For Trump, the Racism is the Point - Horowitz

Donald Trump has made a political career of going to the racial well, fully embracing a crabbed blood and soil vision of our nation. His politics at their core are about stoking racial resentments and fear of the other.  He doesn’t view us as a nation of immigrants bound together by ideas, but as a place where based on skin color and preferred ancestry some people are real Americans and the rest are somehow suspect.

 

That is the common thread that takes us through the racially tinged lie that President Barack Obama was not born in this country—the blatant falsehood that launched his entry into national politics-- to the former president’s recent doubling down on how certain non-white immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.”

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If Donald Trump didn’t want to marinate in explicit racism, which he apparently believes works for him politically, once it was pointed out to him that he was essentially parroting Adolf Hitler, he could have backed off, stopped the incendiary racial rhetoric and still expressed his opinion forcefully about the need for strong border security.   Instead, he chose to continue to repeat the exact phrase, “poisoning the blood of our country.”  And just to make sure that his meaning wasn’t open to interpretation he reprised that what drove his concern was that “they come from Africa, they come from Asia, they come from South America.”  In other words, they are not white and European.

 

While some Republican U.S. Senators straightforwardly criticized Mr. Trump’s continuing use of despicable, explicitly racist language, the overwhelming majority of Republican elected officials either ran for cover or fell back on the standard defensive playbook they employ when attempting to avoid incurring the wrath of the former president. Under persistent questioning from Kristen Welker on Meet the Press, Senator Lindsey Graham(R-SC), for example, said, “If the only thing you want to talk about on immigration is the way Donald Trump talks, you're missing a lot." This was after saying, “he didn’t really care about language people use as long as we get it (immigration) right.” These responses were particularly disingenuous since Ms. Welker had already asked him a number of questions on the substance of the immigration issue. Of course, Mr. Graham well-knows that it is possible to do a better job of controlling our Southern border without borrowing from Adolf Hitler to frame the issue. 

With the Iowa Caucuses and New Hampshire primary only weeks away, Republican caucus and primary voters face a moment of truth.  Chris Christie, Nicki Haley and Ron DeSantis all speak about the importance of cracking down on illegal immigration and have all arguably demonstrated far more competence in governance than the former president, who only was able to build a small fraction of the Wall he promised with such grandiosity. Unlike, the former president, however, they don’t serve up their pledges to control the border with large dollops of naked, unapologetic racism.

 

For Donald Trump, the racism is the point.  It is up to Republican primary voters --who have three alternatives, all of whom are stronger general election candidates-- to say no to the former president and his ugly, divisive, and un-American rhetoric It is an apt time to recall that this was once the party of Lincoln and to “be once again touched…by the better angels of our nature.”—as the first Republican president famously put it.

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