The Washington Post’s reporting this weekend blows a hole in any arguments that Donald Trump was displaying a strategic political genius by his racist tweets about four Democratic congresswomen last week. The president may not get it, but panicked reactions and comments from Republican insiders interviewed for the story show that many in the GOP understand the peril in which he’s put the party. Of course, as many have long argued, the whole GOP is compromised by a racist mindset, but it has taken Trump to catalyze the party’s de facto embrace of white nationalism. It may be darkly pleasurable to see these politicos now panicking about Trump going too far with his displays of outright racism, but this doesn’t mean things are better than they look.
The fact remains that, faced with hate-inciting, white supremacist language, nearly every elected GOP official at the federal level chose to publicly demure on whether the president had done anything wrong. And the unease communicated privately to Donald Trump or to Post reporters seems to have been mostly about the possible harm to everyone’s electoral chances, not over the moral repugnance of his words. But none of this is surprising, and neither is the fact that the president is choosing to run in 2020 on a supercharged version of his 2016 campaign of racism and white resentment.
The huge wild card, then, is what the Democrats will do about it; as I’ve already discussed, the president’s white nationalism cannot be ignored, but must be confronted outright and discredited. Some grounds for optimism is that some Democrats are fighting for just this. Count me as on the same page as pollster Cornell Belcher, who told The New York Times that, “Just as much time and resources as the nominee spends on targeting and messaging around health care and wages and climate change, they should spend an equal amount of resources around an alternative racial vision for the country. This isn’t a goddamn distraction.” It’s also hard to disagree with Ana Maria Archila, co-executive director of Center for Popular Democracy, who told the Times, “You have to be able to speak powerfully about our willingness to belong together. Don’t just condemn the racism and the language but use it as an opportunity to argue for a vision of the country in which we can all be included.”
What to articulate as a countervailing argument to white nationalism is obviously a huge topic, and I’ll return to it in future posts. The point for now is that the last week has clarified that the Democrats absolutely cannot run from this fight.
The Post article I noted at the start also indirectly highlights how much long-term damage the president is willing to inflict on the Republican Party for the sake of his own short-term prospects. There’s not a GOP politician alive who’s always know that you might be able to rev up the vote with full-on expressions of white supremacism — but they also largely knew that this would ultimately prove a losing strategy, making overt what was best left to dog-whistle politics, and running the risk of energizing an anti-racist opposition. They are now about to learn whether their cynical caution was warranted. Again, though, there is good reason to believe that, despite the GOP complicity in Trump’s rule, and the widespread Republican embrace of racist laws involving gerrymandering and voter suppression, Trump may be pushing the GOP to a place it will not survive once the president is out of office.
Then there is the question of all those Trump rally attendees in North Carolina who took up the “Send her back” chant after Trump lied and incited his audience against Representative Ilhan Omar. As canny observers are pointing out, by taking up the chant, his audience indicated that it understood the racist intent behind Trump’s original tweets and follow-up commentary. In this, we see the very real possibility of the president unleashing hateful forces that defy any attempts to whitewash or contain them. I can imagine Democrats running campaign ads of Trump rallies — the racist rants, the solid sea of white, the pleased president accepting his role as a tribune of racial hatred — and simply asking voters whether that’s the sort of America they want for themselves and their children.
This is a simplified and idealistic take, of course, but the way that Trump may be running up against baseline decency is also highlighted by how “Go back to where you came from” is explicitly cited by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission as “an example of potentially unlawful harassment on the basis of national origin,” as noted by Adam Serwer at The Atlantic. Beyond this, the president’s displays of racial antagonism and contempt would get him fired from many a private company. As much as Trump might be saying what millions of white Americans are supposedly thinking, there are millions more white Americans who have worked for years in diverse environments where racial prejudice has been defused, not amplified, by quotidian contact with people of different ethnicities and countries of origin.
These observations point to a final thought: that responsibility for resolving the current crisis of a president willing to play groups of Americans against each other falls squarely on the Democrats and other opponents of the GOP. As Donald Trump encourages his followers towards the blindness of hatred as an expression of authentic feeling, it is up to the rest of use to dissect, defuse, and dissolve these misdirected energies as much as possible, both for the sake of defeating this movement at the ballot box and for the sake of living peaceably with our fellow Americans.