Bill Berkowitz for BuzzFlash: Trump Mirroring George Wallace’s Overt Racism in His Re-Election Campaign
August 17, 2020
George Wallace 1968 booster plate (Jerry “Woody”)
By Bill Berkowitz
Not since the 1968 presidential election, when former Alabama Governor George “Segregation Now, Segregation Tomorrow, Segregation Forever” Wallace ran for the presidency, has a candidate decided that dog-whistling to his base was not going to be enough, and instead opted for out and out racism. Will Donald Trump’s overt and unhinged racist appeals be a factor in the November election? According to a recent Hill-HarrisX poll, if the election was held today, about 50 percent of white voters would vote to re-elect Trump. Dr. Eddie Glaude, Jr., author of the new book, Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and its Urgent Lessons for Our Own, recently told The Gist’s Mike Pesca that after Trump was elected in 2016, he learned that he had “overestimated white America.” Glaude said he should have realized that “we were on the precipice of … the aftertimes, or what some people would call a backlash.”
Rather than being “the least racist person” America has ever known, as he has infamously declared, Trump has unleashed undiluted rhetoric and campaign advertisement stoking racial resentment. Most recently Trump seemed to be reverting back to his birtherism playbook – which first surface when he claimed that Barack Obama was not born in the U.S. -- with regards to Joe Biden’s pick of Kamala Harris as his running mate, raising questions about her citizenship.
In the past several months, Trump has defended confederate monuments; refused to consider removing treasonous confederate general’s names from military bases across the country; branded Black Lives Matter “a symbol of hate”; rescinded fair housing regulations, while assuring white suburban housewives that their neighborhoods will not be overrun by low-income housing; and, continues to imprison immigrant children under conditions dangerous to their health during the pandemic. When asked about the legacy of the recently deceased civil rights hero John Lewis, Trump showing his pettiness, maintained that Lewis skipped his inauguration
Trump has a history of undisguised racism: “Black guys counting my money! I hate it. The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day. … I think that the guy is lazy. And it’s probably not his fault, because laziness is a trait in blacks. It really is, I believe that. It’s not anything they can control.” Trump at first denied those remarks, but later said in a 1997 Playboy interview that “the stuff O’Donnell wrote about me is probably true.”
On July 23, Trump began his campaign of reassuring suburbanites that their neighborhoods will remain color-free zones where they can live out their 1950’s suburban style dreams without worrying about the encroachment of low-income housing. “The Suburban Housewives of America must read this article. Biden will destroy your neighborhood and your American Dream. I will preserve it, and make it even better!,” Trump tweeted. Nearly a week later, Trump came back to this theme, tweeting: “I am happy to inform all of the people living their Suburban Lifestyle Dream that you will no longer be bothered or financially hurt by having low income housing built in your neighborhood... ...Your housing prices will go up based on the market, and crime will go down. I have rescinded the Obama-Biden AFFH Rule. Enjoy!”
Never mind the facts that, as Alternet’s Alex Henderson recently reported, “In a 2016 report for the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy at New York University, Alan Berube (deputy director of the Brookings Institute) found that combined, blacks, Latinos and Asians comprised 35% of the suburban population in the United States.”
In recent weeks, Trump has attempted to stoke white fear that black crime is soaring in cities with Democratic mayors. Trump has called Black Lives Matter “a symbol of hate.”
A conservative friend who critiques my articles – frequently quite unmercifully – and with whom I correspond almost daily, insists that Donald Trump is not a racist. In an email, he cited several of the Trump Administration’s pre-COVID-19 pandemic accomplishments – lower unemployment among African Americans and modest income growth. My friend also stated that there are many African American preachers and intellectuals that support him. He suggested I stick to the facts.
Last year, The Atlantic’s David A. Graham, Adrienne Greer, Cullen Murphy and Parker Richards put together “An Oral History of Trump’s Bigotry”, subtitled, “His racism and intolerance have always been in evidence; only slowly did he begin to understand how to use them to his advantage.”
As the Atlantic story noted, the Justice Department sued his family’s real-estate company for housing discrimination against black’s in 1973 naming both Donald and his father, Fred Trump. According to a front page story in The New York Times, “Donald Trump’s first quoted words in The New York Times expressed his view of the charges: “They are absolutely ridiculous. We never have discriminated,” he added, “and we never would.”.
According to The Atlantic, “In the years since then, Trump has assembled a long record of comment on issues involving African Americans as well as Mexicans, Hispanics more broadly, Native Americans, Muslims, Jews, immigrants, women, and people with disabilities. His behavior has mirrored his statements have been reflected in his behavior—from public acts (placing ads against the Central Park Five, calling for the execution of five young black and Latino men accused of rape, who were later shown to be innocent) to private preferences (‘When Donald and Ivana came to the casino, the bosses would order all the black people off the floor,’ a former employee of Trump’s Castle, in Atlantic City, New Jersey, told a writer for The New Yorker).
“Trump emerged as a political force owing to his full-throated embrace of ‘birtherism,” the false charge that the nation’s first black president, Barack Obama, was not born in the United States. His presidential campaign was fueled by nativist sentiment directed at nonwhite immigrants, and he proposed barring Muslims from entering the country.”
In 2016, Trump described himself to The Washington Post as “the least racist person that you’ve ever encountered.”
Trump has also declared that he thinks his “rhetoric brings people together.”
Here are some of Trump’s “least racist” actions and statements:
· 1970s: Father (arrested for participating in a KKK riot in New York City) and son sued by the US Justice Department for racial discrimination while he and his father were slumlords;
· Taking out full-page ads in all four major New York newspapers to argue that perpetrators of crimes such as those of the Central Park Five (black and Puerto Rican teenagers) “should be forced to suffer” and “be executed.” Even after their exoneration, he is still insisting they're guilty;
· Calling Mexicans rapists and murderers the day he announced his presidential campaign;
· After the Charlottesville Unite the Right/neo-Nazi demonstrations, Trump infamously declared that there are “very fine people on both sides”;
· Trump’s descriptions of Mexican and Central American asylum seekers as “invading hoards,”, highlighted by the non-existent caravan heading to the U.S. just prior to the 2018 elections;
· Frequent condemnation of non-white elected officials including the late Elijah Cummings and members of “the Squad” of 2018 congressional women;
· Proposing a 2017 ban on Muslims entering the US that was blocked by the courts;
· Questioning Judge Gonzalo Curiel’s impartiality in a 2016 in fraud lawsuit brought by Trump University students because he was Mexican-American;
· Calling NFL (practically all black) players sons of bitches for protesting police brutality and systemic racism;
· Not acknowledging he even knew who David Duke was, former KKK Grand Wizard, and refusing to condemn him;
· Cracking a joke about the Trail of Tears and constantly calling Senator Elizabeth Warren, Pocahontas;
· Standing by for 13 seconds while one of his crowds chanted “Send her back,” and then lying about trying to stop it.
Trump’s racism has crossed lines where even some — though admittedly few – hard-core Republicans have had to condemn his remarks.
Nevertheless, the question remains: in this country where there has been a renewed awakening to the evils of racism in its many forms, will 50% of white people still vote for Trump?