Oh! I can answer that. Because we’re married to a person of color? Because we have mixed race or adopted children of color? Because we have a brain and ethical/moral bone in our body? Just spitballing.
I’m just outside Boston, in the first ring of sorta-suburbs, about 5 miles from downtown. It’s racially diverse, but the white folks are wealthy. They (we) have been buying into these convenient neighborhoods and gentrifying them. Houses that used to be run down and sell for $200k now get fixed up and sell for $1 million.
It’s liberal here, and the protesters are widely supported. Boston has been fairly calm.
Nonetheless, I suspect that if one could sufficiently scare these residents that their million dollar homes are at risk one would be surprised at how many of these liberal whites would start to rethink their support of the protesters. I hope I’m wrong. I’m not saying you’d turn Boston red, but if you can move Boston a little then you could move other suburbs a lot more. Remember, just getting people to stay home can make a big difference.
So, to that end, making the “scary people” more agitated might actually work in Trump’s favor.
It wouldn’t be a “race war,” because so many whites (especially young, educated whites) — and Hispanics, too — agree with most blacks about ongoing and deadly discrimination, and a good many of them are joining in the protest marches.
Good 538 article on these trends.
(These facts directly contradict Oredigger’s assertion, even beyond its sad, amoral, sociopathic logic).
Oh, seriously? I made it quite clear that I was trying to answer the question as posed by the OP - Why would Trump want a race war? Yes, as I put it in my last sentence, the problem with the best idea I can come up with is that all white people aren’t a monolithic block.
Although it’s far from certain in this specific case, war, or chaos more generally, tends to help incumbents politically, if Trump even thinks that far. But there are other reasons chaos and killings might appeal to Trump’s reptilian brain. I think these Dopers have it about right:
… with one exception (that I’ve underlined). Operators like Trump are NOT dependent on a good economy. Quite to the contrary, they make fortunes buying real estate on the cheap when there’s blood on the streets.
And Trump’s big-spending friends like Charles Koch or Sheldon Adelson don’t really care if the economy, including their share, crumbles. With a reasonably frugal life style — I don’t think Charles Koch even owns a super-yacht — a man accustomed to $50 billion can live comfortably with $30 billion. At that level it’s about power, not wealth — the ability to snap one’s fingers and destroy the life of someone who shows disrespect.
Fair enough. I wasn’t attacking you, just the sad logic behind your assertion. I guess “assertion” was the wrong word: perhaps you’re as sad as I am that your — observations? speculations? — may be partly accurate. I hope you are as relieved, then, as I am to see, from the 538 evidence I cited, that their accuracy apparently doesn’t extend very far (though still distressingly far into a large bloc of Republican voters).
Trump wants to get re-elected. End of discussion. If a race war helps in that, then its awesome. Otherwise, he couldn’t care less.
If Trump was told that he would win re-election if he nuked every city whose name started with a B, then half an hour later, Belfast, Berlin, Belo, Brussels, Brasilla et al would be flattened, smoldering ruins.
President Bonespurs wants to sound tough for a variety of reasons but I don’t think a race war is one of them. It pleases his base. It distracts from his innumerable failures and lies. He likes the idea of being a king even if he can’t actually be one and issuing king-like orders and threats is the next best thing. He is a big pussy and he knows it. Sounding like a he-man helps him sleep when he isn’t Tweeting. November can’t get here soon enough.
I think people who are ending their arguments with “…and that’ll help Trump get re-elected” are putting too much thought into it. Trump is trying to create chaos because he likes chaos. That’s the end of the causal chain, as far as he’s concerned. He’s not thinking about the effects of the chaos, because extended planning like that is not the sort of thing that comes naturally to the sort of person who likes chaos for its own sake.
This is as good a place to post this as any.
This a.m. my wife was talking to her asshole dad - unapologetic racist and the biggest Trump supporter we know. Tho they did not get into politics deeply, he said that he had been listening to Biden and some of what he said made sense.
Hard to overstate how unexpected something like that was coming from this jerk. Wonder if other “true believers” are questioning their messiah. Of course, my wife declined to observe that Uncle Joe is a doddering old, out of touch fuddy duddy…
Not particularly relieved since I’d be shocked if it was another way. In fact, I skipped the article on 538 since I didn’t expect anything interesting.
It wasn’t just you I got quoted by several people and I wanted to be clear I wasn’t advancing those ideas.
I’ve been thinking about this kind of thing intently for several days now, trying to see the logic of it: “his base, his base, his base…”
It’s reasonable to presume that, as far as support goes, “his base” is/are “in the bag”. I mean, he’s pretty much depleted the rock of all the ore there is to be mined, so to speak. Does he feel that there are still yet those who are not ( yet ) supporters, and that he needs to be more and more over-the-top in his rhetoric so as to bring in some more? Do members of “his base” have conversations among themselves along the lines of “Hey, our guy hasn’t uttered a bombastic remark for a few days now. What is he…going soft? Beginning to waver? I don’t think I’m behind him any more!”
Or is it just a simple matter of the desire to bask in admiration?
I don’t think he wants an outright race war, and I’m not even sure he has the capacity to strategize for long. But he knows that his most intense base of support includes racists. He has a desire to be praised and loved.
Trump’s strategists don’t want a race war. What they want is to polarize the country along multiple axes, not just race. If you polarize the country along strictly racial lines, he loses. He wants to polarize along racial lines, religious lines, socioeconomic lines. His strategists want to split people into different factions so that his small coalition can win.
A race war or real racial conflict would be too obvious and it would potentially drive down at least some of his base that wants to believe they’re not really racist.
Well put.
BrickBat, that’s a good point. The last thing Trump needs to do (by any standard of electoral or strategic logic) is pander to his base — to remind them who he is and what he stands for.
As others have said, he just can’t help himself. Almost inadvertently, he managed to thread the needle this way in 2016. Unlikely to happen again (in that way, at least)…but almost anything’s possible.
Yup. And not just for its own sake: he likes chaos because he thinks that chaos is his best bet for disguising his chronic incompetence, ignorance and malfeasance.
In a governance system where he needed to follow specific rules and fulfill specific duties and incorporate specific knowledge into his decisions, he’d be shown up for a clueless dodo every second of every day. If he can just whirlwind around shouting about whatever pops into his head and doing whatever attention-grabbing shit he can think of, that creates a temporary illusion that he’s in charge and knows what he’s doing, or at least he thinks that it does.
Mind you, I’m not suggesting that he thinks any of this out rationally. In his awareness, it’s just that details and rules and knowledge, all the stuff that immediately reveals his unfitness to handle the job, seem tedious and boring, so he gravitates to all the shouty flappy stuff that he finds more enjoyable.
So well said, Kimstu.
Now, I have R.E.M. singing “Shouty Flappy People” In my head…
Don’t just look at Trump the man; look at what he represents. Look at what people who work with him and who support him represent.
Don’t let his buffoonery and comical ignorance for a moment lead you to believe that his administration isn’t capable of systematically destroying what’s left of American democracy. We’ve been underestimating these guys for way, way too long.
For authoritarianism, it’s first and goal inside the five yard line.
He doesn’t care one way or the other regarding a race war or any other kind of war, except to the extent he can use it to benefit himself. He definitely knows which side he wants to be on if there is one—If it’s in his benefit to provoke one, he’ll do it.
He’s Petyr Baelish, happy to send us into chaos in order to climb to the top.
It could be as simple as that. Let’s face it; Trump needs to hear people praising him. And he’s not getting a lot of that right now. So maybe he’s just throwing red meat to the last group of his supporters that are willing to cheer him on.