In Risky Bid, Trump Stirs Racial Rancor To Motivate Voters, As Pres. Slips Behind Biden In Polls

- "In risky bid, Trump stokes racial rancor to motivate voters." By Jonathan Lemire, Associated Press, July 8, 2020. Edited:

NEW YORK (AP) — President Donald Trump is wielding America’s racial tensions as a reelection weapon, fiercely denouncing the racial justice movement on a near-daily basis with language stoking white resentment and aiming to drive his supporters to the polls. The incendiary discourse is alarming many in his own party and running contrary to the advice of some in his inner circle, who believe it risks alienating independent and suburban voters. It’s a pattern that harks back to cultural divisions Trump similarly exploited in his victorious 2016 campaign. “It’s not about who is the object of the derision or the vitriol. The actual issue is understanding the appeal to white resentment and white fear,” said Eddie Glaude at Princeton University. “It’s all rooted in this panic about the place of white people in this new America.” Though Trump has long aired racially divisive language and grievances in the public sphere, his willingness to do so from behind the presidential seal — and on his Twitter account — has reached a breakneck pace in recent days as the nation grapples with racial injustice.

The Republican president tweeted — and later deleted — a video of a supporter yelling “white power.” He referred to the Black Lives Matter mantra as a “symbol of hate.” He took a swipe at NASCAR for removing the Confederate flag from its races and falsely suggested a Black driver had carried out a racially charged hoax. He mused about overturning a suburban fair-housing regulation and spoke approvingly of the current branding of the Washington Redskins and the Cleveland Indians, team nicknames that many consider offensive to Native Americans. Most notably, he has engaged in a full-throated defense of the Confederate legacy, which he at times has cloaked within tributes to the Founding Fathers, including during a pair of high-profile Fourth of July weekend speeches. "Those who seek to erase our heritage want Americans to forget our pride and our great dignity, so that we can no longer understand ourselves or America’s destiny,” Trump said Friday at the base of Mount Rushmore.."Their goal is not a better America; their goal is the end of America.”

But Trump has repeatedly called for the preservation of statues of the Confederacy and the names of its generals on military bases — all assailed in the protests that have swept from coast to coast in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd. His comments are an apparent descendant, a half-century later, of Richard Nixon’s coded outreach to white voters known as the Southern Strategy. Trump himself has embraced Nixon’s phrase “the Silent Majority” to describe his own supporters. By all accounts, the president’s actions are, at times, born of impulse and an instinctive reaction to what he sees on television. The belief is that his appeals will generate enthusiasm among the same disaffected white voters who made up the president’s base of supporters four years ago. But many in Trump’s orbit are sounding the alarm that 2020 is not 2016.

According to officials, White House advisers have warned that some of the racist rhetoric, including the use of China-blaming “kung flu” to describe the COVID-19 pandemic, could turn off swaths of voters. And some believe there was more of an audience for inflammatory rhetoric about immigration four years ago, particularly as polls show the Black Lives Matter movement gaining widespread support. Four months before Election Day, Republicans are nervously watching polls that show Trump slipping behind his Democratic rival Joe Biden. They have grown increasingly worried that his focus on racial rancor could force GOP senators locked in tough campaigns to distance themselves from their party’s president. “Defending the Confederacy and racial dog whistles is not going to help win the suburbs. He is solely focused on a small part of his base when he should be looking to grow his support,” said Alex Conant, a Republican strategist...

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Associated Press writer Alan Fram in Washington contributed to this report.