Trump's Re-election Message Is White Grievance

[Zorro]

Republicans in D.C. just pretend not to see it.

A lot of Republicans are acting puzzled about Donald Trump’s re-election pitch. “He has no message,” one Republican source told Reuters. “He needs to articulate why he wants a second term,” said another. Some have expressed hope that Trump would find a way to become less polarizing, as if polarization were not the raison d’être of his presidency.

It’s hard to know if Republicans like this are truly naïve or if they’re just pretending so they don’t have to admit what a foul enterprise they’re part of. Because Trump does indeed have a re-election message, a stark and obvious one. It is “white power.”

The president started this week by tweeting out a video that encapsulates the soul of his movement. In it, a man in The Villages, an affluent Florida retirement community, shouts, “White power!” at protesters from a golf cart bedecked with Trump signs. “Thank you to the great people of The Villages,” wrote Trump. Only after several hours and a panic among White House staffers did the president delete the tweet.

His spokesman claimed he hadn’t heard his supporter’s extremely clear words. Trump, naturally, never disavowed them.

And why would he? Republicans might act as if they don’t know why Trump’s fans are so unfailingly loyal. Some commentators spent the first year or two of his presidency dancing around the reason he was elected, spending so much time probing the “economic anxiety” of his base that the phrase came to stand for a type of willful political blindness.

But Trump understands that he became a significant political figure by spreading the racist lie that Barack Obama was really born in Kenya. He launched his history-making presidential bid with a speech calling Mexican immigrants rapists and adopted a slogan, “America First,” previously associated with the raging anti-Semite Charles Lindbergh. Throughout the 2016 campaign, he won the invaluable prize of earned media with escalating racist provocations, which his supporters relished and which captivated cable news.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/02/opinion/trump-racism-2020-election.html

[cayugafalls]

1. Trump's message is clear. Vote for the Nazi White Supremacist.

[KPN]

2. He didn't have a frigging message in 2016 either assholes. So why does it puzzle you only now?!

[bearsfootball516]

3. Amist all of the racism and bigotry in 2016, he did have a message.

It was that Washington DC is a swamp of lifelong politicians that don't care about you and don't relate to you, and if you want real change, you need to elect me, a guy who is a complete political outsider.

It worked for him back then because he didn't have any kind of record to attack him on. But with three and a half years as President and hundreds of failed policies, he can't run on that anymore, and he's struggling to find ANY kind of message.