Reading about Trump’s phone call to governors, it occurred to me that Trump was doing his best to fan the flames of the recent protests. In thinking of past events, it seems to me that this is not the first time he has done so.
So – am I wrong? Does Trump want a race war? If not, what has he done to help assure that such never happens?
If he does want a race war, why? What’s in it for him personally or for the GOP?
Trump, I’m fairly confident in saying, does not want a race war. It’s not like the man has any coherent ideology at all - he’s not a white supremacist himself, he just enables the fuckers. For the most part disruptions to the economy interfere with him making money, which I imagine is his first, last and only true love.
What he probably does want is distractions. His negatives have been rising in the wake of the ongoing pandemic and his polling has been mediocre. Distracting from his other issues by wildly flailing his arms( no more flag-burning! crack down on protestors! )is just bluster designed to make him look more politically virile.
And the notion of cracking down on mostly urban protestors in particular is likely a half-assed attempt to curry favor with educated white suburban voters. It’s a demographic that’s been bleeding away from the Republicans the last couple of years, either in terms of voting against them or just failing to turn out because many of them just plain don’t like Trump. The thought is no doubt that worried, nervous suburbanites who hate disruption in any form may respond positively to tough talk about rioters. And even if they don’t respond it is red meat for his base, which he needs now more than ever. So potential win-win from his POV. Trump is always more bark than bite. And it’s not like any governor not already in his pocket are going to be suddenly bullied into doing his bidding anyway.
I think his thinking is flawed and most likely to backfire, but Trump’s calculus appears to be that by inflaming racial divisions and inciting violence, he can blame all the ensuing chaos on the scary non-whites.
This will supposedly cause those who are uneasy with “the other” to flee in large numbers back to the “safety” of a second Trump term.
That’s all I got.
It’s hateful, fully-deployed racism. I don’t know why anyone expected anything else from Trump.
ETA: Plus it gives him a chance to kill non-whites. I think he likes that idea a lot.
No idea what’s in that crazy mush that passes for a brain but ~60% of the US population is not-hispanic white. If you could divide up the country so they were all on your side and the 40$ minority we’re all on your opponent’s then you would win every election no matter how democratic except for Hawaii, New Mexico, California, Texas, and Nevada. Those 5 states only represent 108 Electoral College votes so each presidential election would be a slaughter. Of course, this requires all white people to side with the white people side but why wouldn’t they?
I seriously doubt Trump actually wants a race war; bad for business after all. He simply seems to be thinking no further than making whatever statements he guesses his base wants to hear. I’m sure even he recognizes that his favorability rating among people of color is something like what, 7%? Sure, go ahead and bash 'em, they’re a writeoff anyway.
What I find most bizarre is the strange political calculus he seems to be employing that he can somehow squeeze a second term out of an ever-narrowing demographic.
Trump is the leader of a white nationalist movement. A race war mobilizes his base, allows for the suppression of rights (especially access to the ballot box) for blacks and fits into his world view.
Starting a race war would require planning and execution. Trump wouldn’t know a plan if it stuck its dick in his ear and fuck-started his brain.
What this is is Trump seizing a way to escape and distract from his most recent fuck show. He’s done it his entire life of going from one spectacular business failure to another. Always leaving someone else holding the bag and claim victory for knowing when to get out while everything behind him burns. This is more of the same. He’s about to fail at another venture (re-election). So set shit on fire, blame others, and stick someone else with the problem.
Because not all of us are as white as we appear to be, and some of us understand that when one of us is not safe none of us are safe. Also, some white people identify as human beings rather than being of a particular tribe based solely on the color of their skin.
Once there is a land of pure, white people then all those white folks in favor of such a thing will turn on each other because they’ll need another scapegoat to blame their problems on. And after they reject that group they’ll need yet another one…
Trump panders to his base every waking moment. He saw the protesters with guns demanding that states be reopened and loved that image. In his brain he sees those same guns being turned on the Floyd protesters, who were conspicuously unarmed. That’s a win-win moment for him.
Remember that he has no sense of tomorrow. He doesn’t care about consequences. He wants what he wants right this moment. And he wants “law and order.” So did Nixon. We know how that turned out.
Trump wants the appearance of out-of-control non-whites, for several reasons mentioned earlier, and:
**He wants a distraction from his bungling of the pandemic response, and
**He wants cover for ongoing efforts by Bill Barr and other anti-democracy operatives in the Trump Administration, who are working to undermine the rule of law, and
**He wants cover for his courting of Putin (inviting Russia back to the G7, getting rid of sanctions, etc.), and
**He wants cover for his grifting, and most of all
**He wants to get his base good and riled up about those Out-of-Control-Blacks (etc), so that he can INVOKE THE INSURRECTION ACT.
Sorry for the all-caps, but this is big. This is very big.
The riled-up base is talking to their Senators, at least two of whom–Tom Cotton and Marsha Blackburn–are urging Trump to have the US military ‘quell the rebellion’ and take up stations in American cities:
More: Trump says he will deploy military if state officials can't contain protest violence
Trump knows he can’t win the November election if it’s free and fair.
It would be so much easier for him if he’s simply a dictator. Why should there be any dissent? If anyone attempts to dissent, the Army can take care of them.
This is what Trump wants. And to get it, he needs a bit more fire and looting footage than he has now.
So, yeah: he’s going to say and do all he can to anger black people. What has he got to lose?
I agree that this is probably his plan. It’s not really aimed at his base; they already plan to vote for him. It’s aimed at swing voters. Trump is thinking that if he can get enough racial violence stirred up, independent white voters will elect him to keep them safe.
But as you noted, even leaving aside the morality it’s not a good plan. Trump’s not Nixon sitting on the sidelines in 1968, talking about what a terrible job Johnson is doing. Trump is the President now when all of these problems are arising. A lot of the voters he wants to appeal to are going to see him as the source of the problem, not the solution.
And Trump can’t sell the idea that he’s the man you want in charge during a national crisis. Not after this year.
Finally, stirring up fears of a race war might work if Trump was running against Obama but not when he’s running against Biden. Joe Biden isn’t a candidate who is going to scare white voters. If Trump makes people scared of racial unrest, they’re likely to look at Biden as somebody who will calm things back down.
Trump is following a Russian playbook and is being used by Putin. One part of the playbook is to use domestic unrest to either cancel, nullify or put election results into doubt. There isn’t just 1 reason.
Trump is very clear that he needs to stay in power else all the lawsuits come home to roost. I don’t think he planned a race war but I think he’s pretty damn happy to take advantage of it and prolong it. He’s going to try to blame the poor economy on this and not his response to COVID-19. And he’s pretty damn racist with his focus on the Central Park 5 so he would love to see people shooting black people; he keeps fantasizing about it so he’d want this anyway.
This is maybe only the first of a series of events. He doesn’t want a race war, per se, but does want to be able to crackdown on ALL his opposition. This is just the first step. Remember, the tactics that they get away with on the minority will, in time, be applied to the majority.
Yes. And Trump got fresh advice from Vlad just today:
“I play it very loose. I don’t carry a briefcase. I try not to schedule too many meetings. I leave my door open…I prefer to come to work each day and just see what develops.” —The Art of the Deal
It should be evident that this is not a good approach to leading one of the most powerful nations in the world, but it is exactly the strategy, such as it is, that his base elected him on. As for wanting to fan the flames of a race war, Trump is a tabula rasa of ideology and while I don’t doubt that he is casually racist (along with pretty much any other prejudice you can conjure up for an ardent Fox News follower) he isn’t dogmatic enough to actually maintain the kind of focus to be a white nationalist. The most focus he has shown for anything has been “Wall” and even that has kind of fallen by the wayside is it proved to be more difficult than just waving his tiny hands and commanding that it be done.
However, many of Trump’s stalwart supporters are avowed white nationalists and/or enthusiasts of authoritarianism, and from them he no doubt hears how there are “many fine people” who will support him from those demographics. Plus, every time he dog-whistles about immigrants, or Confederate statues, or whatever, he gets plenty of free news coverage, and even if much of it is negative it still feeds his ego to be the center of attention. I swear, if the entire media would just turn their cameras away from him for an entire week and spend it reporting on topics that bore Trump like economics, education, technology, public policy, and anything to do with science or art, he’d give up in frustration and resign.
Trump is what happens when an entire nation collectively abrogates its responsibility to select marginally competent leadership. That it also happened during a highly infectious global pandemic, a fragile economy reliant upon underpaid and supported workers, and massive unrest over racial violence is due to a lack of collectively a lack of giving a shit back when it would have been sensible to address these issues. So, now we have this. It’s comforting in a certain way to imagine this is at least the result of some kind of plan, even if it is an evil one, but really, this is just what you get when you neglect your sourdough starter too long.
Stranger
I agree with the idea that seizing onto a distraction from the pandemic is his only plan. He doesn’t seem to understand that setting your house on fire does kind of distract from the car you crashed into the garage, but not in a way that will get you any less in trouble.
The other side has better music.
Thank you, Broomstick.
Yes, this is the thing that people who think they can make themselves safe by walling out the Others are missing. Those who get and keep power by making people afraid of each other must always have an out-group to serve the purpose. And any difference will do; if everybody’s white and Christian the Christians will schism and can be set to killing each other. The closest it’s possible to get to safety is to have as many Others on your side as possible – which means needing to be on their sides, of course.
Yup, this too; or rather, this is part of the same thing.
– Having said all that: I suspect there’s no strategy at all. (On Trump’s part, anyway; others in his administration may be a different matter.) I suspect that Trump has just gone all of his life under the impression that if he shouts loud enough people will do what he wants; and is unlikely to get it through his head at this point that this doesn’t work on everybody, and on some it actively backfires.
This is the answer.
President: “I don’t like all these protesters. Makes me look bad. We have a military, can we use them?”
Advisors: “Uh, yeah, but you have to invoke the Insurrection Act and…”
President: “Yeah, do that!”
That’s probably as much thinking as went into it.
Because a lot of us reject white nationalism and fascism. Even Trump who did historically well with the white vote only got 57% of it. Clinton got 37% and the other 6% were third party or wouldn’t say.
You also have to take into account white nationalist fascists don’t just hate non-whites. They also hate whites who are leftists, jews, labor union members, atheists, muslims, gay, democrats, feminists, etc. A lot of white people know that they would end up a victim if the US ever went fascist. The % of Americans who neo-fascist white nationalists consider ‘true’ Americans is probably 5-10% at most. The KKK didn’t just treat blacks and other non-white groups like garbage. They targeted tons of white people too who they didn’t like (mostly in the groups I just listed, plus catholics but I don’t think modern white nationalists hate catholics as much as a century ago).
Not just that, but even a lot of people would wouldn’t be targeted reject fascism and white nationalism on moral grounds.