Lapointe: Could Michigan’s ‘uncommitted’ vote tip the election to Trump?

In the United States, the Democratic President runs for re-election even though it is clear to both his friends and to his foes that he is not as sharp as he once was.

In Eastern Europe, the wily dictator in Moscow goes on the muscle. Among other targets, Poland ranks high on his list. And in the Middle East, the very existence of Israel is being debated.

“Arabs would choose to die rather than yield their land to the Jews,” the Saudi king warns the American President.

You’ve probably guessed by now that we’re not talking here about 2024; or about President Joe Biden of the United States; or about President Vladimir Putin of Russia; or about Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza.

Instead, it is a flashback to 1944 — 80 years ago — from the book His Final Battle: The Last Months of Franklin Roosevelt, by the late Joseph Lelyveld. (Full disclosure: I enjoyed working for Lelyveld at The New York Times).

Published in 2016, His Final Battle chronicles the 1944 campaign, the end of World War II, and Roosevelt’s death in 1945, at the start of his fourth term, as the Cold War began. In some ways, this timely book reminds us that history doesn’t always repeat itself but sometimes it echoes and rhymes.

Although every analogy wears thin when extended, one thematic through line of current events seems distressingly similar to circumstances of eight decades ago: the world of global power politics is shifting again and the American electorate will have a significant voice in how it changes.

Which brings us to Dearborn, to Arab Americans, to Muslim Americans, to young antiwar voters, and to the possibility that this segment of the Michigan electorate in November could steer the state and choose the fate of the nation and the world.

And that could bring the return of former President Donald Trump, a large, loud, orange-faced, yellow-haired demagogue who is now older, meaner, and more reckless than three years ago when he tried to cling to power by sending lynch-mob rioters to the Capitol to murder Trump’s own vice-president.

Crunch the vote numbers. Trump won Michigan by 10,000 votes over Hillary Clinton in 2016 but lost to Biden by 154,000 in 2020. Both times, Michigan backed the winner. But last week, more than 100,000 voted “uncommitted” in Michigan’s Democratic primary as a protest against American support for Israel.

Should those numbers increase — and should the war and the boycott of Biden carry into November — the absence of these Democratic voters could tip the tilt toward Trump in Michigan, one of a handful of “battleground states” expected to decide the Electoral College.

If so, as we did eight years ago, we will again toss our car keys to the loudest, biggest, crudest drunk in the bar and we will once more say to him, “Here you go, Butch! You get us home.”

And what might that ride be like?

In his first term, Trump harassed Muslim Americans and Arab Americans at airports with his “Muslim ban.” He tormented brown-skinned immigrants at the southern border by splintering Latin American families apart when they entered from Mexico.

Trump now vows more vicious crackdowns with internment camps and deportations. He and his followers dehumanize immigrants as “illegals” and blame them for crime.

“Our country is being poisoned, it’s really being poisoned,” Trump told personal fluffer Sean Hannity of Fox News Channel. “I call it migrant crime.” At Eagle Pass, Texas, last week, Trump spoke of a “Biden migrant crime wave.”

It matters little to Trump or to his Make America Great Again supporters that serious crime is down and that immigrants generally break the law less than American citizens. Ignore that. What matters most is that scary image of a Venezuelan man arrested for murdering a Georgia student while she jogged.

His dark face is in heavy rotation on Fox. You must understand, America, that, in the MAGAt view, this mug shot represents all immigrants and they must be feared because they bring drugs, sex slavery, and welfare abusers to our nation. Yeah. Because Trump says so. OK, pal?

Plus, they will take our jobs and vote Democratic. So, be afraid, America! Build that wall! In two recent trips to Detroit’s blue-collar suburbs, Trump has used blood metaphors to suggest that immigrants contaminate American genes and that foreign nations export lunatics and mental patients.

In Clinton Township last fall, Trump said immigrants are “destroying the lifeblood of our country.” Would he dare say such a thing in Dearborn? Fat chance. A proud and convicted sexual predator who was recently found guilty of (and fined for) financial fraud, Trump has called his opponents “vermin.”

That kind of talk went out of style around the time of Roosevelt’s death, but Trump revives it now for an appreciative audience. Will voters in and around communities like Dearborn and Hamtramck (and around the college campuses) evaluate their binary choice this autumn in a realistic calculation?

Who’s best for them: Biden or Trump? Would Biden ever call them “vermin?”

In the meantime, another of Trump’s TV family — Brother Tucker Carlson — goes to Moscow to kiss the rear end of Putin, Trump’s political pal. Carlson also praises the goodies at a Russian grocery store and marvels at the cleanliness and beauty of the city.

All this just before Putin’s main opponent dies under mysterious circumstances in a prison in Siberia. Since being fired by Fox and striking out on his own, it is as if Carlson cannot decide whether he wants to be Charles Lindbergh or Tokyo Rose.

Those who have studied the Roosevelt era and World War II will recall that Lindbergh — the star-crossed aviator — took up the “America First” cause and national isolationism before Hitler invaded Poland in 1939 and Japan attacked the U.S. Navy in 1941.

Lindbergh got too close to Nazi Germany and his political career crash-landed. Trump and others of his Republican party are using the same scare tactics, urging protectionism and isolationism mixed with racism disguised as nativism. Among many right-wing media contenders, Carlson is the best at this.

Tokyo Rose was the collective nickname for the female radio propagandists (more than one) who broadcast from Japan to American soldiers and sailors during the war in the Pacific, subtly whispering subversion into their ears along with songs from home that the men may have missed.

Even all those years ago, sinister people figured out how to use the medium of broadcasting to manipulate minds and undermine truth. Today’s fools like Hannity and Carlson are simply the current generation of user-friendly tools who twist the truth in traitorous ways.

And from his glass coffin in Moscow’s Red Square, the long-embalmed Lenin is laughing loudly (with a Russian accent?) at two, new useful idiots.

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