Sunday, July 14, 2019

Trump Fans the Flames of a Racial Fire

 
 
a man wearing a suit and tie: President Trump ritually denies any racial animus or motivations. “I am the least racist person you have ever met,” he has said more than once.© Erin Schaff/The New York Times President Trump ritually denies any racial animus or motivations. “I am the least racist person you have ever met,” he has said more than once.
WASHINGTON — President Trump woke up on Sunday morning, gazed out at the nation he leads, saw the dry kindling of race relations and decided to throw a match on it. It was not the first time, nor is it likely to be the last. He has a pretty large carton of matches and a ready supply of kerosene.
His Twitter harangue goading Democratic congresswomen of color to “go back” to the country they came from, even though most of them were actually born in the United States, shocked many. But it should have surprised few who have watched the way he has governed a multicultural, multiracial country the last two and a half years.
When it comes to race, Mr. Trump plays with fire like no other president in a century. While others who occupied the White House at times skirted close to or even over the line, finding ways to appeal to the resentments of white Americans with subtle and not-so-subtle appeals, none of them in modern times fanned the flames as overtly, relentlessly and even eagerly as Mr. Trump.
His attack on the Democratic congresswomen came on the same day his administration was threatening mass roundups of immigrants living in the country illegally. And it came just days after he hosted some of the most incendiary right-wing voices on the internet at the White House and vowed to find another way to count citizens separately from noncitizens despite a Supreme Court ruling that blocked him from adding a question to the once-a-decade census.
His assumption that the House Democrats must have been born in another country — or that they did not belong here if they were — fits an us-against-them political strategy that has been at the heart of Mr. Trump’s presidency from the start. Heading into next year’s election, he appears to be drawing a deep line between the white, native-born America of his memory and the ethnically diverse, increasingly foreign-born country he is presiding over, challenging voters in 2020 to declare which side of that line they are on.
“In many ways, this is the most insidious kind of racial demagoguery,” said Douglas A. Blackmon, the author of “Slavery by Another Name,” a Pulitzer Prize-winning history of racial servitude in America between the Civil War and World War II. “The president has moved beyond invoking the obvious racial slanders of 50 years ago — clichés like black neighborhoods ‘on fire’ — and is now invoking the white supremacist mentality of the early 1900s, when anyone who looked ‘not white’ could be labeled as unwelcome in America.”
Mr. Trump ritually denies any racial animus or motivations. His fight against illegal immigration, he says, is only about securing the border and protecting the country. He regularly boasts that unemployment among Hispanics and African-Americans has hit record lows. Last week he thanked Robert L. Johnson, the founder of Black Entertainment Television, for crediting his stewardship of the economy.
“I am the least racist person you have ever met,” he has said more than once.
But he does not go out of his way to avoid looking like he is, and his string of Twitter posts on Sunday left his own advisers unable or unwilling to defend him. None of six spokespeople for the White House or his campaign responded to requests for comment.
One of the only administration officials who was already booked for the Sunday talk shows, Mark Morgan, the acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, made clear he wanted no part of it. “You’re going to have to ask the president what he means by those specific tweets,” he said on “Face the Nation” on CBS.
Republican lawmakers, by and large, did not rush to the president’s side on Sunday either, but neither did they jump forward to denounce him. Deeply uncomfortable as many Republicans are with Mr. Trump’s racially infused politics, they worry about offending the base voters who cheer on the president as a truth-teller taking on the tyranny of political correctness.
Other presidents have played racial politics or indulged in stereotypes. Secret tapes of Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon show them routinely making virulently racist statements behind closed doors. Mr. Nixon’s Southern strategy was said to be aimed at disenchanted whites. Ronald Reagan was accused of coded racial appeals for talking so much about “welfare queens.” George Bush and his supporters highlighted the case of a furloughed African-American murderer named Willie Horton. Bill Clinton was accused of a racial play for criticizing a black hip-hop star.
But there were limits, even a generation ago, and most modern presidents preached racial unity over division. Mr. Johnson, of course, pushed through the most sweeping civil rights legislation in American history. Mr. Bush signed a civil-rights bill and denounced David Duke, the Ku Klux Klan leader, when he ran for governor of Louisiana as a Republican. His son, George W. Bush, made a point of visiting a mosque just days after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to emphasize that America was not at war with Muslims. Barack Obama invited an African-American Harvard professor and the white police officer who mistakenly arrested him for a “beer summit.”
Mr. Trump’s history on race has been well documented, from his days as a developer settling a Justice Department lawsuit over discrimination in renting apartments to his public agitation during the Central Park Five case in New York. Jack O’Donnell, the former president of Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City, later wrote that Mr. Trump openly disparaged others based on race, complaining, for example, that he did not want black men managing his money.
“Trump has not only always been a racist, but anyone around him who denies it, is lying,” Mr. O’Donnell said on Sunday. “Donald Trump makes racist comments all the time. Once you know him, he speaks his mind about race very openly.”
Mr. Trump, he said, regularly trafficked in racial stereotypes — Jews were good with money, blacks were lazy, Puerto Ricans dressed badly. “White people are Americans to Trump; everyone else is from somewhere else,” Mr. O’Donnell said. “He simply denies the reality of how we all immigrated to the United States.”
Mr. Trump propelled his way to the White House in part by promoting the false “birther” conspiracy theory that Mr. Obama was actually born in Africa, not Hawaii. He opened his presidential bid in 2015 with an attack on Mexican “rapists” coming across the border (although “some, I assume, are good people”) and later called for a ban on all Muslimsentering the United States. He said an American-born judge of Mexican heritage could not be fair to him because of his ethnic background.
As president, he complained during meetings that became public that Haitian immigrants “all have AIDS” and said African visitors would never “go back to their huts.” He disparagedHaiti and some African nations with a vulgarity and said instead of immigrants from there, the United States should accept more from Norway. He said there were “very fine people on both sides” of a rally to save a Confederate monument that turned deadly in Charlottesville, Va., although he also condemned the neo-Nazis there.
He is only saying what others believe but are too afraid to say, he insists. And each time the flames roar and Mr. Trump tosses a little more accelerant on top. The fire may be hot, but that’s the way he likes it.
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