To say that Donald Trump is a racist is to state the obvious but miss the point. He was sued by the federal government in the 1970s for rejecting black tenants. He spent years suggesting that Barack Obama was not born in the United States. He launched his campaign for President by calling Mexicans murderers and rapists. He demanded a “total and complete” ban on Muslims entering the United States and, most recently, has ginned up fears about invading hordes of violent immigrants.
Of course he’s a racist. But what’s more important, and frankly more troubling, is that his racism is strategic. It is intended to secure a political advantage. Fear of “The Other”—black people, Latinx people, Muslims, immigrants, transgender people—is the glue that holds Trump’s base together.
Consider the messages advanced by Trump and other Republicans in last fall’s midterm elections. They hardly mentioned their major legislative accomplishment—a huge new tax cut that primarily benefits the super rich. They did not talk much about rebuilding infrastructure or expanding access to health care. They offered almost nothing in terms of a positive vision for the future.
Instead, their message was: Your life and your liberty are in danger because of those people.
“This is a national emergency,” Trump declared in a last-gasp effort to get money from somewhere other than Mexico to pay for his border wall. “Drugs are pouring into our country. People with tremendous medical difficulty and medical problems are pouring in, and in many cases it’s contagious. They’re pouring into our country.” His January 8 address to the nation from the Oval Office used a handful of crimes to paint immigrants as brutal killers, warning that “thousands more lives will be lost if we don’t act right now.”
Their message was: Your life and your liberty are in danger because of those people.
Trump’s appeals to fear and bigotry are so powerful that his supporters are apparently willing to forgive all of his trespasses, though he forgives no one himself. His moral degeneracy, constant lying, wholesale corruption and rampant criminality, gross incompetence and frank stupidity, are all excused, because he has successfully aligned himself in opposition to The Other.
Trump’s racism is integral to his success, a lesson not lost on other members of his party. The appeals are not even subtle anymore.
Republican Ron DeSantis became governor of Florida after warning voters not to “monkey this up” by picking his Democratic rival, Andrew Gillum, the black mayor of Tallahassee. Republican Brian Kemp was elected governor of Georgia after posing with a supporter wearing a T-shirt proclaiming “Allah is not God”—he claimed to not share this view—and tweeting on the day before the election that his Democratic opponent, former state representative Stacey Abrams, had the backing of the Black Panther Party and was therefore “TOO EXTREME.” (He also engaged in wholesale black voter suppression, but that’s another story.)
In New York State, supporters of Republican Congressman John Faso ran ads attacking his Democratic challenger, Antonio Delgado, a Rhodes scholar and graduate of Harvard Law School, as a “big-city rapper.” One campaign ad from the National Republican Congressional Committee showed white people saying such things about him as “Nobody talks like that around here” and “His voice definitely can’t be my voice.” Delgado ended up winning with 51 percent of the vote.
In California, Representative Duncan Hunter, a Republican incumbent facing multiple criminal charges for stealing campaign funds, falsely suggested his Democratic opponent, Ammar Campa-Najjar, a Christian, was a “radical Muslim” seeking to infiltrate Congress. Hunter won. In Ohio, Republicans sought to link Democratic Congressional candidate Aftab Pureval to Libyan terrorists. Pureval lost.
These are just a few of many examples. Trump has ushered in an era of American bigotry, both dog-whistle and overt.
Politicians have long used racism as a finely honed tool of political persuasion. Just listen to how former Nixon campaign consultant Lee Atwater described the so-called Southern Strategy of appealing to white racial resentment:
“You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.”
There is a direct line from the Southern Strategy to George H.W. Bush’s Willie Horton ad to the present day.
Politically motivated racism harms our ability to make progressive gains. MSNBC’s Chris Hayes recently interviewed Michael Tesler, a political scientist at the University of California at Irvine, for Hayes’s excellent podcast, Why Is This Happening?
Tesler, who has tracked public opinion over the decades, noted that the association of progressive policies with the first black American President had an immediate impact. For instance, Tesler noted, “after Obama gets elected and he starts pushing for health care, you see a big drop in support for governmental health care, and that is highly concentrated among people who view racial inequality in terms of African Americans not trying hard enough to succeed.”
Prior to Obama’s election, Tesler said, less than 50 percent of whites with low education thought Democrats were more supportive than Republicans when it came to providing government assistance to African Americans. In 2012, four years into Obama’s presidency, that number shifted to about two-thirds. The resentment this new association engendered was likely key to Trump’s election.
“From 1992 to 2008,” according to Tesler, “there was no difference between how non-college-educated whites identified. They were basically equally likely to be Democrats and Republicans. Beginning in 2008, though, they start to diverge, and by 2015, low-educated whites are about twenty points more Republican than Democrats. They were ripe for the picking.”
Yet the same thing is now happening in reverse. Opponents of Donald Trump are more likely than they were before to support progressive policies. “You’re seeing this across every issue—gender, immigration, race, kneeling athletes,” Tesler said. “The country as a whole is becoming more liberal [read: progressive] on these issues.”
In other words, Hayes summarized, “What’s happening is Trump is doing for white [progressives] what Obama did for white racial conservatives.” Tesler called that “a perfect way to put it.”
Let’s be clear. There is no upside to racism. It’s toxic and corrosive and sick. Here’s an anonymous comment that was recently submitted online in response to an article in The Progressive. We opted not to post it, as it bore scant relevance to the article. But in the context of this column, it is instructive enough to include (unedited)
I was recently in st cloud mn. You ppl play down what muslims are doing to this country. Try getting out of a parking lot at any apartment building there. Good luck as you can wait upwards of 45min as they park where they want leave when they want. Why not they average being given 5,000.00 a month. I saw a man hit at the Wal-Mart driven over and drug by the muslim behind the wheel. What other refugee that ever came here has been given the free ride and long standing free ride muslims have been given? Try going through the emergency room at st cloud hospital. Don’t go in there with life threatening or even writhing on the floor injuries as the muslim coming in with no symptoms of anything will be taken in before you. Yes this will be played down as nonsense but I assure you, it’s all true! And it’s far worse than what I’ve described.
This is the undistilled essence of racism: raw resentment, untethered to reality, impermeable to reason. Is there any doubt in anyone’s mind that this person is a Trump supporter?
But fear and hatred of The Other does not have to triumph. It is something we can overcome, individually and collectively. There are many signs of that happening, as people all over the country reject the ugliness that flows forth from the President and his allies, by preaching tolerance and practicing inclusivity.
One of our favorite op-eds—we use it as an example in the op-ed-writing tutorials given by The Progressive to activists around the country—is from May 2016. It is by Akilah Monifa, a writer in Oakland, California, who at the time was using her birth name, Elizabeth Ann Thompson, as a pen name. The piece, which you can read on our website, talks about how the author, as a child traveling with her family in the South in the 1960s, had to use the roadside for bathroom breaks because the restrooms at gas stations along the way were for whites only.
This Monifa equates with the so-called bathroom bills that seek to require people to choose restrooms based on their biological sex and not on how they identify. She quotes the remarkable statement put forth at the time by Loretta Lynch, then Attorney General of the United States under President Obama, saying that the government would fight these restrictions—a stance Trump’s AG later reversed—because:
“This is about the dignity and respect we accord our fellow citizens and the laws that we, as a people and as a country, have enacted to protect them—indeed, to protect all of us. And it’s about the founding ideals that have led this country—haltingly but inexorably—in the direction of fairness, inclusion, and equality for all Americans.”
Or, as Monifa expressed, “It’s about recognizing our humanness and not otherness.”
Let us not forget that progress is possible and political gains are real. At least some forms of discrimination are against the law. Most Americans are delighted that same-sex couples can marry. Talk show audiences applaud trans people. Many people of different faiths have built bridges with each other. We are better because of, not despite, our differences in race, religion, and sexual orientation. Out of many, one. And no politician is ever going to take that away.