Not that this should come as a surprise, but with the Republican National Convention less than a week away, Donald Trump is sending out all sorts of signals that whatever his official themes may be will be the real topic of the GOP meeting white flu policy. Unlike in the past, where concerns about the non-appearance of openly racist Republicans have forced dog whistles and coded language, Trump seems to believe that his best bet is to serve racism directly, and thus left doubts about the question whether our president is actually a white supremacist.
Late Tuesday night, Trump praises Laura Loomer, who won the Republican primary in Florida’s 21st Congressional District, which is Trump’s official residence. To call Loomer a “far right” as a “fringe” candidate is the case. She is an obsessive bigot with a long history of unvernished hatred against Muslims – as someone she simply suspects may be a Muslim – who calls herself a “cruel people” and marks herself a #ProudIslamophobe. Her rhetoric is openly genocidal, such as when she declared that “we should never leave another Muslim in the civilized world” and does not encourage taxi and ride-sharing companies to hire Muslim drivers. (It may be reassuring to know she’s unlikely to win in November. The neighborhood is solidly Democratic, and Republicans are not even bothered to run for office against incumbent Rep. Lois Frankel in 2018.)
Loomer has been banned by both Uber and Lyft for this public bigotry, and was then banned from Twitter after tweeting about rep. Ilhan Omar, the Minnesota Democrat who is one of two Muslim women in the House: “Ilhan is pro Sharia Ilhan is pro -FGM Under Sharia, homosexuals are oppressed and murdered. Women are abused & forced to wear the hijab.”
In reality, Omar is pro-choice and supports LGBTQ rights, and has condemned “religious fundamentalists” who “want to impose their beliefs on an entire society.” But of course, Loomer does not really care about religious freedom. She worries about accusing Omar and all other Muslims of being anti-American.
Trump’s celebration of Loomer’s victory comes not long after his enthusiastic Twitter embrace of Marjorie Taylor Greene, who won a Republican House primarily in Georgia, despite a QAnon supporter who has wallowed in wild racist rhetoric and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories . It’s more likely that Greene won, of course because of those things.
Trump lets most Republican primary winners go unreported on his Twitter feed, so singling these two for praise sends an important message: Not only does the president openly welcome racist wackos into the Republican Party, he thinks that openly racist wackos are both core and the future of the Republican Party.
These tweets build on a summer of Trump digging his heels into the idea that all-in-one to continue with open racism is the key to winning the November election. He has repeatedly stated that the way to win over “Suburban Housewives” is to scare them with threats that people of color will move into their neighborhood and “destroy the suburban life dream”. (Trump seems to have no idea that most women living in suburbs work outside the home, let alone that not everyone is married or heterosexual.)
And of course, Trump decided to go big with racist attacks on sen. Kamala Harris of California, who was recently elected running mate of Joe Biden, claims he “has heard” that she “does not meet the requirements” to be vice president.
A number of stores have dutifully leaked pieces about the extensive legal “theories” (scary quotes because they are more than puns than theories) that state that Harris – who was born in Oakland, California – in one way or another no “natural is” born citizen “as required by the Constitution. (That is, of course, and that legal question has been decided since at least 1898, no matter how many right-wing legal beagles want to kneel there.)
But in a sense that misses the point. By applying the same “birther” conspiracy theory to Harris that Trump used for years against Barack Obama, Trump makes it clear that this has nothing to do with legitimate confusion about who is and is not an American citizen. It’s just a backdoor method for Trump and his supporters to deny that Black people are like the children of immigrants really Americans, and to imply that the only legitimate candidates for the White House are white people.
Now the Republican convention seems to be committed to bringing to the fore the theme that the “real” victims of racism and bigotry are not Black people murdered or abused by police or Latinos who are targeted by harassment by ICE or Asian Americans subjected to hate crimes after Trump and his allies began using racist terms for the coronavirus, but rather white people who become unjustly victims by becoming racist.
Note that among the RNC speakers we find Patricia and Mark McCloskey, the St Louis couple who were the target of widespread online mockery after responding to Black Lives Matter protesters walking in the public street in front of their house by pulling guns and threatening the Protestants. Since then, the McCloskeys have been heavily portrayed on the right victim-complex media circle, portraying themselves as the victims of censorship liberals, although they blatantly sought to end acquittal with threats of deadly violence.
The McCloskeys will be at the convention alongside Nicholas Sandmann, a high school student who has a slightly better claim on the idea that he was unfairly portrayed in the media after he and his colleague wore MAGA hats. electoral activists in a conflict got into the streets of Washington last year with some progressive activists demanding rights for Native Americans. Video of the incident showed that neither the MAGA children nor the Native American protesters started the conflict – that credit goes to a group of Black Hebrew Israelis, an anti-Semitic fringe group that has been evacuated across the political spectrum – and the right could ambiguity of the situation to spin a simplistic story about innocent young conservatives falsely accused of racism.
But no matter how ambiguous Sandmann’s situation may have been, the McCloskey situation was not: these were a few helpful white people harassing peaceful Protestants and threatening the “crime” of walking in a public street. The conflict between the two cases shows that Trump is not really interested in the guilt or innocence of anyone accused of racist actions. This is about stabbing white grief over the fact that racism itself is being treated as a social pun in the first place.
Will this work? It’s hard to say, but there are reasons to hope it will not. Trump himself simply goes with just racism on his Twitter feed and in his public statements, but the RNC plays a somewhat more subtle game, seeking prey on fears of white people to become “racist”, while not insisting that racism is actually OK.
Most Americans already believe that Trump is a racist, and are not happy about that. There is really no evidence for Trump’s theory that there is a “silent majority” of Americans who feel oppressed by the anti-racist elite, which seems to be rooted in beliefs of past decades. At some level, even that seems understandable, and that’s why his real strategy – as Democratic insider Simon Rosenberg recently told Salon’s Chauncey DeVega – is not to win enough voters to win a fair election, as much as rigging the results by destroying the Postal Service and delaying emails so they do not count. But even if he does lose, Trump’s strategy of inculcating and embracing open racism will leave a dark flesh on this country that could take many years to scrape out.
