For much of his time as president, Donald Trump has been the bully in the bully pulpit, castigating targets foreign and domestic. Much of Trump’s bluster attempts to divide people into us-against-them, and it often has a single polarizing agent: race.
On Friday night, as he has many times before, Trump inflamed an almost exclusively white Southern audience against opponents who he said were trying to steal their heritage and attack their values. In that Alabama speech and on Saturday, he criticized African American athletes who had exercised free speech by declining to stand during the national anthem.
His racially oriented statements seem to reflect Trump’s embrace of the world as it was decades ago when power was largely held by men like him.
By the sheer bulk of his comments, Trump has reversed what had been a trend in politics over several decades: racial appeals have grown less overt, not more. Trump’s targets in the last week, by contrast, have included Golden State Warriors star Stephen Curry, unemployed NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick and ESPN anchor Jemele Hill — all African Americans…
Trump jumped into the presidential contest by flinging insults at Mexicans. During his campaign, he cast doubt on the allegiance of Muslims, accused people in China and Japan of taking American jobs, and over and over castigated immigrants.
The point appeared to be to encourage a surge of white pride that would draw voters to him — and to a large extent it worked. Now, as president, Trump is continuing in the mold he made as a candidate.
“Trump is specifically trying to run on a strategy of mobilizing whites,” said Stephen A. Nuno, a political science professor at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. “It’s not coalition building. It’s identity formation.”
Both of his slogans — “Make America Great Again” and “America First” — carry insinuations of race and culture. The first suggests a return to a time when nonwhites, as well as women, were locked out of the power centers of America, whether business suites or the Oval Office. “America First” was used by opponents of the U.S. entrance into World War II, some of whom expressed strongly anti-Semitic views.
