Mother Jones’ David Corn nails what Donald Trump’s re-election strategy is likely to be: a full-on assertion that the United States is beset by chaos, and that the president is the only one strong enough to prevent the total destruction of America. As Corn describes it, “Trump and his campaign want voters to believe their homes are about to be overrun by mobs associated with the ongoing protests against police violence and social inequities.” Corn correctly notes that this is actually pretty much the president’s strategy from 2016, an assertion of a country beset by foreign invaders and internal enemies that only strongman rule by Trump can redeem.
But Trump’s decision to use the current social justice tsunami as a foil for his re-election effort means that he is not so much putting law and order at the center of his campaign as white nationalism and white supremacism — only without the efforts at plausible deniability that he and his campaign deployed back in 2016. When the president deliberately ignores that the protests are overwhelmingly peaceful and aimed at defending the rights of minority Americans, and instead asserts that they are about mysterious leftist forces violently trying to take over America, he is relentlessly promoting a vision of white nationalism; under the guise of supporting repressive visions of law and order against civil rights protestors, he is in fact asserting a vision of white supremacy.
Moreover, the massive protests and burgeoning social movement that have followed the killing of George Floyd have by now become interwoven with the president’s own attempts to deny their legitimacy and mischaracterize them as wholly violent and destructive. In this way, Trump has ensured that this justice movement is seen by most Americans as intimately connected to his own malignant role as president. In other words, the racist messaging of Trump’s 2016 campaign has now been replaced, by dint of the fact of Trump being president, by the reality of Trump’s actual racist response as chief executive to an actual justice movement.
The difference is between abstract promises of white nationalism, and white nationalism concretely enacted at the highest levels of government. The most visible manifestation of Trump’s white nationalist (and authoritarian) rule has been in the president’s clear aim to violently suppress the protests in Washington, D.C. and elsewhere; the connection between this white nationalist approach and his re-election effort was made seamless when he released a campaign video of his walk through Lafayette Square after it had been violently cleared of peaceful protestors.
It’s true that the Trump campaign, at a superficial level, is seeking to hide its overt racism by trumpeting lies about antifa and anarchists being an existential, riotous threat to the United States, and the true movers and shakers behind the protests. Yet it would be hopelessly naïve to think that Trump’s decision to make war on a movement that’s so clearly about racial justice isn’t in fact all about his own opposition to racial justice, not to some abstract and exaggerated chaos in the streets as he claims. The veneer of deniability has all but come off in the last few days, as the president has stepped in to stop the US Army from re-naming facilities named for Confederate generals, while also decrying the destruction and decommissioning of Reconstruction-era monuments to the Confederacy. To top it off, we then learned that he planned to resume his campaign rallies in Tulsa, Oklahoma, site of one of the worst racial pogroms in U.S. history, on June 19, the day of the Juneteenth holiday recognizing the freeing of American slaves. According to a million persuasive Twitter takes, it defies belief that this white nationalist president, advised by white nationalists like Steven Miller, isn’t aware of the dire symbolism of such a locale and such timing (the Tulsa rally has now been pushed back a day in the face of massive criticism).
I don’t doubt that Trump’s decision to fully rip off the mask and pretty much crown himself King of the Racists won’t thrill and delight some minority of the voting population, but this seems like a reckless political decision given the widespread public support for the George Floyd protests and the need for racial justice that they represent. The president seems blind to the definite role he’s played in bringing this moment about, and to the fact that still more overt racism on his part might well catalyze further rejection of him among previous supporters, while stiffening the resolve of his enemies. It almost feels as if he’s just given in and let his freak flag fly — only in this case, his freak flag is a tattered Confederate battle standard raised by a man in a KKK hood.
Trump’s full-on white supremacist re-election strategy is all the more self-destructive in light of how his efforts to militarize the response to the protests have largely failed. In particular, it appears that the military leadership has overwhelmingly recoiled from the president’s attempts to enlist it in his race war, which means that his overt racism is no longer so easily wrapped up or diffused by patriotic-militaristic-fascistic appeals. This is why his simultaneous recent defense of the Confederacy strikes me as such a self-inflicted wound; having symbolically lost his claim to wave the American flag as the army brass edges away from him, Donald Trump seems to be reaching for another flag discredited in the eyes of all but a relatively few Americans. As the Lincoln Project folks are saying, Donald Trump is the second Confederate president — a taunt that feels more like a credible accusation by the day.