Trump and Racial Issues

[lpetrich]

Allegations of racism have marked Trump’s presidency and become key issue as election nears - The Washington Post - long, very interesting piece

In unguarded moments with senior aides, President Trump has maintained that Black Americans have mainly themselves to blame in their struggle for equality, hindered more by lack of initiative than societal impediments, according to current and former U.S. officials.

After phone calls with Jewish lawmakers, Trump has muttered that Jews “are only in it for themselves” and “stick together” in an ethnic allegiance that exceeds other loyalties, officials said.

Trump’s private musings about Hispanics match the vitriol he has displayed in public, and his antipathy to Africa is so ingrained that when first lady Melania Trump planned a 2018 trip to that continent he railed that he “could never understand why she would want to go there.”

When challenged, he says things like "No one loves Black people more than me".

About some of his initiatives, like calling himself a champion of the "Suburban Lifestyle Dream" and objecting that school students are "fed lies about America being a wicked nation plagued by racism", "The America envisioned by these policies and pronouncements is one dedicated to preserving a racial hierarchy that can be seen in Trump’s own Cabinet and White House, both overwhelmingly white and among the least diverse in recent U.S. history.​"

 

[lpetrich]

Scholars describe Trump’s record on race in historically harsh terms. Carol Anderson, a professor of African American Studies at Emory University, compared Trump to Andrew Johnson, who succeeded Abraham Lincoln as president and helped Southern Whites reestablish much of the racial hegemony they had seemingly lost in the Civil War.

“Johnson made it clear that he was really the president of a few people, not the American people,” Anderson said. “And Trump has done the same.”

A former official compared Trump to President Woodrow Wilson, saying that he was "outwardly a white supremacist".

Though White House officials brag about how much the Trump Admin has done for black people, "Black unemployment has surged disproportionately during the coronavirus pandemic, and officials said Trump regretted reducing prison sentences when it didn’t produce a spike in Black voter support."

So he only cared about how much support he got, rather than whether or not it was the right thing to do. Something like his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.

And there are indications that even Trump’s allies are worried about his record on race. The Republican Party devoted much of its convention in August to persuading voters that Trump is not a racist, with far more Black speakers at the four-day event than have held top White House positions over the past four years. ​

 

[lpetrich]

Cohen accuses Trump of routinely disparaging people of color, including former president Barack Obama. “Tell me one country run by a Black person that isn’t a s---hole,” Trump said, according to Cohen.

...
In recent months, Trump has condemned Black Lives Matter as a “symbol of hate” while defending armed White militants who entered the Michigan Capitol, right-wing activists who waved weapons from pickup trucks in Portland and a White teen who shot and killed two protesters in Wisconsin.

Trump has vowed to safeguard the legacies of Confederate generals while skipping the funeral of the late congressman John Lewis (D-Ga.), a civil rights icon, and retweeted — then deleted — video of a supporter shouting “White power” while questioning the electoral eligibility of Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.), the nation’s first Black and Asian American candidate for vice president from a major party.

Like his birtherism about Barack Obama.

These add to an already voluminous record of incendiary statements, including his tweet that minority congresswomen should “go back” to their “crime infested” countries despite being U.S.-born or U.S. citizens, and his claim that there were “very fine people on both sides” after torch-carrying white nationalists staged a violent protest in Charlottesville.

At Stormfront, a big neo-Nazi site,

“If Trump doesn’t win this election, the police will be abolished and Blacks will come to your house and kill you and your family,” the site warned. “This isn’t about politics anymore, it is about basic survival.”

Trump himself has warned that Biden wants to shut down the police.

 

[lpetrich]

“I don’t think Donald Trump is in any way a white supremacist, a neo-Nazi or anything of the sort,” a third former senior administration official said. “But I think he has a general awareness that one component of his base includes factions that trend in that direction.”

Studies of the 2016 election have shown that racial resentment was a far bigger factor in propelling Trump to victory than economic grievance.

So he wants to get the white racist vote.

"Several officials said that Trump is not a disciplined enough thinker to grasp the full dimensions of the white nationalist agenda, let alone embrace it."

I agree that he is not a very disciplined thinker -- he is neither much of a thinker nor very disciplined.

“This is a guy who abuses people in his cabinet, abuses four-star generals, abuses people who gave their life for this country, abuses civil servants,” the first former senior White House official said. “It’s not like he doesn’t abuse people that are White as well.”

Nearly all said that Trump places far greater value on others’ wealth, fame or loyalty to him than he does on race or ethnicity.

Many officials offered versions of "some of my best friends are black". He has certainly worked with black people, like Ben Carson and Omarosa Manigault-Newman. But working with them does not seem to have made much impact on him.

 

[lpetrich]

About 4,700 inmates have been released or had their sentences reduced under the First Step Act, an attempt to reverse the lopsided legacy of the drug wars of the 1980s and 1990s, which disproportionately targeted African Americans. But this policy was championed primarily by Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, and former officials said that Trump only agreed to support the measure when told it might boost his low poll numbers with Black voters.

Months later, when that failed to materialize, Trump “went s---house crazy,” one former official said, yelling at aides, “Why the hell did I do that?”

Manigault Newman was similarly excoriated when her efforts to boost funding for historically Black colleges failed to deliver better polling numbers for the president, officials said. “You’ve been at this for four months, Omarosa,” Trump said, according to one adviser, “but the numbers haven’t budged.”

So he cared only about his poll numbers, not about whether doing something was the right thing to do.

Under Trump, the Justice Department has cut funding in its Civil Rights Division, scaled back prosecutions of hate crimes, all but abandoned efforts to combat systemic discrimination by police departments and backed state measures that deprived minorities of the right to vote.

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The Justice Department’s shift when faced with allegations of systemic racism by police departments has been even more stark.

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The authority was put to repeated use by three consecutive presidents: 25 times under Bill Clinton, 21 under George W. Bush and 25 under Obama. Under Trump, there has been only one.

 

[lpetrich]

Consider who likes Trump.

Days after the 2016 election, David Duke, a longtime leader of the Ku Klux Klan, tweeted that Trump’s win was “great for our people.” Richard Spencer, another prominent white nationalist figure, was captured on video leading a “Hail Trump” salute at an alt-right conference in Washington.

People with far-right views or white nationalist sympathies gravitated to the administration.

Then about that Charlottesville rally.

On Aug. 11, 2017, hundreds of white supremacists, neo-fascists and Confederate sympathizers descended on the city. Purportedly there to protest the planned removal of a Robert E. Lee statue, they carried torches and chanted slogans including “blood and soil” and “you will not replace us” laden with Klan and Nazi symbolism.

...
Gary Cohn, the White House economic adviser at the time, threatened to resign and argued that there were no “good people” among the ranks of those wearing swastikas and chanting “Jews will not replace us.” In a heated exchange, Cohn criticized Trump for his “many sides” comment, and was flummoxed when Trump denied that was what he had said.

“Not only did you say it, you continued to double down on it,” Cohn shot back, according to officials familiar with the exchange. “And if you want, I’ll get the transcripts.”

This is fun. "Some white nationalist leaders have begun to express disenchantment with Trump because he has failed to deliver on campaign promises they hoped would bring immigration to a standstill or perhaps even ignite a race war."