A recent poll of Iowa voters found an equal share, 47% apiece, plan to vote for Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Another 7% told pollsters from the Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll they weren't sure or would pick a third party.
As a nonnative of Iowa, who has lived here nearly 30 years, I've had trouble wrapping my mind around that. The Iowans I've known, for whatever their political beliefs, have been civic-minded people who care about their neighbors, favor modesty over bombast, keep their word, tell the truth and have a fundamental sense of right and wrong. And I just can't understand where Donald Trump fits into that framework.
The president doesn't only lie, brag or demean his opponents in schoolyard-bully terms. He makes a point of also dragging in their race, age, weight, national origin, disabilities and other immutable characteristics they can't control. Such characteristics, which are the basis for discrimination, are not appropriate for insults from a head of state.
This isn't about Trump's policies. Leadership has many aspects, both of form and substance. America is staggering under the weight of the over 200,000 lives lost to COVID-19; our rate of infection is among the world's highest. How can this be, with our vast resources, scientific sophistication and ability to rapidly mobilize?
In a word, denial. Specifically, the president's.
From the start, he downplayed the pandemic, taking pains to regularly remind us it came from China. Fine. European settlers in America brought smallpox. After a point, it's less fruitful to focus on the source than deal with the disease. Trump decided to downplay its seriousness, as he told author Bob Woodward, even after knowing the risks. "This is deadly stuff," he said on tape Feb. 7; much more dangerous than the flu.
Yet on Feb. 26, he told the public that doctors should treat it like the flu, which he said was more deadly. He said COVID-19's risk to Americans "remains very low" and tweeted, "The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA." He let his Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director, Robert Redfield, tell Americans to go about their daily lives. Later he undercut Redfield for contradicting his contention there could be a vaccine by early November.
New Zealand's prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, kept her country's numbers down by introducing a four-stage national lockdown beginning in March. But Trump mocked masks, promoted risky homemade cures like oleander plant extract, and the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine, not to mention injecting disinfectant into the body and irradiating patients with UV light. He tried to undermine the well-respected expert Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, when he disagreed with him.
To this president, loyalty means never contradicting or questioning him, even when he's wrong. It means terminating someone who recuses himself, even if not doing so would violate ethics standards. That was the fate of Trump's former attorney general, Jeff Sessions. All the while, Trump plays the patriotism card.
Now he's demanding schools teach patriotism, which means a version of U.S. history that doesn't include the legacy of slavery. He says he doesn't want children to be "fed lies about America being a wicked nation plagued by racism."
No, he won't even acknowledge racism exists here. He has never publicly lamented or even questioned a police killing of a Black person. He famously said there were good people on both sides when white supremacists marched on Charlottesville, Virginia. He characterized Black Lives Matter protests as anarchy and "symbols of hate." Apparently he believes that plays well with his base.
Does it?
A patriotic president doesn't invite another government to interfere with U.S. elections, even in jest, or encourage one like Ukraine's to dig up dirt on his prospective election opponent. Evidence of Trump's doing that got him impeached by the U.S. House.
These are marks of authoritarianism, and not the only ones in his case. He's at perpetual war with the free press, dubbing stories that don't serve his purpose "fake news," and getting all his information from a network whose information carries his political slant.
Is that the kind of president you want?
In other times _ no, in better times _ a U.S. president would showcase successful immigrants as proof America is a land of opportunity for those who work hard, play by the rules, and then give back. But campaigning in Pittsburgh, Trump picked on U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota to ridicule because she was born abroad and has a foreign name: "How about Omar of Minnesota ... she's telling us how to run our country. How did you do where you came from? How's your country doing?"
Whatever he thinks of her political views, couldn't he at least concede America is the congresswoman's country now? Her family clearly did not do well where they "came from," fleeing Somalia during wartime, and living as refugees in Kenya before getting asylum in the U.S. She got citizenship, was elected to the Minnesota Legislature and later to the U.S. Congress _ the first Somali American in both cases.
Her story also shows the best of America, as a beacon of hope to those fleeing persecution. But under Trump, our country is separating newly arrived family members seeking legal status and putting children in cages.
This isn't about left or right. It's about demanding basic decency, trustworthiness and fair play from whom we elect to the highest office because they've been missing these past four years under this president. And I'm having a hard time understanding how half this nation, and half of the state I call home, would opt to continue that way.
