Dear Friends -
109 days until the election; 16 weekends. Can we make it? Remember rule 1: it will get crazier.
The polls are looking good. A huge raft of new polling about the presidential race came out this week, and there’s no doubt: Americans are clearly unhappy with the Trump/GOP response to the pandemic. Don’t get too excited yet: 109 days is an eternity in politics, and much could change. But this quote from a major pollster stood out: "There is no upside, no silver lining, no encouraging trend hidden somewhere in this survey for the president.” Even Trump’s advantage in “handling the economy” is slipping. I could say much more about polls, but as I have previously warned not to do that, I will not do that. I will however note that Republican primary voters did not show up last week in the GOP primary run-off in Alabama.
So there is no way Trump can win, right? Maybe the Apprentice-inspired belief among a majority of Americans that Trump can handle the economy better than Biden isn’t the strongest argument for Trump’s re-election. Way back in November of 2015, I predicted Trump would win the GOP nomination. (Even earlier, in 2013, I went on the record in Politico saying that Hillary couldn’t win.) But when I outlined the reasons Trump would win, I missed one. Baratunde Thurston pointedly reminded me at the time: “You forgot racism.”
Trump’s case for re-election is all about race:
When asked last night on CBS News why Black Americans are “still dying at the hands of law enforcement in this country” Trump said, and I quote: “So are white people. So are white people. What a terrible question to ask. So are white people. More white people, by the way. More white people.”
Meanwhile, “Almost every day in the last two weeks, Mr. Trump has sought to stoke white fear and resentment…”
The Trump campaign’s latest TV ad hammers away the claim that Biden is “soft on crime” interspersed with video clips implying that Black people are perpetrating violence all over the country -- “innocent children fatally shot” blares the ad.
And top Trump advisors told NBC News “that the president believes divisive rhetoric helped him win the White House” -- “divisive rhetoric” being a polite way of saying “racist”.
When Trump says “a lot of people don’t want to talk about supporting me” and tweets (as he did on Monday) “The Silent Majority will reign!” I hear him saying “people don’t want to admit they’re racist, but they are.” There is evidence he’s right.
All of this is amplified in a media bubble I mentioned last time that is (at a minimum) inspired by racism and frequently explicitly racist.
If you want to know if Trump will win, ask yourself: how racist are white Americans? Not a pretty question, and not a pretty answer. Three weeks before the 2016 election, I interviewed MSNBC host Joy-Ann Reid on stage at Harvard and was stunned when she told me America was racist enough to elect Trump; I did not believe that about our country. I was wrong. The first thing I thought of when Trump won was the novel I had just finished: Colson Whitehead’s “Underground Railroad”.
In the midst of this week’s promising polls for Biden, I was talking with someone I know reasonably well; someone who is generally liberal and would self-identify as a Democrat. At one point in our conversation he said to me “I’ve heard the whole white privilege argument and I think it’s baloney.” I could hear Trump’s recent comments echoing in our conversation. And that’s no accident:
Racism is at the root of our current policy fights. Duke University professor Nancy MacLean’s book Democracy in Chains documents how much of contemporary conservative public policy -- shrinking government and creating more “choice” -- is explicitly rooted in racism and a response to school desegregation. She follows the intentional “conversion” of blatantly racist politics into more broadly palatable public policy.
The 2016 election was -- deeply -- about race. The central messages of Trump’s 2016 campaign were isolationism (leave NATO, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria), protectionism (leave NAFTA, punish China), and nativism (build the wall, kick out the immigrants).** Everything You Love Will Burn is a complicated book not given to short summary, looking at the rebirth of white supremacy in the United States. But one thing the book makes crystal clear is that those three “isms” are quite explicitly a vehicle for white supremacy.
The existing media infrastructure serves racist narratives. My colleagues at Harvard (Yochai Benkler, Rob Faris, and Hal Roberts) have shown how these ideas are then amplified by a toxic stew of Fox News, digital publishers, social media, and a completely reactive mainstream media. Multiple books have documented the way Steve Bannon and others used the “ism” narratives to capture the White House. (My favorite among these books is Devil’s Bargain by Bloomberg reporter Joshua Green.)
Is it any surprise that Trump decides to bank his re-election on racism? The infrastructure to support Trump’s message is strong, and history does not suggest that betting against racism in America will lead to defeat.
And what does this mean for the Senate? Ah, well… Trump understands political power better than any president since LBJ. (I can make this case at absurd and tremendous length.) Trump regularly reminds GOP Senators that he out-polls them among primary voters, and that if they defy him, he will destroy them; just ask Jeff Sessions. (If you have any doubts, at a recent White House meeting of top GOP senators, Trump passed out a summary of how he polls against them, an implicit threat of a primary challenge.) This doesn’t mean the GOP will retain control of the Senate; it is a street fight, to be sure. But it does tell you about the degree of Trump’s power over the party and consequently the pressure to carry his message.
All of that brings us back to: how racist is white America?
Hope isn’t enough. I am reminded of the exceptional young poet Amanda Gorman’s “In This Place (An American Lyric)” which ends “a history written that need not be repeated / a nation composed but not yet completed…”
More to come next time -- nicco
PS. The three “isms” I have stolen from George W. Bush. In his final year of office, as he was leaving, he spoke frequently about the dangers he saw ahead -- specifically the three “isms”: “isolationism and protectionism … (and) another ‘ism,’ and that’s nativism.” Predictably a certain wing of the party had a negative reaction.