Tag Archives: Racial resentment

2020 General Election, Donald Trump, Off the Rails, Republicans

“Infested. It sounds like vermin. . . . subhuman.” — Wallace; “It’s fair to have that conversation.” — Mulvaney

“There is a clear pattern here, Mick,” Chris Wallace says and goes on to describe Donald Trump’s dehumanizing language directed always at people who happen not to have white skin. “Infested. It sounds like vermin. It sounds subhuman. And these are all six Members of Congress who are people of color.”

Mick Mulvaney responds: “I think you’re spending way too much time reading between the lines.”

Wallace: “I’m not reading between the lines. I’m reading the lines.”

Mulvaney scrambles to divert attention from the pattern of Trump’s smears by raising the possibility that if Adam Schiff had criticized Trump’s border policies, then Trump could be directing these comments at Schiff.

Wallace interjects: “I don’t think he’d be talking about his crime-infested, rodent-infested district.”

Mulvaney plows ahead, insisting that if Trump were directing these insults at Schiff, this would not be because Schiff is Jewish.

Mulvaney: “This is what the President does. He fights. And he’s not wrong to do so.”

Mulvaney continues talking, still diverting attention from Trump’s vilification of black and brown Members of Congress and minority Congressional districts. Sticking to (the non-existent, but hypothetically possible) criticism of Schiff, Mulvaney castigates California: “The richest state in the nation. The richest state in the nation has abject poverty like that. A state, by the way, dominated for generations by Democrats.”

Mulvaney’s audience of one may have found this defense convincing. Then again, Mulvaney’s comments might be aimed much more broadly (“… Trump’s advisers had concluded after the previous tweets that the overall message sent by such attacks is good for the president among his political base — resonating strongly with the white working-class voters he needs to win reelection in 2020.”).

2020 General Election, Donald Trump, Off the Rails

Trump continues to insist that Democratic women with brown skin don’t belong here

“What the president is doing is, we are tired — sick and tired — of many people in this country. Forget these four. They represent a dark underbelly of people in this country of people who are not respecting our troops, are not giving them the resources and the respect that they deserve.”—Kellyanne Conway on Fox News (video at link)

As Donald Trump’s undisguised racist attack on the four Democratic Congresswomen known as ‘the squad‘ continued to dominate the news cycle for another day, it has become clear that this represents a central theme in the President’s 2020 campaign.

Brad Parscale, the Trump campaign manager, has been telling people that it is very hard to persuade voters in the current hyperpartisan political landscape.

Mr. Trump’s re-election strategy, instead, is to solidify his base and increase turnout. A major component of that is to portray his opponents as not merely disliking him and his policies, but also disliking America itself.

The strategy is reminiscent of how President Richard M. Nixon and the Republican Party tried to frame their fight with Democrats during the 1972 elections around questions of patriotism and loyalty. Nixon supporters took to using the slogan “America: Love It or Leave It” to cast the Democrats and the growing opposition to the Vietnam War as anti-American — not merely anti-Nixon or anti-Republican.

Pat Buchanan, the populist, conservative former presidential candidate who served as an aide to Nixon, said that by elevating the four, Mr. Trump is trying to set the terms of his re-election fight.

“Rather than let Democrats in the primaries choose his adversary, Trump is seeking to make the selection himself,” Mr. Buchanan said. And if the election is seen as a choice between Democrats like Ms. Ocasio-Cortez and Ms. Omar, Mr. Buchanan added, “Trump wins.”

Two reporters at the Washington Post cataloged Congressional Republicans’ reactions to Trump’s tirades. The results (as of July 16 at 8:12 p.m.):  

  • 18 condemned Trump’s remarks;
  • 42 criticized both Democrats and Trump;
  • 29 supported Trump’s remarks; while
  • 161 did not comment, dodged the question, or made vague statements that couldn’t be characterized as either criticism or support.

Yesterday 4 Republicans (and Independent Justin Amash) joined all 235 Democrats in voting to condemn Trump’s racist remarks. (A handful of Republican Congressmen voted against the resolution, after earlier condemning the President’s remarks.)

Dave Wasserman of the Cook Political Report noted that “Democrats represent 54% of all House districts but 95% (!) of the 100 districts with the highest shares of foreign-born residents,” while “Republicans represent 83% of the 100 districts with the highest shares of native-born residents ….”

“New Poll: The Rasmussen Poll, one of the most accurate in predicting the 2016 Election, has just announced that “Trump” numbers have recently gone up by four points, to 50%. Thank you to the vicious young Socialist Congresswomen. America will never buy your act!“—Donald Trump @realDonaldTrump

Will this be a winning strategy for Trump? It was in 2016. It wasn’t in 2018. Time will tell. According to Pew Research Center, the partisan gap in views of immigration is as wide as at any point in 25 years (chart at link). The question is, who will turn out to vote?

2020 General Election, Donald Trump, Off the Rails, Republicans

GOP and corporate Resistance fades as Trump doubles down on racist comments

Yes, some Republican leaders spoke out to offer mostly muted criticism of Trump after more than 24 hours, often in the next breath (or the first breath) criticizing the Democratic women of color Trump attacked.

“They’re just terrified of crossing swords with Trump, and they stay mute even when the president unleashes racist tirades,” said presidential historian Douglas Brinkley, who has been critical of Trump. “Republican leaders are now culpable for encouraging this kind of rank bigotry. By not speaking out, by staying mum, they are greenlighting hate rhetoric.”—“Trump’s incendiary rhetoric is met with fading resistance from Republican and corporate leaders,” Toluse Olorunnipa, Washington Post,  July 15, 2019

The WaPo article notes the silence of corporate leaders (including those on the South Lawn of the White House celebrating Trump’s economic policies) as Trump continued to defame four women newly elected to Congress as members of his political opposition.

After some brief remarks about American manufacturing, the president launched into an acerbic screed doubling down on his Sunday tweets that encouraged the Democratic congresswomen, who he said “hate our country,” to leave the United States.

“If you’re not happy here, then you can leave,” he added. “That’s what I said in a tweet that I guess some people think is controversial. A lot of people love it, by the way. A lot of people love it.”

He was met with applause.

It seems that for many people Trump being Trump is hardly worthy of comment any more, even as he ratchets up the racism, xenophobia, and hate. Certainly Trump wouldn’t be Trump without the racism:

Trump has trafficked in racist and racially charged politics for decades, working to keep African Americans out of his and his father’s apartment buildings in Cincinnati and New York from his earliest days in the real estate business.
In 1989, he ran newspaper ads calling for the death penalty after five black and Latino teenagers were accused of raping a jogger. Last month, he suggested the Central Park Five might still be guilty even if they were exonerated by DNA evidence and another man’s confession years ago, saying, “You have people on both sides of that.”
Trump raised his profile as a political figure on the right during President Obama’s tenure by fanning false conspiracies questioning whether Obama was born in the United States.
And he drew some of the strongest rebukes of his own presidency in August 2017 when he said there were “very fine people on both sides” in violent clashes between white supremacists and counterprotesters in Charlottesville, Va.
James Fields, who drove his car into a crowd and killed a woman during the rally, was sentenced Monday to life in prison plus 419 years on state charges. Fields was previously sentenced to life in prison on federal hate crime charges.— “As Trump doubles down on racist comments, House to vote on condemning them,” Noah Bierman, Jennifer Haberkorn, Los Angeles Times, July 15, 2019

(Image: screen grab from local TV of the four newly elected Democratic Congresswomen, popularly known as ‘the squad,’ responding to President Trump’s attacks yesterday.)

Donald Trump, Off the Rails, Republicans, Short & Sweet ... Short & Sour

The Republican Party stands foursquare behind this man and his Presidency

So interesting to see “Progressive” Democrat Congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world (if they even have a functioning government at all), now loudly……
….and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run. Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came. Then come back and show us how….
….it is done. These places need your help badly, you can’t leave fast enough. I’m sure that Nancy Pelosi would be very happy to quickly work out free travel arrangements!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 14, 2019

2020 General Election, Democrats, Income Inequality, Republicans, Short & Sweet ... Short & Sour

“Democrats should court the economically anxious Trump voters who don’t exist”

While the headline, from an Eric Levitz post at New York magazine, expresses the point ironically, I am in complete agreement with the argument. Politics – and winning elections – is a pragmatic endeavor. Taking back the White House in 2020 is a crucial goal; disparaging voters who opted for Trump 2016 is not. A couple of key quotes:

“The politician and the public intellectual have two very different jobs. The latter is tasked with telling the best approximation of the truth they can muster — especially when said truth is uncomfortable or unpopular. We need political scientists willing to overturn our most cherished presumptions about actually existing democracy, historians eager to recover our republic’s most violently suppressed memories, and commentators who illuminate our collective complicity in contemporary injustice.
In certain contexts, on certain subjects, we need elected officials to do the same. But the politician’s primary vocation isn’t to speak truth to power — it is to win power, and then exercise it in a manner that advances the greater good. In a representative democracy, that typically means rallying the largest possible coalition behind you, your party, and its governing priorities. Depending on one’s definition of the greater good, that task may well involve a great deal of uncomfortable truth telling. But any politician who cares more about expressing (what she perceives in a given moment to be) the unvarnished truth than about using state power to improve people’s lives has chosen the wrong line of work.”

And:

“Many progressive policies and value propositions enjoy majoritarian support. But the percentage of Americans who hold the liberal position on each and every political question is tiny (as is the percentage that espouses uniformly conservative views). For progressives, there is no alternative to finding ways to make common cause with the unenlightened.”

(Image: Wage Inequality, Economic Policy Institute, from inequality.org)