Donald Trump is continuing to dig way down into his nasty bucket of racism and hate, grab the mess in his hands, and then smear it all over himself. And the 2024 election remains an effective tie. It appears there is little if anything that Trump can do to lose support. Trump’s MAGA followers and tens of millions of other Americans are enthralled by his disgusting behavior. The Harris campaign and its surrogates are learning that calling Trump and his MAGA agents and other followers names such as “weird” will not stop them. They welcome the contempt; it empowers them.
In a new essay at The Atlantic, Tom Nichols gets to the heart of the strategy:
And this, in brief, is the problem for Kamala Harris in this election. She and others have likely hoped that, at some point, Trump will reveal himself as such an obvious, existential threat that even many Republican voters will walk away from him. (She delivered a short statement today emphasizing Kelly’s comments.) For millions of the GOP faithful, however, Trump’s daily attempts to breach new frontiers of hideousness are not offensive but reassuring. They want Trump to be awful — precisely because the people they view as their political foes will be so appalled if he wins. If Trump’s campaign was focused on handing out tax breaks and lowering gas prices, he’d be losing, because for his base, none of that yawn-inducing policy stuff is transgressive enough to be exciting. (Just ask Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis, who each in their own way tried to run as a Trump alternative.)
Some Trump voters may believe his lies. But plenty more want Trump to be terrifying and stomach-turning so that reelecting him will be a fully realized act of social revenge. Harris cannot propose any policy, offer any benefit, or adopt any position that competes with that feeling.
At a series of rallies on Tuesday, Trump told his followers that Kamala Harris is “lazy,” has a “low IQ” and appears to be on drugs or abusing some other substance(s). These are all lies. Harris is the vice president of the United States. She is also the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee. She is a former district attorney and attorney general. There is no reasonable way to conclude that Kamala Harris is a lazy person. By comparison, Donald Trump has been shown falling asleep at campaign events. Trump also appears to be manifesting symptoms that suggest that he is experiencing a crisis with his thinking, emotion and speech. Trump’s spokespeople have cut short his interviews while they were in progress and have canceled other engagements because the felon corrupt ex-president is “exhausted.”
To suggest that a Black person is lazy is a very old white racist stereotype that has its origins in white on Black chattel slavery and the American apartheid system that deemed Black people as incapable of full citizenship, “natural” slaves, childlike and members of a subordinate and inferior group that was unfit for freedom. As historians and other experts have repeatedly demonstrated, the white racist lie that Black people constitute a naturally lazy “race” is evidence of the absurdity of the race system and white supremacy given that Black human property were literally worked to death by their white owners.
Trump’s slur against Harris is part of a much larger pattern of racism, white supremacy and misogyny (specifically misogynoir) against Harris (and against Black and brown people more broadly).
Trump has attacked Harris’ fitness for office by saying that she is “retarded,” mentally ill and cognitively impaired and “stupid.” In reality, Harris is highly intelligent and mentally and emotionally healthy. After Harris was a guest on "The View," Trump attacked the hosts, calling them “degenerates” and “dumb women.”
Trump hates anyone who disagrees with him otherwise dares to challenge him. Trump, a man who a court of law has deemed guilty of sexual assault, has an especially deep contempt and hostility towards Black and brown women who dare to do such a thing.
Trump has attacked the Black prosecutors, Judge Chutkan and other members of law enforcement who are attempting to hold him responsible for his public crime spree as stupid, lazy, incompetent and thugs who “hate” white people.
Trump’s own nephew alleges that he uses racial slurs against Black people in private. Other Trump insiders have reported that he uses misogynistic language when talking about Harris, calling her a “bitch.”
Trump and his surrogates such as JD Vance are continuing to tell the racist lie that the Black Haitian community in Springfield, Ohio, are “invaders” who are stealing and eating white people’s cats and dogs.
Donald Trump has contempt for America’s military service people. This contempt is also filtered through his racism and misogyny. The Atlantic is reporting that Donald Trump offered to pay for the funeral of a soldier, Vanessa Guillén, who was murdered by a fellow soldier at Fort Hood in Texas. When Trump received the bill, he reportedly said, “It doesn’t cost 60,000 bucks to bury a f***ing Mexican!. … Don’t pay it!” In the end, Trump did not pay for the funeral expenses.
Donald Trump and his surrogates' and propagandists' racist, white supremacist, sexist, misogynistic and other vile attacks on Kamala Harris — and by implication her voters and other supporters — are not “dog whistles,” “coded,” racially “inflammatory,” “provocative,” “polarizing,” "extreme," or “controversial” as many in the white-dominated mainstream news media, in its collective moral cowardice and desperate attempts to normalize Trump and Trumpism have suggested. These are air raid sirens, screams and howls.
His history of racism includes his refusal to rent apartments to nonwhites, his birtherism against Barack Obama, private meetings with antisemites and avowed white supremacists, creation of a concentration camp system for nonwhite migrants as part of his regime’s family separation policy, suggestion that the Nazis, white supremacists and assorted racist thugs who rampaged in Charlottesville in 2017 are “very fine people” and racially disparate impact of his public policies on Black and brown communities. Trump reportedly admires Adolf Hitler, is obsessed with eugenics and breeding human beings like they are horses, and is threatening to purify the blood of the nation by purging it of “the enemy within” i.e. “racial undesirables” and the so-called Left.
At a rally on Thursday in Tempe, Arizona, Trump used eliminationist and genocidal language, describing the United States as the "garbage can of the world" where non-white immigrants are the waste:
"People coming out of the Congo. Not just South America. They're coming from 181 countries as of yesterday....We're a dumping ground. We're like a garbage can for the world. That's what's happened. That what's happened to — we're like a garbage can."
At his Madison Square Garden rally on Sunday, which in many ways was just an update of the infamous 1939 rally held there by the American Bund in support of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, Trump and the other speakers continued their racist and sexist attacks on Kamala Harris. They said she was stupid and basically a "DEI" or "affirmative action" or "quota" hire, "the enemy within" to be vanquished. One of the speakers at Trump's MSG MAGA American Bund rally was so bold as to slander Harris' reputation and dignity by basically saying that she is a prostitute. Another speaker at Trump's MSG hate rally accused Harris of being the "antiChrist".
Spewing out a tsunami of racist and sexist lies, stereotypes and other invectives, Tucker Carlson, who is white, attacked Kamala Harris' agency and personhood, telling the tens of thousands of MAGA supporters at the MSG rally that "It’s going to be pretty hard to look at us and say ‘You know what? Kamala Harris, she got 85 million votes because she’s so impressive as the first Samoan-Malaysian, low-I.Q., former California prosecutor ever to be elected president. It was just a groundswell of popular support and anyone who thinks otherwise is just a freak or a criminal...No, she’s not impressive."
There are many other examples of Trump’s racism, antisemitism and white supremacy. Donald Trump has conclusively proven that he is a racist and a white supremacist. Such a conclusion is not an extraordinary one that requires extraordinary evidence; it is self-evident and obvious to any thinking and reasonable human being.
In the 12 days until Election Day, Donald Trump is only going to wallow and roll around even more in his ugly bucket and latrine of racism, white supremacy, misogyny and other hatreds. His MAGA followers and other voters and supporters will be worked up into a froth as their Great Leader and aspiring dictator breaks every norm of civility and human decency he can in order to take power. Trump has few if any limits on his behavior. I would not be surprised and am actually preparing for the moment when Donald Trump publicly uses the ugliest word in the English language, one that is six letters and begins with an “n” and ends with an “r,” as he rages at Kamala Harris. And even if Trump does not directly say such a foul word, he will dance around and with it, play with it, winking at his MAGA people the whole time as they laugh and nod along with him.
Donald Trump is one of the most accomplished and prominent racists and white supremacists in modern American history. Trump is truly the country’s first White president – and it appears increasingly likely that he will be back in the White House in January 2025.
