Disaster response, the Secret Service and a city of 60,000 people in Ohio all have become fodder for an increasingly heated campaign season, underscoring how once nonpolitical events and people are increasingly being politicized and weaponized.
Just this week, former President Trump blamed Democrats for a Secret Service staffing shortage that forced his campaign to relocate an event in Wisconsin.
He later used a visit to hurricane-ravaged Georgia to quip that President Biden was probably asleep and couldn’t be reached, despite the state’s governor saying he had a productive conversation with the president.
The fight over Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, hit the vice presidential debate stage shared by Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D). The debate was relatively civil, but the two debaters' mics were turned off at one point by the CBS moderators as they argued over the Springfield facts.
Criticism of the Secret Service and disaster relief is of course fair, and members of both parties, in particular, have raised serious questions about this summer’s assassination attempts on Trump.
But there’s also a sense that things are get heated earlier and earlier, and that few institutions are safe from criticism that they are acting on behalf of one candidate or another.
“I would say it’s not new for these things to become very politicized when you’re in the homestretch of a presidential election,” said Dave Hopkins, an associate professor of political science at Boston College.
“What’s new is even when we’re not a month away from the presidential election, this stuff tends to be very politicized,” he added. “If this were happening two months from now or six months from now, we’d still see the same partisan fervor and partisan dimensions of these discussions of things that could be discussed as nonpartisan.”
The response to Hurricane Helene has been marked by partisan swipes, set off by Trump being first on the ground in a storm that ravaged part of Georgia. During his visit on Monday, the former president joked that Biden might be asleep and claimed Gov. Brian Kemp (R) was “having a hard time getting the president on the phone.”
But Kemp himself had confirmed the same day that he spoke to Biden and expressed his appreciation for the federal government’s assistance.
Trump’s comments got under the skin of Biden.
“I've spoken to the governor, I’ve spent time with him, and he told him he's lying. I don't know why he does this,” Biden snapped back late Monday. “And the reason I get so angry about it — I don't care about what he says about me, but I care what he communicates to the people that are in need. He implies that we're not doing everything possible. We are.”
Trump has also dragged the typically nonpartisan Secret Service into the political fray, using the agency to levy attacks on his opponents. The former president this week accused Democrats, specifically Biden and Harris, of “interfering” in his campaign by not providing adequate Secret Service protection.
Trump over the weekend was forced to relocate a campaign event in Wisconsin because of concerns over Secret Service staffing as the agency also dealt with world leaders gathering in New York City for the United Nations.
The Secret Service said in a statement that Trump is being given “heightened levels” of protection and the "top priority is mitigating risks to ensure his continued safety at all times.”
It’s part of a broader trend for Trump, who has repeatedly attacked the Justice Department as partisan over his own legal problems and has questioned the FBI’s handling of a July assassination attempt at a Trump rally.
In an interview with NewsNation's Ali Bradley, Trump attacked special counsel Jack Smith as "deranged" repeatedly and blasted the federal indictment against him over his attempts to remain in power in 2020 as "a weaponization of government."
Experts and strategists said the politicization of practically every issue is a result of a polarized electorate that is often driven by distrust or discontent with the other side.
“I would say that is a feature of where the country’s at in terms of its political polarization,” said Grant Reeher, a professor of political science at Syracuse University. “The forces in American society and American economy that have produced this level of polarization are very large in scale and also very hard to dislodge.
“It doesn’t surprise me at all that all of those things get seen in partisan lenses and become political footballs because that is the case with everything now,” Reeher added. “And the most dramatic example of that was when [COVID-19] hit, there was a lot of chatter at the time that will realign the country and cause us to drop some of this extreme partisanship. Well just precisely the opposite happened. The pandemic was very rapidly turned into a partisan issue.”
Efforts to capitalize on those feelings of polarization and frustration have been amplified in an election year where the presidential race is shaping up to be decided by several thousand votes across a handful of battleground states.
Polling released Wednesday from the nonpartisan Cook Political Report found Harris leading Trump in five out of seven battleground states, though all are within 3 percentage points.
“We are fighting for inches in the electoral map and there’s no telling what might move the needle,” one Republican strategist said. “Ten thousand votes is a pretty big deal in these states.”
