Has Trump declared war on the US to save his own skin?

In a speech on Monday, the president made clear that he will not disappear without a literal fight. Terrifyingly, this may win him another term

Donald Trump heads to St John’s Church in Washington DC to pose with a bible after addressing the country on Monday. Photograph: Rex/Shutterstock

Arwa Mahdawi-Tue 2 Jun 2020

Did Donald Trump just declare war on the US? Because that is certainly what it sounded like.

After spending the weekend hiding in a bunker and firing off incendiary tweets, Trump finally addressed the country on Monday evening. In his first official speech since the killing of George Floyd by police sparked global protests, #BunkerBoy stood in the White House Rose Garden and threatened to mobilise the American military against the American people. Branding himself the “president of law and order”, Trump vowed that, if violence and looting continued, and mayors and governors did not take action, he would “deploy the United States military and quickly solve the problem”. It is no exaggeration to say that the president of the US, the country that likes to declare itself the world’s greatest democracy, threatened to implement martial law.

It feels as if the US is at a turning point. The unrest sweeping the country could be the undoing of Trump – or it could dramatically increase his power. Which will it be? Toss a coin. Heads means this is the beginning of the end of Trump’s presidency, tails means we can expect another term.

I am not being flippant; I am trying to be realistic. 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. 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. But when it comes to this president, the normal rules do not seem to apply. One week, Trump is suggesting that we inject bleach to ward off the coronavirus, the next he is threatening martial law. Everyone is shocked for a second, then we move on to his next drama.

There is a school of thought that argues the urban uprisings in the US will help Trump. 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. Trump seems to be trying his best to pull a Nixon. Before his extraordinary speech on Monday, he held an equally extraordinary video conference with governors and law enforcement officials. On the call, Trump told participants that they were “weak” and needed to “dominate” the protesters. “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. In other words: lock up a lot of people who might not vote for him. That is one way to win an election.

There is another school of thought, however, that reckons this moment will harm Trump more than it helps him. He may be trying to ape Nixon, but there are enormous differences between 1968 and 2020 – not least the fact that Nixon was not trying to win a second term. 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 is the one who is supposed to be in charge.

Again, it is too early to say how the situation will play out for Trump. It is, however, fair to say that Trump is in trouble – and he knows it. 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. 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%. Trump is in trouble, which means trouble for the US. As the president made clear in his speech on Monday, he will not disappear without a fight – no matter how much collateral damage that causes.

• Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist