The Memo: Floyd’s legacy reverberates beyond his funeral

George Floyd was laid to rest on Tuesday in Houston, with the nation only beginning to grapple with the way his death has changed the political landscape.

Floyd’s death has not just sparked huge protests in countless cites. It has also had an impact on the 2020 presidential race, pushed congressional Democrats to introduce legislation aimed at curbing police abuses and — at least for the moment — shifted views of the police itself.

On Monday, focus group expert Frank Luntz, a Republican, retweeted polling results showing 57 percent of Americans now agree with the statement that “police are more likely to use excessive force against African Americans.”

Luntz added: “In my 35 years of polling, I’ve never seen opinion shift this fast or deeply. We are a different country today than just 30 days ago.”

Other polls indicate serious trouble for President Trump. 

Trump has expressed sympathy for Floyd’s death, but those sentiments have been overshadowed by a blizzard of controversies. 

The president has tweeted that “vicious dogs” would attack any protesters who breached White House security. He has reprised a line originating from a reactionary Miami police chief in the 1960s — “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.” 

He has repeatedly cast protesters as troublemakers and subversives.

Those various misfires have contributed to widespread disapproval with Trump’s response to Floyd’s death and to the protests in its wake. A recent Economist-YouGov poll found that just 32 percent of Americans approved of Trump’s response, while 53 percent disapproved.

The uproar that has followed Floyd’s death — which occurred in Minneapolis on May 25, as a white police officer ground his knee into the neck of the prone Floyd — is just one problem besetting Trump. The coronavirus crisis has killed more than 110,000 people in the United States and has wreaked devastation on the economy.

It can be hard to untangle the effects of the protests from other factors affecting Trump’s popularity. Still, there is clear evidence that his polling decline has accelerated in the past few weeks, even though the coronavirus-related shutdown began much earlier, in mid-March.

On May 18, one week before Floyd’s death, Trump’s net approval rating in the RealClearPolitics (RCP) polling average was negative 5.5 points. By Tuesday afternoon, it was more than twice as bad, at negative 11.6 points. 

Trump has also lost ground against his presumptive Democratic challenger, former Vice President Joe Biden. In the RCP average on May 18, Biden led Trump by 4.7 percentage points. The Democrat’s advantage was 8 percentage points on Tuesday.

Trump could falter further because of the perception that the nation is in a general state of near-chaos. An NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll released on Sunday saw 80 percent of voters contend that the United States is currently “out of control.”

Trump clearly believes this could make for fertile ground for his repeated promises to enforce “law and order.” But even some Republicans admit there is a weariness with his apparently insatiable desire for confrontation.

“Even voters who voted for him the first time because they wanted to ‘shake things up’ or whatever didn’t want to shake it up this much,” said Doug Heye, a former communications director for the Republican National Committee.

The contrasting styles of Biden and Trump were on display Tuesday. The Democrat appeared by video at Floyd’s funeral, where he told Floyd’s youngest daughter, Gianna, “You’re so brave. Daddy’s looking down on you.”

Biden also said: “When there is justice for George Floyd, we will truly be on our way to racial justice in America.”

Trump, meanwhile, ignited yet another firestorm by tweeting Tuesday morning that an elderly protester knocked down and injured in shocking fashion by police in Buffalo, N.Y., could have been “an ANTIFA provocateur.”

The injured man, Martin Gugino, is a 75-year-old peace activist who is being treated for cancer, according to The Associated Press.

 The tweet was startling enough to draw disapproval from some Republicans. Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) described it as “shocking.” Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) lamented of Trump, “Why would you fan the flames?”

A number of other Republican senators claimed not to have seen the tweet.

Democrats, meanwhile, saw the tweet — and Trump’s approach to the protests generally — as one more example of his desire to appeal to his base above all.

“He has ostracized all of the groups that he could potentially reach out to in order to add to his coalition,” said Democratic strategist Joel Payne. Payne added that the Trump campaign is “depending on turning out every single Trump voter that exists — everyone who thinks this is their last stand.”

Beyond the presidential race, congressional Democrats have sought to push for reform with legislation that would make it easier to prosecute police officers and would bar the use of lethal force except as a last resort.

Attention has focused on the local level as well. Most notably, a majority of Minneapolis City Council members have pledged to disband the city’s police department.

There is, of course, the possibility that Democrats could go too far. Biden has said he does not support calls, currently popular on the left, to “defund the police.”

Those battles aside, however, the ground seems to be shifting in the country at large, with an acceptance that some kind of reform is necessary.

On Tuesday, Floyd’s niece Brooke Williams invoked the history of racial injustice at her uncle’s funeral — and scorned Trump’s signature slogan.  

“Someone said, ‘Make America great again,’” she said. “But when has America ever been great?”

The Memo is a reported column by Niall Stanage, primarily focused on Donald Trump’s presidency.