Trump has become the voice of insecure white Americans
Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson has been watching what’s going on around Donald Trump, and he has some interesting things to say about it. Here are some excerpts from his recent column:
When the racist chant began Wednesday night — “Send her back! Send her back!” — President Trump paused to let the white-supremacist anger he had stoked wash over him. George Wallace would have been so proud.
That moment at a Trump campaign rally in North Carolina was the most chilling I’ve seen in American politics since the days of Wallace and the other die-hard segregationists. Egged on by the president of the United States, the crowd was calling for a duly elected member of Congress — Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), a black woman born in Somalia — to be banished from the country because Trump disapproves of her views.
This hideous display followed Trump’s weekend call for Omar and three other House Democrats, all of them women of color, to “go back” to the “totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.” All of this is an unmistakable echo of the racist taunts that used to be leveled at minority groups that had the temerity to demand civil rights and the gall to achieve political and economic success — go back to Africa, go back to Mexico, go back to China.
After the election and reelection of the first African American president, one might have thought we were beyond such ugly, desperate racism. To the contrary, perhaps Barack Obama’s tenure surfaced long-buried fear and loathing that made Trump’s ascension possible.
We can leave that for the political scientists to figure out in the fullness of time. Right now, we have an emergency to deal with. Trump has decided to seek a second term by making a naked appeal to white racism. I didn’t think we’d ever see anything worse than his 2016 campaign, which he launched by slandering Mexican immigrants as drug dealers and rapists. Obviously, I was wrong.
The 2018 midterm election, which saw a Democratic blue wave that flipped control of the House, gave a clear sense of what voters think about the Trump presidency. Despite the lies he frequently tells on Twitter about his approval ratings, they have never reached 50 percent. Trump has to know his reelection bid is in trouble, and he is already in what looks like panic mode.
He has never made a serious effort to expand his base. Instead, he seeks to inflame it.
Trump no longer pretends to be the voice of forgotten working-class Americans. He has become the voice of insecure white Americans, whom he encourages to resent foreigners, immigrants and uppity minorities. His border policy — separating babies from their mothers, putting children in cages — is the fulfillment of an ugly revenge fantasy. Cruelty isn’t an unfortunate byproduct of Trump’s crackdown on asylum seekers. It’s the whole point.
The president apparently believes he has found a perfect foil in “the Squad” — the four newly elected members of Congress he told to “go back” to where they came from. Omar is a refugee from civil war in Somalia who became a U.S. citizen in her teens. The others were all born in this country — Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) in Detroit; Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) in Cincinnati; and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) in New York.
But Tlaib is Palestinian American, Pressley is African American, and Ocasio-Cortez is of Puerto Rican heritage. Trump has decided to try to paint four young, progressive women of color as the enemy. Trump’s message to his aging, white base is clear: This is the future you should fear. These are the people you should hate.
The Republican Party goes along meekly as the president struts around like a dime-store Mussolini. As for Democrats and independents, history teaches us that the way to deal with hateful demagoguery is not to ignore it, not to downplay it, not to hope it somehow exhausts itself, but to confront it. Trump’s fomenting of hate has to be called out. It has to be denounced. It has to be resisted.
Democratic presidential candidates need to realize that elaborate policy positions are necessary but not sufficient. Trump is a bully who will push and push and push. The Democratic Party is unlikely — and would be unwise — to nominate someone too timid to push back.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) needs to rethink her strategy, as well. I know she understands how much is at stake. I know she worries that impeachment may be a trap. But if Trump is going to preside over what amount to white-power rallies, the time for measured restraint is past.
The next 16 months must be a referendum on Trump’s weaponized racism. The answer must be a resounding no.
Jonathan Wolfman
07/20/2019 @ 10:41 am
It’s another reason Marginals adore the man: like him, they have no creative, expansive imagination whatever.
Ron Powell
07/20/2019 @ 11:20 am
Interesting, how Hillary’s ‘basketful of deplorables’ can readily be characterized as ‘marginals’ without a hint of arrogance or condescension.
Ron Powell
07/20/2019 @ 10:55 am
Interesting, how Hillary’s ‘basketful of deplorables’ can be readily characterized as ‘marginals’ without a hint of arrogance or condescension…
Ron Powell
07/20/2019 @ 11:17 am
“Trump has decided to seek. a second term by making a naked appeal to white racism.”
He wants the campaign to morph the culture war and make it become a race war.
Some time ago, I suggested that the Republican Party is so bereft of legitimate policy imagination and ideas that the only thing they would/could run on is racism….
I truly wish that I would be unable to correctly declare that; ” I told you so.”
koshersalaami
07/20/2019 @ 6:09 pm
This is true but we knew it.
Alan M. Milner
07/21/2019 @ 4:55 pm
Ronald, you really can’t do this. Reproducing an entire written by someone else but published under your name is not legal, even if you give them credit. This constitutes copyright violation.
If you want to feature someone else’s writing in this manner, what you have to do is write a paragraph of your own that summarizes the article and then insert a hyperlink to the original source.
Right now, we can get away with it but once our marketing program goes into full swing, we will get busted for doing this.
This in the second time you’ve done this, so I have to warn you that under current law, BindleSnitch is not culpable for the copyright infringement….but you could be.
As I said to you before, I really appreciate this kind of article because it enables people who don’t subscribe to the Post to get their information. I am going to reformat your article as it should have been done.
07/21/2019 @ 5:01 pm
Now, please, if you will, go into the article, select the three most important paragraphs, enclose them in quotes and republish the article. It will now conform to the legal use limitations. Okay, you can have four excerpts and they can be long ones.