Trump sees an opening in the statue wars

President Donald Trump and his allies have seized on an argument they think will resonate with Americans: They may take our Confederate statues, but they will never take our other dead white men.

On Monday night, after a weekend full of statues being pulled off their pedestals nationwide, protesters only feet from the White House threw ropes around a bronze statue of Andrew Jackson, the populist 19th century president whose portrait hangs in Trump’s Oval Office. They yanked at the statue, hoping to bring it down, before police intervened. On TV, cable news carried the images of the clash between protesters and police nationwide.

On Twitter, Trump bellowed that he would throw the perpetrators in prison for “up to 10 years” and tied the anti-statue push to the dangers of the “radical left.” Watching it all unfold, Trump’s allies thought they finally had a visual that would appall a broad swath of Americans. Seeing the reaction, Trump’s critics started fretting that the president’s backers were right. Americans were mostly supportive of racial justice protesters going after Confederate statues, but some of the president’s opponents worried that such support would not extend to attempts to target any slave-owning ex-president.

"The protesters are playing right down to the stereotype of ignorant iconoclasts that their conservative opponents hope to stick on them,” said Tom Nichols, a senior adviser to the anti-Trump group Project Lincoln and a professor of national security at the U.S. Naval War College.

Right after the events unfolded Monday night, a person close to the campaign predicted Trump would pounce. “Bad move on protesters part to target that specific statue that’s so close to the [White House],” the person said via text. “Now Trump’s gonna weaponize this like only he can.”

Tuesday night, he did.

“If you give power to people who demolish monuments and attack churches, set fire to buildings, then nothing is sacred and nothing is safe,” Trump said Tuesday night during a speech before students in Arizona, lumping the attempts to remove statues with vandalism of buildings that mostly occurred in the early days of the largely peaceful protests.

The push to deface, remove or outright topple monuments to historic figures is an outgrowth of the recent demonstrations that erupted following the killing of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police. The protests have resurfaced a separate long-running debate over American history — namely, whether the country should continue to honor Confederate generals and historically significant figures who were slave owners.

It began with government officials deciding to remove statues of Confederate generals throughout the South, arguing that it was inappropriate to honor people who literally rebelled against the United States. A Quinnipiac University poll released last week found that 52 percent of Americans supported the removal of Confederate statues, and 44 percent were against it.

“I don't like the idea of honoring the losing team with a statue,” said Stephen Miller, a conservative media critic and contributor to The Spectator.

But protesters have gone further in recent days, defacing monuments of prominent figures who owned slaves or oppressed minority groups, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Andrew Jackson also owned slaves and oversaw an era of forced expulsion of Native Americans from their territories. Even Civil War heroes have not escaped the fury. On Friday, protesters attacked a statue of Ulysses S. Grant, the Union general and future president who literally waged war against the Confederacy, citing a slave Grant was gifted and later freed before the war.

Even seemingly unaffiliated statues, like one of blues guitar legend Stevie Ray Vaughan in Austin, have been lightly vandalized. And on Monday, high-profile progressive activist Shaun King urged protesters to go next to churches with statues and images of “white Jesus,” saying the depiction of Jesus as a white man was a form of “white supremacy.”

“Toppling Washington, Jefferson and Grant obscures the more important point about Jim Crow monuments and makes it about the protests, rather than the issues — which is exactly what the right-wing culture warriors want,” Nichols said.

During last week’s rally in Tulsa, Okla., Trump and Pence came down firmly on the side of keeping Confederate statues up as a way to “remember our history,” a stance that could alienate moderate voters ahead of the 2020 election. But Trump and his allies have now shifted focus to the vandalism targeting non-Confederate monuments, potentially seeking to pander to a broader audience while trying to paint progressive protesters — and the Democrats supporting them — as detached from mainstream American norms.

“They hate our history, they hate our values, and they hate everything we prize as Americans,” Trump said Tuesday night. “The left is not trying to promote justice or equality or lift up the downtrodden.”

Trump and his backers have spent weeks trying to find a way to discredit the protesters — claiming without evidence that violent antifa provocateurs were embedded in Black Lives Matter protests, attacking the largely peaceful activists in Seattle’s autonomous zone as “domestic terrorists.” But those appeals largely played to Trump’s base. Conservatives are hoping that Americans more broadly will be concerned with protesters going after non-Confederate statues.

Miller argued the widespread statue attacks play into a stereotype conservatives are pushing that Democrats are yoked to “white bourgeois podcast Marxists” who are blaming dead white men for all of today’s problems.

“This is all meant to be a shiny object to distract [from] addressing the policies of the people who have been in charge of these cities and communities for decades,” he said.

Seth Mandel, executive editor of the right-leaning Washington Examiner magazine, said Trump is making the subject into a dichotomy — statues or no statues — that serves as a proxy battle for the ideological culture war. He compared it to the way Trump treated mask-wearing during the current pandemic — the subject started as a public health debate but has at times turned into a sign of whether someone supported Trump or not.

“Statues deserve nuance, too,” he said. “There are many statues that are legitimately controversial — meaning wanting to take them down shouldn't be considered nihilistic. But it strikes me as a fringe position to say Jefferson and Washington should come down, too.”

He added: “It would be a shame if the national debate came down to statues vs. no statues, instead of a serious debate over what the statues represent.”