Donald Trump’s Southern comforts
I’m a Democratic Mississippian who happens to live and work in New York. As if that’s not confusing enough, back in the spring, I suffered a freak accident. A fall wiped out my memory of most everything that happened between April and June. I completely forgot many things, including the fact that someone with no common sense but constant demands for public praise remains President.
By the summer, I decided to spend some time back in Mississippi as I recovered. I listened to Mississippians talk about Trump.
I discovered — with no surprise — that white Southerners still support Trump, despite the topsy-turvy state of affairs that characterizes Trump’s reign. Sure, they sigh about Trump’s “personal things”: the three marriages, golf trips, and the torrent of tweets. Bless his heart, Trump can’t regulate himself about anything, especially anything Russia-related.
But through it all, he maintains an 85% job approval rating among white Southerners.
For those who know a little history, there’s no mystery as to why. For while Donald Trump was born in New York, his path to the White House was made in Mississippi. That’s where, over the decades, a generation of Southern Republican leaders cynically used race, nativism and populism to trump the family and religious values that Southerners profess to hold dear.
The blueprint to turn white Southern Democrats into Republicans was minted largely in Mississippi in the 1980s by Haley Barbour, taken national by the late Lee Atwater, and prettied up for polite company by Karl Rove.
What began as a cunning regional strategy became the grand design of the national GOP. By the time Donald Trump crashed the Party, he did the Southern dance better than any of the actual Southern candidates.
In 1982, Barbour ran against John Stennis, a Democratic Senator since 1947, and a last gasp of the old Democratic South. Barbour tried every trick in the book to flip the state to the GOP, but hadn’t quite perfected the knack of camouflaging a blunt appeal to race.
Then came Atwater, whose key insight was to mask the appeal to white racial fears with “coded” language and issues that could work practically anywhere in the country. In his own words: “By 1968 you can’t say (the N-word) — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like ‘forced busing,’ ‘states’ rights,’ economic things and a byproduct of them is (that) blacks get hurt worse than whites.”
When Atwater was facing death with a terminal brain tumor at age 40, he asked forgiveness for “the naked cruelty” of his ways. But at the memorial service, Barbour praised everything Atwater ever said or did. “Lee never did anything that wasn’t true or fair,” he put it.
In 2000, Karl Rove took the cosmetics a step further, adding a layer of “compassionate conservatism” to perfume the stench.
Trump’s evil genius was to add a thick layer of the ugliest anti-immigrant fearmongering. Bad hombres, the wall, and the call for a complete Muslim ban — all were a clever modernization of the strategy pioneered by Southern politicians with school busing and Willie Horton.
Trump laid the groundwork well before the campaign, when he cast Barack Obama as “the other” through the birther movement. Never mind that Muslims are relatively few and far between in small-town Mississippi; immigration was the number one issue cited by all of Trump supporters I talked to back in my hometown.
Many Mississippians don’t like the “Mexicans moving in,” and all that that implies. They talk about it in the context of immigration. I reminded some Mississippi relatives and friends that my mother, who passed away in 2010, didn’t like so many Mexicans coming to Mississippi either — but counted as a friend a Mexican neighbor who helped move huge trees from her driveway after Hurricane Katrina.
When I was growing up in a Mississippi town smaller than most blocks in Brooklyn, someone with Trump’s profile couldn’t get elected dog catcher, much less governor or President.
He is the kind of man our preachers warned us about as they railed about all the sins that would awaken the wrath of an angry Lord. And now, somehow, he carries the South’s hopes and dreams. Southern men like Atwater, Barbour and Rove paved the way; Trump, the big-city billionaire, drove his limo down the road.