Trump Endorses a Racist Theory

I have long believed that what attracts much of the MAGA base to Donald Trump is his open racism and his effort to mainstream white supremacy.  The MAGA base is terrified of anyone who looks different than them, loves differently, or holds to a different religious faith.  Yet, underneath it all, skin color is the determinative factor and these people want to maintain their perceived white privilege and claims of superiority.  Some of those I know who support Trump may claim that they are not racists, but when you look at the overall circumstances, there is truly no other plausible explanation for their fealty to a man who I once thought would be anathema to the morality these people  have claimed to embrace in the past.  I continue to be shocked by some of the Facebook post by these individuals who I suspect would say they and I disagree on politics, but in truth we differ on matters of basic morality.  Now, with Trump freaking out over the change presidential campaign and Kamala Harris' rise in the polls, both Trump and his campaign appear to be going all in on a shockingly racist theme pitting whites and non-whites against one another.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at this renewed racism and the lies it promotes.  Here are highlights (the image above is from Trump's campaign): 

Yesterday, the official Trump War Room campaign account on X posted a picture of a peaceful residential neighborhood, which it captioned “Your Neighborhood Under Trump.” The tranquil image was juxtaposed with a chaotic scene of Black and Hispanic migrants who’d arrived in New York last summer, captioned: “Your Neighborhood Under Kamala.” “Import the third world,” the post declared. “Become the third world.”

This racist post is consistent with the tone that the Trump campaign has taken in recent weeks—one even uglier than that of months and years past—as the former president struggles to gain traction against Kamala Harris. Like Donald Trump himself, the War Room account has a singular obsession: It regularly highlights stories about migrant crime, posting pictures of Black or brown men who have immigrated to the U.S. and been arrested. A necessary note: There is no evidence of a migrant-led crime spike, or of higher crime rates in cities with the greatest numbers of migrants. Research suggests that immigrants are less likely than their native-born counterparts to be arrested. Trump and his campaign’s obsession with crimes committed by migrants—and their relative silence on other dangers Americans face, such as mass shootings—speaks for itself.

The drumbeat seems to have gotten louder this week. Yesterday, the War Room account also reposted a clip of a Fox News segment about a Haitian migrant charged with raping a child, adding, “Life under President Trump: Increased child tax credits. Life under Kamala Harris: Increased child rape.” The list goes on and on.

None of this is new for Trump, who has a long and well-documented history of racist remarks, and whose campaigns have been built on stoking fears of migrants. Indeed, migrant crime has been a consistent Trumpian theme since he came down a golden escalator in 2015 . . .  As a candidate in 2015, Trump called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” and according to The Washington Post, he referred to Haiti and African nations as “shithole countries” while president.

Trump has never backed off. His campaign is now pushing that same line, but with a grotesque twist. They are hammering on the theme that it is Trump’s Black female opponent who is responsible for all of this supposed chaos. “Kamala Harris IMPORTS rape and plunder into our communities,” another Trump War Room post declared yesterday.

Perhaps even more worrying is that the “neighborhood” post went beyond Trump’s fixation on migrant crime to highlight his campaign’s embrace of the “Great Replacement” theory—the fear that Black and brown migrants will displace white Americans in the voting booth, the workplace, and a neighborhood near you. Once confined to the white-nationalist fringes, the theory was popularized in part by the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson . . .

Now Trump’s own campaign is amplifying these fears of a “Third World” takeover. Trump has taken his racism far beyond a dog whistle, and as even a cursory scroll through the War Room account shows, his campaign is not attempting to hide it.