Trump is also doing very badly in the polls: Joe Biden has a 10-point lead over him in an ABC News/Washington Post poll from Sunday and the president’s approval rating has dipped below 43%. The protests don’t exist in a vacuum: the coronavirus crisis means one in four American workers has filed for unemployment benefits and some of the country’s swing states are expected to see prolonged job losses. It is, however, fair to say that Trump is in trouble – and he knows it. He is the one who is supposed to be in charge.Īgain, it is too early to say how the situation will play out for Trump. Trump is doing his best to blame Democrats for the unrest, but he can’t get around the fact that he is the president. He may be trying to ape Nixon, but there are enormous differences between 19 – not least the fact that Nixon was not trying to win a second term. There is another school of thought, however, that reckons this moment will harm Trump more than it helps him. In other words: lock up a lot of people who might not vote for him. “You’ve got to arrest people, you have to track people, you have to put them in jail for 10 years and you’ll never see this stuff again,” Trump said.

On the call, Trump told participants that they were “weak” and needed to “dominate” the protesters. Before his extraordinary speech on Monday, he held an equally extraordinary video conference with governors and law enforcement officials. Trump seems to be trying his best to pull a Nixon. There have been numerous comparisons to 1968, when Richard Nixon exploited an anti-riot backlash and rode a law-and-order platform to electoral victory. There is a school of thought that argues the urban uprisings in the US will help Trump. Everyone is shocked for a second, then we move on to his next drama. One week, Trump is suggesting that we inject bleach to ward off the coronavirus, the next he is threatening martial law. But when it comes to this president, the normal rules do not seem to apply. By rights, a million different crises – from the Russia investigation to the disputed accusation that he raped the journalist E Jean Carroll to his handling of the pandemic – should have sunk Trump by now.

There has been a lot of speculation about how the protests will affect Trump’s chance of re-election, but the truth is that none of us, not even a very stable genius such as me, know how this will play out. I am not being flippant I am trying to be realistic. Heads means this is the beginning of the end of Trump’s presidency, tails means we can expect another term. The unrest sweeping the country could be the undoing of Trump – or it could dramatically increase his power. It feels as if the US is at a turning point.

Did president trump declare martial law