This weekend’s analysis by The Washington Post of the Trump re-election campaign’s decision to make explicitly racist appeals to his base offers a wealth of insight into the GOP’s rationalization of his full-on white nationalist strategy for 2020 — a strategy that will inevitably bear heavily on the electoral fortunes of the party as a whole. The gist of the article is that the Trump campaign, having looked at the polls measuring the public reaction to the president’s racist attacks on four Democratic representatives of color more than a week ago, has decided that more of the same is the recipe for re-election. However, to defend against accusations of overt racism, the Post notes how some Republicans have asserted that his “attacks were based in ideology rather than race,” and goes on to state:
But 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.
This has prompted them to find ways to fuse Trump’s nativist rhetoric with a love-it-or-leave-it appeal to patriotism ahead of the 2020 election, while seeking to avoid the overtly racist language the president used in his tweets about the four congresswomen.
I don’t see any way to understand the Trump campaign’s preferred strategy as anything but plausibly deniable racism. If the president concentrates his attacks on minority and immigrant lawmakers, and then Republicans say that it’s only about their “ideology,” only the most naive voters (and reporters) would not see this for what it is: claiming that disagreement on policy is meant to provide cover for a racist appeal to white voters. And the clincher is this: since the president has already made clear that everything is for him about race, there is no reason for any American to credit all-too-transparent efforts to re-brand his racism as something more palatable.
Again and again throughout the article, the claims by GOP politicians and strategists that the president is not doing what he clearly is — running for re-election based on appeals to racism and white supremacism — are illogical or even outright laughable. It notes that “Republican officials say Trump is harnessing the anger of those who continue to feel left behind despite the strong economy, and steering their fury toward members of Congress he has accused of bad-mouthing the country and embracing socialist policies.” This explanation reveals far more than those GOP officials realize: they admit that the wonderful Trump economy is anything but wonderful, and correctly identify the president’s strategy of distracting his base from his economic failures by supercharging their racial resentments against groups who have no responsibility for their economic malaise. Their explanation also oddly leaves out those Trump supporters who are doing well in the economy and who nonetheless are fired up by Trump’s incitements to open racism.
Equally feeble are the efforts by Trump campaign and other Republican officials to claim that Trump supporters are “too quickly branded as bigots,” and that it’s the Democrats who are trying to “create conditions where if you are a certain gender or a certain race all criticism is considered racist or sexist,” as noted by Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh. And Bryan Lanza, a 2016 Trump campaign advisor, tells the Post that “Usually, when they are faced with charges of racism, Republicans hide a little bit. And the president’s not hiding. And I think that that’s what the Republican voters like about him.” Of course, the reason the president is facing charges of racism is because he’s made racist statements and implemented racist policies. Lanza may be trying to make the opposite point, but he ends up giving the game away: Trump doesn’t hide his racism, and his supporters like it. It’s a secondary matter that they admire that Trump stands by his racist statements and always denies that they’re racist.
Yet though it may be secondary to their receptivity to racist appeals, the widespread belief among many prejudiced white voters that they are not actually racist, and that it’s insulting to call them racist, is a very real and potent psychological phenomenon. Studies have shown that explicit condemnations and call-outs of prejudice can have the effect of making people double-down on their racism, and clearly Trump and the GOP are now happy to weaponize this phenomenon, too, into a sinister campaign (Molotov) cocktail. The president runs a racist re-election campaign, which thrills his base; the loyalty of the base is further super-charged when the necessary condemnations of Trump’s racism and of his followers are felt by his base to be unmerited and illegitimate. So the racist method is not without its madness, and this is why the GOP wants to have things both ways, as it has for decades now — it wants to make racist appeals that are also deniable. Trump is all on board with the racist appeals, but whether through indiscipline or conscious determination (or a combination of the two) doesn’t really care if the racism is deniable in a traditional sense. To Trump, a racist statement can be rendered deniable simply because he denies that he is racist.
What keeps getting lost, not just in this one Washington Post article, but across much of the reporting on the Trump presidency and the 2020 campaign, is that the idea of a “racist campaign strategy,” while inherently evil in and of itself, simply can’t be separated from the fact that the Trump presidency is every single day moving forward a white supremacist agenda in actual real life. Indeed, the same can even be said of the racist campaign strategy, where the president’s incitements of hatred against African-Americans, Latinx citizens and immigrants, and other groups are not just words that energize his base, but have consequences for millions of Americans who are made to feel less welcome in their own country, and who are rendered less safe as the president’s words inevitably give at least tacit encouragement to those who will follow their racist inclinations with action, up to and including terrorizing violence against their fellow human beings who happen to have a different skin color.
It’s also of note that the article chronicles how Republican politicos are avidly trying to convince themselves that this openly racist re-election strategy will not alienate more voters than it gains them. And so they point to supportive polls, and make the argument, that moderate voters will look past the racism because they oppose the Democrats’ legislative agenda. One detects a whiff of wishful thinking in some of the comments captured in the article, but the question of whether or not open racism backfires is the proverbial million dollar one. (In this regard, it’s worth noting that some Republicans appear to have given up hope of winning the popular vote, and see a path to an Electoral College victory via this immoral white supremacist appeal.) But it is surely the responsibility of Democrats, both as matters of electoral and patriotic necessity, to work to ensure that the Trump-GOP racist playbook fails. They must confront and call out this white nationalism head-on, even when the GOP tries to hide it behind claims of arguing about “ideology” rather than race. Likewise, Democrats must be sure to map out how it is in Trump’s interests to appeal to the worst parts of human nature and our shortcomings as a nation in order to hide his own failings as president. It is not essential or anyway realistic to expect to win over the mass of Trump backers; but peeling away even a few may make the difference in this next election.
Finally, the Post notes that “Democrats are banking on the idea that even if Trump’s language excites his base, it is likely to offend a diverse coalition of voters who will turn out to defeat him,” which one hopes will be the case. But even as they talk a good game about still winning over moderate voters, Republican awareness of the backlash they are provoking provides deep incentives for them to mess with the mechanics of the 2020 election, whether through voter suppression or tacit support for ongoing Russian efforts to tamper with election systems and inject propaganda into the U.S. mediasphere. Another way of putting it: Trump’s morally corrupt racist appeal makes other forms of corruption necessary in order to seal the deal of an election that must be won by a minority of voters.