Donald Trump Sings the Same Old Racially Incendiary Song - Horowitz

Donald Trump Sings the Same Old Racially Incendiary Song - Horowitz

“It’s the Same Old Song ” was a big hit in 1965 for the Four Tops. The song was intentionally similar in sound to the legendary Motown vocal group’s previous hit, “I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie Honey).”

 

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Donald Trump is highly unlikely to have similar success with his latest effort to stoke and capitalize on racial resentment. In attacking Kamala Harris’ biracial ancestry and intentionally misrepresenting how she has described it, he is reprising the same playbook he used when he advanced the birther lie, falsely claiming that Barack Obama was not born in this country.

 

It is true that his nakedly racist attack on President Obama, raised his profile within the Republican Party and built a base that paid dividends for him in his successful campaign to capture the 2016 Republican nomination. But it also repelled swing voters as did his repeated returns to the racial well during his presidency, contributing to his unpopularity throughout his term and culminating in his decisive defeat by Joe Biden in 2020.

 

More specifically, the former president enthusiastically embraced birtherism, finally only grudgingly conceding President Obama was born in this country in the fall of 2016.  He launched a presidential trial balloon in 2011 and continued to build up his political brand over the next few years by falsely accusing President Obama, our first African American president, of not being born in the United States, as well as raising unfounded doubts about his academic credentials.  Mr. Trump announced that he had sent a team of investigators to Hawaii to uncover the real story about the birth records. “They cannot believe what they are finding,” he falsely told ABC’s The View in 2011. Of course, if Donald Trump ever sent anyone, he never told us what they found. This is because there was nothing to find.

 
Mr. Trump’s attack on the vice president’s racial identity echoes his championing of birtherism. “She 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, he told the National Association of BlackJournalists (NABJ) last week. “So, I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?”  

 

Mr. Trump’s description of how Ms. Harris has characterized her racial identity throughout her life and political career is blatantly false. “Ms. Harris has long embraced both her Black and  South Asian identity,” AP reported. “She attended Howard University, a historically Black institution, and pledged Alpha Kappa Alpha, the nation’s first sorority established for Black college women. Headlines from her earliest political victories dating back to the early 2000s highlighted both identities.”

 

 Yet, Donald Trump doubled down on this racially charged and falsehood-ridden attack, repeating the same misrepresentations about the vice president’s identity in social media posts and at his campaign rallies.  The goal is to define Ms. Harris as “other”—not one of us, somehow not a real American.  It goes hand-in-hand with Mr. Trump’s crabbed blood and soil vision of our nation, and his blatant appeals to a narrow and destructive nativism, fueled by racial resentment.

 

Once again, however, Mr. Trump is making a political miscalculation. We are a far better, more open-minded, and less bigoted people than the former president apparently believes.

 

In fact, it might behoove his advisors to remind Donald Trump that while the birther lies and his racially tinged demonization of immigrants helped in a crowded Republican primary field, this same approach to his presidency was one of the reasons for his defeat in 2020.  Among the swing voters in this election, these kinds of racial dog whistles are political poison.

 

Additionally, nearly 34 million American adults identify as multiracial, according to the 2020 census. It is the fasted growing demographic group in the nation. His attack on Harris will be perceived by this substantial subset of voters as particularly odious.

 

There was nothing surprising about Mr. Trump’s attack on Ms. Harris. You can pretty much count on the former president to ramp up the racism whenever he is feeling politically vulnerable.  The good news is we can also count on most Americans to reject this approach. 

 

While Americans couldn’t get enough of the sweet and recognizable voices of The Four Tops even if they were singing the same old song, the tired and warmed-over racial attacks from Mr. Trump are a whole different story.  They will not find a sufficient number of receptive ears.