The Trump Campaign Wants Everyone Talking About Race

Earlier this month, the self-identified “white nationalist” Donald Trump adviser Laura Loomer said that if Vice President Kamala Harris wins, “the White House will smell like curry & White House speeches will be facilitated via a call center.”

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{snip} What’s going on here is emblematic of the Trump campaign’s strategy, which is to try to make race the big issue of the campaign, via incessant trolling, lying, and baiting of both the press and the Harris camp. The racism rope-a-dope is one of Trump advisers’ favorite moves—say something to provoke accusations of racism, then ride the wave of outrage over your critics’ perceived oversensitivity.

The theory is that by supercharging the salience of race—a reliable winner with huge swaths of the electorate—they can compensate for the unpopularity of the Trump campaign’s actual policy agenda: its plans to ban abortion, repeal protections for preexisting conditions in the Affordable Care Act, deregulate Big Business, and cut taxes on the wealthy while raising them on everyone else. The campaign wants people—white people in particular—thinking about race, and hopes that these kinds of appeals will activate the necessary number of voters in the key swing states where the electorate is more conservative than the country as a whole. As Molly Ball reported in 2017, based on polling from the former Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway, another former Trump stalwart, Steve Bannon, developed a plan to galvanize white voters with race-baiting on immigration.

The belief that demagoguery on immigration is politically potent is why conservative media erupt with saturation coverage of the perennial migrant caravans every election season. The right sees as its most effective message the argument that immigrants, particularly nonwhite immigrants, are going to come to America and take or be given that which belongs to you. {snip}

“What it is is: Imagine if this explosion of migrants or illegals happened on your block, in your neighborhood? You don’t have a clearer real-world example of the consequences of these Biden-Harris immigration policies, and most voters do not want that to happen where they live and send their kids to school,” a Trump adviser told Rolling Stone’s Asawin Suebsaeng. He added that the Trump campaign believes “this is a surefire political winner for them.”

As soon as Harris became the nominee, Republicans began goading her. Republican elected officials immediately attacked Harris as a “DEI hire,” accusing the former district attorney, attorney general, and senator, who has spent more time in elected office than either member of the GOP ticket, as unqualified. Trump went to the National Association of Black Journalists convention and falsely accused Harris of recently “becoming” Black. The Trump campaign has charged Harris with wanting to “import the third world,” a framing that implicitly suggests that Americans of non-European descent don’t belong here. In August, Trump shared an image of dark-skinned people with the caption, “If you’re a woman you can either vote for Trump or wait until one of these monsters goes after you or your daughter.” Trump’s dehumanizing rhetoric about immigrants “poisoning the blood of the nation” predates Harris’s entrance into the contest, but the Trump campaign’s focus shifted once the child of Jamaican and Indian immigrants took center stage.

“They’re coming from the Congo. They’re coming from Africa. They’re coming from the Middle East. They’re coming from all over the world—Asia,” Trump told supporters last week. “What’s happening to our country is we’re just destroying the fabric of life in our country … We’re not going to take it any longer. You got to get rid of these people. Give me a shot.” Trump makes no distinction between illegal and legal immigration here, and Vance has already announced that the distinction doesn’t matter to him. What matters is that people who are not white do not belong here, unless they happen to be married or related to Vance; then he’s willing to make an exception.

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In her book, White Identity Politics, Ashley Jardina distinguishes between a politics of racism and white identity—one that is useful for understanding what the Trump campaign is doing. Some white voters who are not ideologically opposed to stronger social-welfare policies in general can be manipulated by appeals to the sense that white people as a group are threatened.

“White identity is sometimes latent, but it is also reactive—made salient by threats to the dominance of whites as a group,” Jardina writes. Politicians seeking to activate that sentiment “can make racial appeals that not only take advantage of the hostilities whites feel toward racial and ethnic minorities, but also ones that appeal to whites’ desire to protect and preserve their group’s power.”

The Trump campaign’s more overtly racist rhetoric is meant to capture the support of the former group, while its race-baiting is intended to provoke attacks that will activate a sense of white solidarity. {snip}

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