, Obama took an extreme approach — bypassing the Republican Congress and using all the powers he could legally exercise to do his own thing. "I'm going to do everything I can, with the tools I can use, and I'm definitely not going to be able to rely on the Republican Congress to make significant progress on what I think is important."
The move also drew strong opposition from public opinion. To bypass Congress is to bypass the American people, which is absolutely not allowed in the United States, which claims to be "democratic."
At this point, the American people are generally disappointed and very suspicious of the political institutions, whether it is Congress or bipartisan.
The shootings struck again. On June 17, 2015, a "white supremacist" ran to a black church in Charleston, South Carolina, and fired indiscriminately, killing nine people, including a pastor. The killer, Dylan Luffer, was eventually convicted of 33 counts and sentenced to death on January 10, 2017.
▲ The picture of Dylan Luffer walking into the church with a gun on his back.
The killer wrote in his diary: "What really woke me up was the case of Trevon Martin. How could the news of Trevon Martin go viral and hundreds of black killings of whites ignored? He believes that blacks are occupying the world, and Obama's becoming president of the United States is one of the manifestations.
The Massacre in South Carolina made Obama finally realize that he had to confront race. At the memorial service, Obama delivered a speech that for the first time showed unbridled comfort for black people.
Perhaps, in the last moments of his presidency, Obama dared to truly release himself. Yet he was also asking himself, "What if we're wrong?" What if people just want to retreat to their own race? Is people's racial or ethnic identities stronger? ”
In his final State of the Union address, Obama concluded: "We have to admit that the cooperation over the past 7 years has been quite difficult, and this is one of the few regrets of my presidency." The hatred and suspicion between the two parties has gotten worse than improved. Without the will to compromise, democracy gives way. Even basic facts are questioned or only spoken by people who agree with me.
But it doesn't matter. Because soon it will be Trump's turn to officially appear.
4
Taking advantage of the "split," Trump took office
Trump once used the birth paper incident to create a momentum for himself, so what about this time? Immigration issues.
His top aide, Sam Neuberg, came up with an idea for him — to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border and get Mexico to pay for it. The move was intended to draw sustained attention from a wide range of voters, as Sam Neuberg found immigration highly concerned among Republican voters.
Then, in 2015, Trump came up with the idea in a speech in Iowa, and the audience went "crazy" with joy. Trump's move perfectly caters to the wishes of voters. Although this practice seems ridiculous to outsiders.
In a speech, Trump openly discriminated against Mexican immigrants: Mexico sent people, but did not send the best... They send a lot of troublesome people, they bring us trouble, they bring crime, they bring drugs, they are rapists...
Then it caused widespread controversy across the country, but Trump didn't want to retract his remarks at all. Some media outlets argue that he may be blunt and sometimes unwise, but he is conveying the views of most Republican voters.
Steve Bannon argues, "That's our guy, he [Trump] is a very imperfect tool, but he's an armor-piercing bullet."
Obama came to power with the slogan of unity, but Trump came up to exploit differences. Even Clinton and George W. Bush jr., the first message they sent when they took office was unity. Although when they left office, the United States was torn apart more severely than the previous one.
At the same time, the electorate is furious, and they desperately need a tough and independent voice to speak up for them, whether it is politically correct or not, they support him, treat him as their own, and no one can bully him.
On August 6, 2015, during the first Republican nominee debate about the 2016 election, Fox News host Megan Carey questioned Trump: "You call the women you don't like fat pigs, dogs, idiots, and disgusting animals... Does that sound like the temperament of a president we need? ”
Megan Kelly. Image credit: Daily Kos
Subsequently, in an interview after the debate, Trump responded: "I personally think Megan is behaving very badly...", and then, at 3:40 a.m., he sent another tweet: Wow, Meghan really lit a barrel of explosives tonight. People on Twitter are starting to go crazy. It's fun to watch.
Megan believes that Trump realized that this was a good story at the time, and then he has been adding fuel to the fire, because he knows that some voters like to see him challenge strong women, so he deduced that this will greatly improve his polls. Even though she's on Fox News.
Of course, this kind of thing is indispensable to Trump's strong ally , Brightbart News Network and its leader Steve Bannon. Bannon revealed that in order to target Megan, he had two of his generals chase after Meghan and write 20 stories about Megan, "We will keep fighting her, and then the 'war' will break out." ”
Subsequently, insults and rumors against Meghan spread on Brightbart. Roger Ayers, then fox news director, had to call Bannon to hope he would stop the attack on Megan because she was "depressed and being personally attacked," but Bannon responded: "Sounds like a personal trouble." But we're not going to back down, and we'll be making more stories tomorrow. ”
▲ Trump and Bannon. Image credit: Time
Under the onslaught, Ayers had to compromise. He needed Trump, Bannon and Brightbart more than Meghan, who was Fox News's popular hostess at the time. Ayers didn't want to lose those viewers who supported Trump.
Before that, Republican politicians had always succumbed to Fox News, but Trump changed that, he fought Fox News, and he won. This is a great encouragement to Trump supporters.
After that, Trump began to use the tears of American society to win political capital for himself. Trump has told Robert Costa, the host of the talk show "Washington Week," that he believes America is already tearing apart and that if he shows confrontation like a fighter, people who feel aggrieved will embrace him.
This is different from traditional campaign tactics — not to try to unite the country, but to tear it apart.
Trump began to constantly introduce the concept of "forgotten people" in his campaign speeches. What is a "forgotten person"? It is the people who are excluded from the system, who reject the elites, who reject the intellectuals, who despise the media because they feel that they are looked down upon.
▲ The forgotten men and women of our country will not be forgotten again.
Trump understands what these people need and does his best to meet them. Over the past decade, many white Americans have believed that they are losing their country, and the only person who can stop this trend is Trump.
"We need to have a strong military, no one dares to mess with us!" "We're being led by very stupid people!" "Can't we beat ISIS? Make no mistake! ”
Trump is very good at stirring up emotions, and the first emotion he exploits is the complaints about immigration. "You should drive past illegal immigrants!" "Build walls!" Build walls! ”
Every time you show up, you don't know what explosive news will come out of Trump's mouth, so the news media is happy to report on him. Even, in some live broadcasts, Before Trump was present, the live broadcast had already begun. And Trump, who came from a talk show star, is very good at performing in front of the camera.
This has directly led to rising public anger, and Trump has even attracted the support of extreme groups such as white supremacists, the Ku Klux Klan, and neo-Nazis.
Trump has fueled the trend of America's tearing apart, and his political strategy has blended with American anger.
Even a significant portion of Americans believe that Russia took advantage of this disagreement to successfully intervene in the 2016 U.S. election. The reason is that after the election became a competition between Trump and Hillary Clinton, some Russian media took the lead in making a big fuss about Hillary Clinton's health, and then the right-wing media in the United States immediately followed.
Trump also mocked Hillary Clinton's "unhealthiness" in public, and even called on Russia to check the "30,000 emails" at the "Hillary Mailgate" incident.
Whether Russia interfered in the US election is difficult to determine and does not matter.
Importantly, while Hillary Clinton's health problems are fake news, many people believe it. It seems that "people are only willing to believe what they are willing to believe" is the trend of the world.
This phenomenon also finally saved Trump once. On October 7, 2016, during the election, the Washington Post published a video and related article about a conversation between Trump and someone else in which Trump described his attempts to seduce a married woman, "I won't even wait." When you become a star, they make you do it. You can do anything. Grab their pussy. You can do anything. ”
This is the "Trump Videogate" incident. As soon as the news came out, the stone broke the sky. Trump's popular approval rating has been hit hard, falling to 35 percent, compared to 48 percent for Hillary Clinton. At this point, there is still a month to go before the general election.
Some even compared him to Harvey Stein, the protagonist of Hollywood's "me too" time.
Almost everyone thinks Trump is out of the loop, even his campaign staff. Except steve Bannon. He thinks Trump still has an absolute chance of running for success, and he said to Trump: "Listen, they [the voters] don't care, it's just a locker room topic, they don't care about vulgarity or anything like that, they care about the jobs that are being lost, the countries that are losing." ”
But the Republican establishment is not optimistic about Trump and has withdrawn, including the current Vice President Pence. They believe that female voters in the United States will not vote for Trump again.
The traditional political rule is that Trump needs to apologize. But trump's apology is also very "Trump". In a Facebook video posted later, he said: "I never said I was a perfect person. Nor will I pretend that it is not me. I regret having said and done something, and what I said in today's video more than a decade ago is one of them. People who know me know that these words don't reflect me. I said. I was wrong and I apologize. ”
But then Trump began to attack Bill and Hillary Clinton, saying that Bill Clinton was "actually the one who abused women" and that Hillary Clinton was "a victim of bullying, attacking, and humiliating him [Bill Clinton]."
Soon, Bannon's ideas came true, and voters running for al-Qaeda continued to show support for Trump.
Bannon then plotted a counterattack. At the presidential debate that followed, Bannon suggested that Trump bring all the women involved in the Bill Clinton sex scandal to the scene and hold a press conference, "We're going to beat them up." ”
Trump's bad character? Hillary wasn't clean either. Everyone is half a pound, anyway, the general election is just two people, voters to distinguish it. Although the Clintons have long denied sexual assault, Trump's move was successful, having a positive impact on the final weeks of the election.
In the end, Trump won the 45th president of the United States with the advantage of electoral votes - 304:227 - with the advantage of electoral votes than Hillary Clinton.
▲Image source: cnbc
There was a national uproar. Only 1 percent of pollsters and forecasters previously predicted Trump's campaign would be successful. The elite, in particular, find it incredible. How could someone who was so rude and blatantly exploiting racial issues and divisions succeed in running for office?
"It speaks to the extent of the country's tearing. You have two presidential candidates, both of whom get huge numbers of votes, and in the end only a few states vote to determine the outcome. Wesley Lowry thinks so.
According to Trump's campaign aides, almost no one thought Trump would succeed, and even Trump himself was surprised.
At this point, Mr. Trump seemed to have changed into a different person, rejecting Bannon's suggestion that he continue to make tear-apart speeches in his victory speech. "Now is the time for the United States to heal the wounds of its differences and unite ...", and the tone of his speech was also "unity."
He even privately told campaign staff that he would behave more like president than Lincoln and would tweet less. But soon, the anger, resentment, and conflict that led to Trump's election will return.
5
Towards the abyss of tearing, uncontrollable
In January 2017, national intelligence agencies, led by the CIA, the FBI, and the U.S. National Security Agency, said the Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in support of Trump's election. FBI Director James Comey slammed a stack of investigative materials on the White House table.
The investigative material, completed by private intelligence agencies and funded by some Democrats, accuses the Trump campaign of various "collusions" with Russia.
And there's also information about Trump's involvement in perverted sex. Numerous media outlets rushed to report it, and later, the secret document was circulated online by the mainstream media BuzzFeed. This is tantamount to detonating a bombshell.
Sure enough, Trump was furious and was already under siege before he officially took office. Chief strategist Bannon told Trump he knew what was going on — the mainstream media was cracking him down.
So it's no surprise that Trump has concluded that "the media will be the adversary." Why can they get the documents? The media has sources of information to discredit him.
The next day his response was this: "I think it's shameful, shameful, that the intelligence agencies have allowed any information to leak, and it turns out that the information is fake." "This fake, fake information, which has never happened, is released to the public..." "I will tell you that I am facing some of the media. It's fake news, I can name it, but it doesn't matter, there are a few sitting here, they are very dishonest people..."
At the press conference, Mr. Trump also told a reporter who had been asking questions and said what he often said later: You are fake news. This is where this famous terrier comes from.
Fake news！ It has become a common routine for Trump to eliminate negative remarks about himself. He knows that the credibility of the media is declining, and that public skepticism and cynicism are rising, directly challenging the media and hitting these people in their hearts.
In his inaugural speech that followed, he no longer mentioned "unity", but shouted directly to his campaign base: their victory, not your victory, their triumph, not your triumph..." "We" versus "them", Trump openly preached confrontation on such a solemn occasion, which has never happened before.
This confrontation was staged that day. There are even more opponents than there are celebrators. In the end, the demonstration turned into a conflict. This suggests that the anger of the left is also on the rise.
The next day, nearly 500,000 people poured into Washington to express their displeasure with Trump's anti-women and other offensive rhetoric. The number of participants on that day was even greater than the number of people on the day of Trump's inauguration.
That's nothing for Trump. But news about fewer people watching on his inauguration day than Obama on his inauguration day in 2009 infuriated Mr. Trump again.
He ordered press secretary Sean Spencer to say at a news conference that "that's not true, we have the largest number of spectators in history".
Is the media right? Or is the president right? Who should people believe? Believe, of course, what they are willing to believe.
Subsequently, Trump began to make good on his promises to voters, signing a series of decrees, such as weakening Obama's health care reform, withdrawing from the Paris Agreement, repealing federal regulations aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions, air pollution, water pollution and the use of toxic substances, and approving the construction of walls on the U.S.-Mexico border.
Most controversially, in 2017, Trump signed an executive order banning seven Muslim countries in the Middle East and Africa from entering the United States, aimed at "protecting the United States from foreign terrorists from entering the United States."
Then a new round of opposition was set off.
Trump then proceeded to repeal Obama's health care reform. The reality is that there are many people in the United States who support Obamacare and have already enjoyed the benefits of it, they don't want to abolish it, and opposition is also rising. But in order to make good on his promises to voters, Trump acted.
Yet the form was more complex than he had imagined. In the first Senate vote, Republican McCain, Trump's old rival within the party, voted against it at the last minute. He walked to the middle of the field, raised his hand, and then made a thumbs-down gesture that shocked everyone present.
Trump is also deeply disappointed in this, and he is deeply disappointed in the Republican establishment. If they can't get it done, I'll do it myself. Then he used his most powerful weapon, Twitter, to launch an offensive against Republicans in Congress, especially its leader, Mitch McConnell, accusing them of being at a disadvantage, in order to convey the message that it is not my fault that the abolition of health care reform will not pass, it is their fault.
The Twitter storm also provoked Trump supporters to start opposing Congress. He took advantage of the success of the split campaign to divide the United States into "you" and "us," and now he is turning the finger against a new enemy, the government itself.
He will dismiss FBI Director James Comey, who is investigating "Russian interference in the U.S. election." Since you can't get him to stop investigating, just dismiss him. This incident immediately caused an uproar in the United States.
▲ Sacked James Comey.
Image credit: Tickle The Wire
Later, in a speech to voters, Trump continued to make confrontational remarks: "Fire this person, I have done you a great favor." ...... Look at these politicians, who once liked this crap (James Comey), colluded with Russia? Come on! ”
Some argue that this is basically a divide-and-conquer strategy. As long as America is torn apart, Trump is the defender, and he can weaken those who attack him. Even if it is to adopt the unprecedented tactics of a president to attack his own government.
On Twitter, Trump also portrayed himself as "the biggest victim in American history." Right-wing media such as Fox News and Brightbart agree with this view, but CNN, The New York Times and other media outlets are just the opposite.
High-rise fights, folk are not idle. In May 2017, in honor of the 2015 Charleston Church shooting, the Charlottesville City Council in Virginia decided to remove a statue of General Robert E. Lee. Because General Lee was loyal to the Confederacy during the Civil War and opposed abolitionism, the city council and pro-demolitionists believed that its image was linked to racism and voted to make the decision.
On August 11-12, 2017, white supremacist groups (which include alt-right, neo-Nazi, Ku Klux Klan, white nationalist, and far-right groups) began rallying in Charlottesville to oppose the removal of the statue of General Robert E. Lee from Liberation Park.
Demonstrators holding Nazi flags.
The participants claimed that the Jews were destroying the West and paid tribute to Donald Trump. David Duke, the former leader of the Ku Klux Klux Klan, called the event "a promise made by President Trump."
At the same time, supporters rushed in to confront their opponents, which eventually developed into a clash that resulted in dozens of injuries. In the process, a car rushed into the crowd, killing one woman and injuring 19 others.
At the post-event press conference, the speech prepared by the assistants for Trump was originally a strong condemnation of the violence, "we condemned the amazing manifestations of hatred, violence and bigotry in the strongest terms", but Trump improvised the addition of a "multifaceted" sentence, meaning that it did not just condemn those extreme white supremacist groups. However, public opinion believes that the first to cause conflict are white supremacist groups, which bear the main responsibility for the violence.
This in turn aroused the collective condemnation of public opinion. Trump has been suggested to apologize, but Steve Bannon is in the opposite position, and he supports Trump's continued remorse.
Trump then responded: "There are some very good people on both sides,...... That group, in addition to neo-Nazis and white nationalists, has many others..."
This suggests that the president still has some recognition of this Nazi, and he sends a signal to the masses that racism can exist.
The move was also publicly condemned by many Republicans. Among them was Arizona Republican Congressman Jeff Fleck. Then Trump fought back. In a speech in Arizona, he publicly denounced Jeff. As a result, Jeff Flake, who had lost his popular opinion, lost his position as a member of parliament.
But things must be reversed, and the opposition of the people to Trump is also growing. Subsequently, Democrats rebounded and regained control of the House of Representatives, and the bipartisan struggle became more intense. What happened next was closer. In December 2019, the House of Representatives launched an impeachment of President Trump on two counts, the first of which accused Trump of abusing his power by pressuring Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joseph Biden, the democratic party's next presidential candidate. The second charge is that Trump obstructed Congress.
But in the end, they were all rejected by the Senate.
Time into 2020. The most torn side of American society that we see is the COVID-19 pandemic. If the rise to power of Obama and Trump has accelerated the tearing of the United States, then the epidemic has undoubtedly exposed how deep this rift is.
Recently, house speaker Nancy Lopez and Trump's scolding war has escalated, childishly making people think that children are living at home. Following López's call of Trump "morbidly obese", Trump's fight back against his mental problems, and Lopez's mockery that "I didn't expect him to be so sensitive", Lopez described Trump as a "shit-stained kid with shoes on May 20,...... Everyone he's worked with for a long time has on their shoes. And stressed that Trump, as the president of the United States, often speaks without measure, "these people do not know what the truth is, they open their mouths, and they believe it." ”
A while ago, Trump ignored Nancy Lopez's handshake and was also very angry.
Isn't that Trump's usual style?
The documentary", The Great Divide in America: From Obama to Trump, ends with this passage: "Entering 2020, the tears in the United States are unprecedented. The 2020 election will be the most divisive election we have ever seen,...... Whether the next president, whether It's Trump's re-election or Democrats coming to power, whether we can overcome the tears and look forward will be the biggest problem he faces. I think it will be extremely difficult based on the phenomena of the last few years, or even a dozen years. ”
Perhaps the tearing of American society will continue for a long time. And the reason behind this, "America's Great Divide: From Obama to Trump" may only provide an interpretation. But let you know that the complexity and absurdity of American politics far exceed the interpretation in the divine drama "House of Cards".
Is the "white left" too left, or the "red neck" too right? Game of Thrones is not just ice and fire, black and white.