It’s been a good week for Donald Trump.
Despite spending his days straining to stay awake in the courtroom for his own criminal trial, his poll numbers continue to go up. According to a new Emerson College/The Hill poll, President Joe Biden is currently trailing Trump in seven swing states, outside of the margin of error.
This week, Time magazine published a stunning interview of Trump in his own words saying he would create detention camps for undocumented immigrants, allow states that bar abortion to monitor women’s pregnancies, and weaponize the federal government against his enemies.
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But that story was old news by late afternoon, superseded by wall-to-wall coverage of college campuses across the nation embroiled in tumult over protests against the war in Gaza. What started peacefully turned into scenes of windows being shattered, students refusing to leave campus, and the occasional display of support for terrorist groups including Hamas and Hezbollah.
This moment in history could prove to be a perfect storm for Donald Trump.
Trump spends his days gagged in a courtroom, only appearing to give brief remarks to the press. He’s not on the campaign trail day in and day out. He’s not giving media interviews every day espousing dangerous rhetoric and conspiracy theories like he was after losing the 2020 election.
He still occasionally makes an outrageous statement, but his court hearings may be helping him by keeping him contained and unable to feed his worst instincts—which will only provide voters with reminders for why they rejected him four years ago.
Then consider Biden is deeply unpopular, most Americans don’t believe the country is going in the right direction. Then add in the terrible optics of violent campus protests over the war in Gaza. It could be the perfect scenario to damage Biden from the right and left—and hand the race to Trump, despite his utter unfitness.
Liberals have drawn parallels between the 1968 protests against the war in Vietnam with these current Gaza protests on college campuses. What they seem to forget is that after watching violence unfold at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, and a summer of protests, the country elected Richard Nixon.
News viewers left, right, and center saw images of the American flag being taken down and replaced by the Palestinian flag and Jewish students being taunted, intimidated, and refused entry to their classrooms. A campus rabbi advised Jewish students to leave campus for their own safety. Many Jewish students left campus because they didn’t feel safe. And now multiple colleges are moving to remote learning and canceling their commencements out of fear for students’ safety.
The visuals and the words coming from college campus protests are radioactive to the moderate voters Biden needs to win—the ones who put a primacy on law and order, decency, and safety for their kids. There are voters who don’t approve of Trump and think Biden is a good and decent man. They’re inclined to support the president, but they could be persuaded to vote for Trump or just sit home if the unrest on campuses continues or explodes at the Democratic National Convention this summer… in Chicago.
On the flip side, it’s increasingly hard to see how Joe Biden is going to win back the left flank of his own party, especially young progressives. He has only six months to convince them he isn’t complicit in genocide, as many falsely argue. A new CNN poll found Biden is 11 points behind Trump with voters aged 18-34. That’s a massive swing from the majority of young voters supporting Biden in 2020. As many as one-fifth of registered voters between 18-34 support Robert F. Kennedy Jr, according to the same poll.
If President Biden can’t convince these young voters to be with him, he will very likely lose the election to Trump. To date Biden hasn’t given a national address or major policy speech explaining to young voters what the administration is doing to try to reach a ceasefire, and to try to encourage the Israeli government to minimize civilian casualties.
The Biden administration and campaign have utterly ceded the narrative around his administration and Gaza to the loudest and often least-informed voices on college campuses who are accusing him of being complicit in genocide.
Biden has yet to argue the case that Trump would be far worse for the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, considering he cut international aid to the Palestinian Authority during his first term. Biden has yet to take on protesters directly and remind them that Trump signed the Muslim ban and would level Gaza if he thought it were politically expedient.
While campuses will soon be much quieter for summer break, protests will continue at other venues. So far we’ve seen numerous at events President Biden attended, including the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. We can expect without a major tide turn in the war in Gaza, that the Democratic Convention will be a focal point for protest.
Will history repeat itself, with violent protests at the Democratic Convention, in Chicago again, just like in 1968? If so, I think we can expect a President-elect Donald Trump in November.
