Depending on your personal sense of the time/space/political continuum, it’s either way back in the rear view mirror or light years past, but either way I thought it would be worthwhile to talk about Donald Trump’s appearance at the National Association of Black Journalists at the beginning of August. First, given the passage of time (14 days by old-fashioned terrestrial measurement), we can now categorize it as the first major evidence that Donald Trump has lost his bearings in the presidential race. Specifically, it was both an effort to re-gain control of media attention and, interrelatedly, to knock Harris off her tremendous momentum, and in both efforts he has so far been unsuccessful. Subsequent failures include his deranged press conference last week and his crazed tweet asserting that photos depicting huge crowds cheering Kamala Harris are actually AI-generated fictions. More face-plants are likely to come.
That his initial effort failed is worthy of consideration, and doubly so as it involved Trump going back to the racist well of resentment, fear, and hatred that has always been at the center of his political appeal to certain Americans. If you can stomach it, I strongly encourage you to watch a video of the interview, as words and summaries don’t convey the full crapulence of his appearance. First, and most prominent in coverage of the event, Trump asserted that Harris “turned” black after first claiming to be Indian, helpfully adding later that there is nothing wrong with either race but clearly suggesting that her black identity is a political contrivance. (“I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black,” Trump said. “So I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?”) There are many levels to Trump’s statements, not because he was being particularly complex or cunning here, but because racist statements always have plenty of ways to intersect with the centuries-long history of white supremacism.
At the most basic level, and I think at the level nearest to his basic intention, Trump wanted to remind white America not that Harris is black (which would be obvious to 99% of voters by now), but more importantly to let them know that he himself is well aware of this fact and wants them to know, as many of them likely already think, that it’s a big, bad deal-breaker. Moreover, he did so in a way that seemed designed to provoke Harris and/or her campaign into a direct response, perhaps something along the lines of saying that “Harris is black and proudly so.” In Trump’s universe, this would be used to further a racist line of attack that would ask how Americans could trust a black person to be president, especially one who so vigorously asserted her blackness. In this way, Trump was wielding white supremacism in a blunt manner no differently than he has for so long — as a way to assert his basic identity as a white man willing to engage in appeals to racism to defeat non-white candidates and the party of non-white people (i.e., the Democrats). He wanted to remind his base, and other possible voters, that he is to be considered the nation’s spokesman for unrepentant white supremacism.
In the same vein, by reminding listeners that Harris is also Indian, he played to the same racist mindset. I don’t think the central intent was to argue she’s untrustworthy because she lied about her identity (although that was obviously a side benefit); rather, he found a way to talk about the basic fact that she’s not just a minority, but doubly so, with Indian as well as African-American ancestry (or even triply so if a listener were confused by the American Indian/Indian American distinction). It was a basic attempt to “other” her, to make her seem alien and strange and definitely not someone with whom white people should feel comfortable (so much exotic blood! So many conflicting loyalties!).
Amplifying the spectacle of American’s white supremacist-in-chief sowing his racist oats was the context of his remarks: the National Association of Black Journalists conference, and the fact that he spoke in response to questions posed by a trio of female African-American reporters. It was in answering their initial question, from ABC’s Rachel Scott, that he uttered his first slanders against Harris, and it’s not insignificant that Scott’s question indeed went straight to the heart of his appeal (or lack thereof) to groups he has targeted. Recounting Trump’s various rhetorical attacks on Blacks, including his birther accusations about Obama and telling four minority congresswomen to “go back” to where they came from, she asked, “Why should Black voters trust you after you have used language like that?”
Trump was clearly angered, replying, “I don’t think I’ve ever been asked a question in such a horrible manner,” characterizing the questioning as “disgraceful,” and asserting this was a “rude introduction. This pattern of indignation and attempts to belittle Scott continued through the rest of the interview, with Trump alternating between critiquing her questions and at times manipulatively bestowing approbation on what he clearly thought was gentler questioning from the two other journalists on stage. He also appeared to blame Scott personally for technical issues at the event, including the interview’s late start (“You’re the one who held me up for 35 minutes”) and issues with the microphones (it was later reported that the delayed beginning actually owed to Trump campaign quibbles with the format of the event). In other words, at the same time that Trump was issuing racist attacks on Harris, he was engaging in a parallel set of racist (and misogynistic) attacks against a black interviewer, as if in Trump’s mind Harris was not fully distinguishable from Scott, nor Scott from Harris. And for receptive racists listening at home, perhaps this was true enough.
In the immediate wake of the interview, it felt as if political coverage teetered on the brink of familiar patterns that have long favored Trump. After all, he did utter outrageous and attention-grabbing assertions that couldn’t be ignored. More than this, Harris would undoubtedly have to respond to them, potentially turning this into a conflict defined on Trump’s terms. But perhaps most decisively to why the story did not play out that way, Harris declined to engage in the manner that Trump likely hoped she would. Rather, at a Houston rally, she remarked that, “It was the same old show. The divisiveness and the disrespect [. . . ] The American people deserve better. The American people deserve a leader who tells the truth, a leader who does not respond with hostility and anger when confronted with the facts. We deserve a leader who understands that our differences do not divide us. They are an essential source of our strength.”
This refusal to engage on Trump’s terms appears to have been the right choice, as stories about Harris’s identity provoked by his comments quickly peaked and diminished in a matter of days. But just because it was strategically wise for Harris to decline such engagement doesn’t mean that commentators and other Democratic politicians shouldn’t highlight the fact that Trump’s efforts to regain press attention and reverse his steady slide in polls seem to primarily involve reaffirming his white supremacist credentials as a way to attract voters. Likewise, it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t remark on the basic fact that not only are such racist appeals disqualifying, they aren’t working as he intended or as they once might have.
Members of the media should also think long and hard about how the questioning at the NABJ conference proved so illuminating as to Trump’s policies and attitudes — a point rightly raised by Jennifer Rubin in a recent column. After all, not only did he engage in white supremacist strategizing, he offered damning responses on other subjects as well. Among other things, he doubled down on his intent to pardon January 6 insurrectionists, suggesting that they were unfairly prosecuted and jailed. He lied about the inflation rate (suggesting it was the worst in 100 years). He threw flailing VP choice J.D. Vance under the bus, remarking that, historically speaking, vice presidents don’t affect the outcomes of presidential races. And in an intriguing rebuttal to his long-time assertion that he will only lose the presidential race if Democrats cheat, he noted that, “If you don’t like me, I’m not going to win” — a rare admission of reality, and remarkable for being one of his few truthful utterances at the event. At a minimum, it feels quite possible that Rachel Scott’s initial, context-laden question broke his cool, making him vulnerable to questioning on other matters as well, including sharp follow-up questions from Scott and her colleagues.
Trump’s racist attacks on Harris have continued since his NABJ appearance, but we need to keep ever in mind that white supremacism was already the single most important element of his campaign for the presidency even before Harris took Biden’s place in the race. His two biggest issues, immigration and crime, are both rooted in the utterly racist idea that degenerate brown-skinned people are literally invading the United States in order to cause mayhem, steal American jobs, and illegitimately cast votes in elections. In this sense, Trump’s racist invocations against Harris are overdetermined, in that there was no way such a racist campaign would ever be able to resist lumping an African-American candidate in with the criminal immigrant threat on which Trump has staked his election chances.
With white supremacism acting as the glue holding together the Republican base and affiliated voters, Democrats would do well to continue to explore ways to describe these attitudes as beyond the pale, subversive of a strong and united America, and revealing of a moral rot at the heart of Republicanism. White supremacism can’t be called out and rolled back in the abstract; rather, the words and deeds of its political practitioners should be accurately described and condemned, and their electoral careers ended by a disapproving majority. While any mass disparagement of the Republican base as intrinsically racist and in need of repentance would be counter-productive and overbroad, it’s still possible to describe the racism of GOP leaders in a way that might wedge open some moral distance from their supporters, while communicating non-negotiable values of equality to the entire public. I think Harris showed one way to do this when she described Trump as performing “the same old show” and referenced “the divisiveness and the disrespect”; this approach captured both Trump’s racism and general unfitness for office without explicitly describing the former. It was a way of acknowledging his racism while avoiding an exchange that might facilitate Trump’s efforts to “other” her.
But politicians and commentators beyond Harris have more leeway to offer specific indictments of Republican white supremacism. While the “weird” discourse sparked by VP pick Tim Walz has mostly been used to highlight GOP misogyny and culture war extremism (banning books, targeting trans youth), watching Trump carry on in tritely racist ways at the NABJ conference made me wonder if a similar strategy might be used against him and others. As much as Trump was engaging in a political strategy that dovetails with his personal hatreds, he also came across as unhinged, outdated, and embarrassing (in addition to being deeply offensive). I don’t think “weird” is the appropriate way to describe a racist, but on the other hand, it feels like an opening exists to characterize Trump’s behavior as something you’d expect to see in a senile older relative raised in a different era — someone whose bizarre racial obsessions place them outside the mainstream of contemporary American life.
As a specific example, Trump’s decision to voice (feigned) confusion about whether Harris is black or Indian falls within a sordid tradition of white Americans claiming the privilege of sorting non-whites into preferred rankings of a racial hierarchy. At the same time, and certainly related to its racism, his commentary has an inherent “ick” factor to it, with Trump ironically tossing himself into another sorting bucket — the one containing dudes who take it upon themselves to stick their noses into other people’s business. With Trump veering nauseatingly into the territory of demanding an intimate accounting of Harris’ very biological being, he places himself adjacent to the uncanny fixations of the misogynist set, with their irrepressible desire to see women solely in terms of their reproductive function and whether or not they are good girls dedicated to replicating the white race. In both cases — Trump’s racial nitpicking and misogynists’ obsession with imaginary babies over adult women — the common thread is a pseudo-scientific assertion of certain nutjob realities (“everyone is one obvious race and must declare what team they are on posthaste!” in the first case, “blastocysts are pre-adult voting citizens whose parents should cast ballots on their behalf” in the second) that are abnormal by the majority’s standards. If outright declarations that Trump’s words reflect white supremacism are too blunt to break through the defenses of many, then finding a way to mock his antiquated racial yardstick might still get through.