Flip Side

One of the criticisms of then President George W. Bush, when Hurricane Katrina flooded a good chunk of New Orleans just about 20 years ago, was that he's deliberately quashed the Federal Emergency Management Agency response to the storm, out of a partisan desire to punish the residents of the city for, basically, not being Republicans.

It was a classic conspiracy theory, being a simple answer (President Bush is a mean-spirited partisan) to a complicated question (Why was FEMA apparently caught so flat-footed by the storm). It was a straightforward answer to a seemingly stark divide between people's expectations of what Federal disaster response should look like, and the reality of the aftermath of the hurricane.

Republicans in all levels of government rallied to the President's defense with shock and outrage that ranged from the apparently genuine to the openly performative. To the degree that the criticisms were perceived to be opportunistic and partisan, so did the rebuttals. But the general tenor was clear; it was unfair to presume that President Bush would be so crass as to deliberately punish Americans simply for being Democrats. Like most Presidents before him, he aimed to be seen as fair minded.

Contrast this with the current President, Donald Trump. President Trump is open in his opinion that the apparatus of government should be used to punish his political enemies. While he touted his crackdown on immigration into the United States, he's openly targeted it primarily at large cities in Blue states with Democratic mayors. His current plans to use the National Guard to police major cities names specifically large, Democratic cities with non-White mayors, and large Black and other minority populations.

And Republican officeholders defend this policy as justified. Sure, a lot of that defensiveness comes from needing to run for office again, and thus needing to court the votes of people who understand that the President can do no wrong, but it's a fairly stark about-face no matter how one looks at it.

Of course, the real problem is the potential precedent. Presidents, of course, don't need to be able to demonstrate that a predecessor has taken some action to justify themselves, but it certainly helps. And if Democrats return to power in Washington D.C. over the next election cycle (which seems likely, honestly), they're going to be under quite a bit of pressure from aggrieved constituents to give as good as they've gotten. And if Republicans (suddenly) see the light and start to espouse national unity, one can be sure that those words will fall on deaf ears.

But that's a problem for the future. Right now, President Trump is following his political instinct to search for conflicts, and then join what he thinks will be the winning side. And in the absence of external enemies, Americans tend to turn their drive for conflict against one another. Twenty years seems like a short span of time to go from decrying the very suggestion of this state of affairs to embracing it with open arms.