Who ever thought that racism would be a Presidential campaign strategy?

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  • Norman Bernstein
    Liberaltarian
    • Nov 2004
    • 25217

    Who ever thought that racism would be a Presidential campaign strategy?

    The last line in this opinion piece, I think, says it best.

    It’s hard to attribute President Trump’s racist tweets over the weekend to some deep strategy to improve his re-election prospects, but let’s face it: It’s working exactly as he intended.

    As Charlie Sykes has noted, trom birtherism to Mexican rapists to mistreating migrants at the border to the “fine people” in Charlottesville, it’s worked for him.

    That’s why Trump allies expect this ugliness to get worse as the presidential campaign heats up, not better.

    In this case, Trump is exploiting recent divisions with the Democratic party, mainly between Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the four progressive House Democratic women who refer to themselves as “the Squad.”

    Trump has seen the polling that the most visible one of these liberal Democrats — Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) — is becoming the face for the party with a crucial group of swing voters. And he’s baiting Democrats into rallying around her and her allies.

    Trump knows exactly how Democrats will react: with justified outrage. But it also helps him tie all Democrats — especially those running for president — to the most liberal side of their party. At the same time it also allows him to speak to his racist base in a way no president has dared to do in modern times.

    Meanwhile, the news media plays a familiar game of refusing to call out Trump’s racismand instead relying on “critics” of the president. The effect is to not frame Trump’s racist rhetoric as wrong; it’s simply portrayed as more partisanship.

    Of course, none of this works if Republicans had joined Democrats in denouncing Trump’s racist rant. Their complete silence proves that Trump is in total control of the Republican party. There was no dissent at all — even for language that would have been considered unacceptable and even un-American just a few years ago.

    As we look at the campaign ahead, it’s obvious that Trump no longer needs to rely on dog whistles. He can use a bullhorn.
    "Reason and facts are sacrificed to opinion and myth. Demonstrable falsehoods are circulated and recycled as fact. Narrow minded opinion refuses to be subjected to thought and analysis. Too many now subject events to a prefabricated set of interpretations, usually provided by a biased media source. The myth is more comfortable than the often difficult search for truth."






  • birlinn
    Isle of Mull, Scotland
    • Jul 2011
    • 10883

    #2
    Re: Who ever thought that racism would be a Presidential campaign strategy?

    A certain Austrian house painter?

    Comment

    • Domesticated_Mr. Know It All
      treetop flyer
      • Sep 2003
      • 23853

      #3
      Re: Who ever thought that racism would be a Presidential campaign strategy?

      Not me.
      I still don't.
      Not if they expect to win.
      Last edited by Domesticated_Mr. Know It All; 07-15-2019, 12:14 PM.
      Keep calm, persistence beats resistance.

      Comment

      • David G
        Senior Member
        • Dec 2003
        • 89688

        #4
        Re: Who ever thought that racism would be a Presidential campaign strategy?

        An assumption that spoke volumes. And today... he doubles down --

        While other presidents have found ways to appeal to the resentments of white Americans with subtle and not-so-subtle appeals, none of them in modern times have done so as overtly as this one.



        When it comes to race, Mr. Trump plays with fire like no other president in a century. While others who occupied the White House at times skirted close to or even over the line, finding ways to appeal to the resentments of white Americans with subtle and not-so-subtle appeals, none of them in modern times fanned the flames as overtly, relentlessly and even eagerly as Mr. Trump.

        His attack on the Democratic congresswomen came on the same day his administration was threatening mass roundups of immigrants living in the country illegally. And it came just days after he hosted some of the most incendiary right-wing voices on the internet at the White House and vowed to find another way to count citizens separately from noncitizens despite a Supreme Court ruling that blocked him from adding a question to the once-a-decade census.
        David G
        Harbor Woodworks
        https://www.facebook.com/HarborWoodworks/

        "It was a Sunday morning and Goddard gave thanks that there were still places where one could worship in temples not made by human hands." -- L. F. Herreshoff (The Compleat Cruiser)

        Comment

        • AlanMc
          Senior Member
          • Jul 2017
          • 7635

          #5
          Re: Who ever thought that racism would be a Presidential campaign strategy?

          pfffffffffft

          Comment

          • ron ll
            Seattle WA USA (Ballard)
            • Oct 2005
            • 24274

            #6
            Re: Who ever thought that racism would be a Presidential campaign strategy?

            Originally posted by AlanMc
            pfffffffffft
            You've long identified yourself and your values here, no need to keep reinforcing it.

            Comment

            • Paul Pless
              pinko commie tree hugger
              • Oct 2003
              • 124805

              #7
              Re: Who ever thought that racism would be a Presidential campaign strategy?

              Originally posted by Norman Bernstein
              Who ever thought that racism would be a Presidential campaign strategy?
              david g?
              Simpler is better, except when complicated looks really cool.

              Comment

              • AlanMc
                Senior Member
                • Jul 2017
                • 7635

                #8
                Re: Who ever thought that racism would be a Presidential campaign strategy?

                Originally posted by ron ll
                You've long identified yourself and your values here, no need to keep reinforcing it.

                yeah, my values are racism...

                PFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFT

                Comment

                • Tom Montgomery
                  Lurking since 1997
                  • Sep 1999
                  • 35611

                  #9
                  Re: Who ever thought that racism would be a Presidential campaign strategy?

                  .
                  From today's Washington Post:

                  By Amber Phillips

                  By now, it’s not a surprise that congressional Republicans are largely silent as President Trump attacks four American congresswomen in language that, outside the GOP, has been widely condemned as racist.

                  They’ve learned over the years that they have nothing to gain by speaking out against Trump, and plenty to lose — like their jobs.

                  Let’s go back to one of the first high-profile times that Trump used, in Republicans’ own words, racist language. Trump was the Republican nominee for president and was accusing a judge overseeing a lawsuit about Trump University of being biased because of the judge’s Hispanic heritage. At the time, House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) called it “the textbook definition of a racist comment."

                  What happened to Ryan? Trump won the election, Republicans embraced him, and Ryan retired after two years rather than keep trying to play nice with Trump.

                  The next time Trump used language about race that shocked the nation was a year later, during deadly protests led by white supremacists in Charlottesville. A neo-Nazi supporter was recently convicted of murder for ramming a car into a group of peaceful protesters. Yet at the time of the attack, Trump said, “I think there is blame on both sides.”

                  Ryan said language like that was wrong but maintained he wasn’t going to do anything about it.

                  Former senator Bob Corker of Tennessee tried to. Once on a shortlist for a Trump Cabinet post, Corker decided to use his leverage as a known Trump ally to say this: “The president has not yet been able to demonstrate the stability nor some of the competence that he needs to demonstrate in order to be successful."

                  Corker saw his popularity in Tennessee plummet. He is now retired.

                  Fast-forward to the 2018 midterm elections. It’s primary season, and some of the House’s most conservative Republicans are in danger of not even winning their primaries. Why? In the case of Rep. Martha Roby of Alabama, voters there remembered how she said she wouldn’t vote for Trump because of the way he bragged about sexually assaulting women in an “Access Hollywood” tape released in the final weeks of the presidential campaign.



                  Rep. Martha Roby

                  @RepMarthaRoby
                  Donald Trump's behavior makes him unacceptable as a candidate for president, and I won't vote for him.



                  She eventually won her primary. But another outspoken Republican critic of Trump wasn’t so lucky. Trump tweeted the day of South Carolina’s primary for Republican voters to knock out sitting congressman Mark Sanford. And they did.

                  “We’re playing with real fire in a reason-based republic,” Sanford told me shortly after losing his primary.

                  Mia Love, the lone black Republican in the House, lost her reelection in Utah in November after she criticized Trump for calling Haiti, where her family is from, one of several “a$$hole countries.”

                  “Mia Love gave me no love, and she lost,” Trump said.

                  Seeing a theme here? Republicans who have spoken out forcefully and memorably about Trump are no longer Republican officeholders. It is overly simplistic to say these Republicans retired because of their battles with Trump — though in Ryan’s case, a new book suggests that might be true. But all of them saw the writing on the wall: I can either speak out about Trump, or keep my job. In this Republican Party, you can’t do both.

                  One Republican member of Congress is kind of testing that theory. On Sunday, Rep. Chip Roy of Texas became the lone Republican lawmaker to condemn Trump’s remarks, tweeting that Trump "was wrong to say any American citizen, whether in Congress or not, has any ‘home’ besides the U.S.” Though in that same tweet he made sure to qualify how supportive he is of Trump’s immigration policies.

                  Self-preservation is the default mode of any politician. Most of the congressional survivors of Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party went into that mode when Trump attacked a federal judge, and again when he didn’t forcefully stand up for peaceful people protesting white supremacy. So when Trump attacks Democratic lawmakers, who are regular boogeymen on Fox News anyway, there’s no political incentive for Republicans to say anything about it.

                  That’s the way Trump has engineered the Republican Party, to be able to get away with whatever he wants to say. And it’s working.

                  https://www.washingtonpost.com/polit...=.de55c4288b38
                  21st century Republicans are both morally and ethically bankrupt. They are divided between those who enthusiastically applaud Trump's racism and those who, as Ms. Phillips points out, servilely enable it by declining to oppose it. We see plenty of the second kind here in the WBF Bilge. The 21st century GOP is a sick man.
                  Last edited by Tom Montgomery; 07-15-2019, 11:00 AM.
                  "They have a lot of stupid people that vote in their primaries. They really do. I'm not really supposed to say that but it's an obvious fact. But when stupid people vote, you know who they nominate? Other stupid people." -- James Carville on the plethora of low-quality GQP candidates in the mid-term election.

                  Comment

                  • Hugh Conway
                    Banned
                    • Jan 2012
                    • 9162

                    #10
                    Re: Who ever thought that racism would be a Presidential campaign strategy?

                    Lee Atwater.

                    Comment

                    • David G
                      Senior Member
                      • Dec 2003
                      • 89688

                      #11
                      Re: Who ever thought that racism would be a Presidential campaign strategy?

                      Originally posted by Paul Pless
                      david g?
                      Indeed, I did.
                      David G
                      Harbor Woodworks
                      https://www.facebook.com/HarborWoodworks/

                      "It was a Sunday morning and Goddard gave thanks that there were still places where one could worship in temples not made by human hands." -- L. F. Herreshoff (The Compleat Cruiser)

                      Comment

                      • Durnik
                        Out 'n About
                        • Feb 2011
                        • 11534

                        #12
                        Re: Who ever thought that racism would be a Presidential campaign strategy?

                        Ronald Reagan.

                        Carl Rove.

                        more.

                        Who ever thought most Americans were clueless..

                        Comment

                        • LeeG
                          Senior Member
                          • May 2002
                          • 72781

                          #13
                          Re: Who ever thought that racism would be a Presidential campaign strategy?

                          Originally posted by AlanMc
                          yeah, my values are racism...

                          PFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFT
                          No, you value being a troll.

                          Comment

                          • AlanMc
                            Senior Member
                            • Jul 2017
                            • 7635

                            #14
                            Re: Who ever thought that racism would be a Presidential campaign strategy?

                            Originally posted by LeeG
                            No, you value being a troll.

                            i just like to sport the hair

                            Comment

                            • Tom Montgomery
                              Lurking since 1997
                              • Sep 1999
                              • 35611

                              #15
                              Re: Who ever thought that racism would be a Presidential campaign strategy?

                              .
                              Is AlanMc thirteen years-old? Asking for a friend.
                              "They have a lot of stupid people that vote in their primaries. They really do. I'm not really supposed to say that but it's an obvious fact. But when stupid people vote, you know who they nominate? Other stupid people." -- James Carville on the plethora of low-quality GQP candidates in the mid-term election.

                              Comment

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