Trumpism Is Racism, So Things Will Get Worse

November 6th was a bad night for President Trump, no matter what he says. He now has to deal with a newly empowered opposition party with a mandate to check his myriad abuses and scandals. The rebuke wasn’t as harsh as it needed to be, though.

Trumpism, which is essentially short for “espousing racism,” continued to score well with the president’s base. Paired with the flaws in our democracy that help maintain white political power, it diluted a Democratic victory that should have been more absolute. Trumpism likely helped some Republicans hold off insurgent candidacies that would have otherwise taken them down.

Ron DeSantis, who articulated no real platform other than “I’m with Trump,” warned Florida voters not to “monkey this up” by electing his African-American opponent, Andrew Gillum, as governor. In Georgia, Republican gubernatorial nominee Brian Kemp shamelessly used his powers as the state’s top elections official to suppress the black vote. The day before the election, he tweeted a false story about armed New Black Panther Party members intimidating voters on opponent Stacey Abrams’ behalf. Those outcome of those elections are still up in the air, but California GOP Rep. Duncan Hunter, whose August indictment should have doomed his incumbency, turned to openly Islamophobic slander against his half-Mexican/half-Palestinian opponent, Ammar Campa-Najjar. It worked.

Catering to bigotry gave these candidates something to run on in lieu of a policy platform. That approach may work for Trump heading into 2020, because he’s Trump and there’s an unshakable cult of personality around him. But is his brand of racism a sustainable strategy for the Republican Party?

“I think it was a 55-45 night in the direction of the Democrats,” says Anand Giridharadas, journalist and author of Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World. “A sizable part of the country repudiated racism, demagogy, sexism, corruption, the abuse of power and demi-competent authoritarianism. The other way to read the results is that 45 percent is too damn high. A wanna-be tyrant like Donald Trump should not poll in the double digits in American life, and we’re not safe until he doesn’t anymore.”

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/2018-midterms-trumpism-754178/