In risky bid, Trump stokes racial rancor to motivate voters
President Donald Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, left, and first lady Melania Trump, attend a “National Dialogue on Safely Reopening America’s Schools,” event in the East Room of the White House, Tuesday, July 7, 2020, in Washington.
President Donald Trump is wielding America’s racial tensions as a reelection weapon, fiercely denouncing the racial justice movement on a near-daily basis with language stoking white resentment and aiming to drive his supporters to the polls.
The incendiary discourse is alarming many in his own party and running contrary to the advice of some in his inner circle, who believe it risks alienating independent and suburban voters. It’s a pattern that harks back to cultural divisions Trump similarly exploited in his victorious 2016 campaign.
“It’s not about who is the object of the derision or the vitriol. The actual issue is understanding the appeal to white resentment and white fear,” said Eddie Glaude, chair of the Department of African American studies at Princeton University. “It’s all rooted in this panic about the place of white people in this new America.”
Though Trump has long aired racially divisive language and grievances in the public sphere, his willingness to do
NEW YORK —
Visitors arrive for the unveiling of a 148-foot tribute mural to Black Lives Matter in Los Angeles on Tuesday. The artwork was created by five African American artists, Alexandra Allie Belisle, Amanda Ferrell Hale, Noah Humes, Peque Brown, and Shplinton. so from behind the presidenbranding of the Washington of Mount Rushmore. “In toppling tial seal — and on his Twitter Redskins and Cleveland Indians, the heroes of 1776, they account — has reached team nicknames that seek to dissolve the bonds of a breakneck pace in recent many consider offensive to love and loyalty that we feel days as the nation grapples Native Americans. for our country, and that we with racial injustice. Most notably, he has engaged feel for each other. Their goal
The president tweeted — in a full-throated deis not a better America; their and later deleted — a video fense of the Confederate goal is the end of America.” of a supporter yelling “white legacy, which he at times In defending Thomas Jefferson power.” He referred to the has cloaked within tributes and George WashingBlack Lives Matter mantra to the Founding Fathers, ton that night, Trump did as a “symbol of hate.” He including during a pair of not mention the Confederacy. took a swipe at NASCAR for high-profile Fourth of July Instead, he painted removing the Confederate weekend speeches. racial justice demonstraflag from its races and falsely “Those who seek to erase tors with a broad brush that suggested a Black driver had our heritage want Americans made no distinction between carried out a racially charged to forget our pride and our the many who oppose honoring hoax. He mused about overturning great dignity, so that we can the Confederacy and a suburban fair-housno longer understand ourselves the relative few who question ing regulation and spoke or America’s destiny,” celebrating Founders approvingly of the current Trump said Friday at the base who owned slaves.
President Donald Trump’s niece offers a scathing portrayal of her uncle in a new book, blaming a toxic family for raising a narcissistic, damaged man who poses an immediate danger to the public, according to a copy obtained Tuesday by The Associated Press.
Mary L. Trump, a psychologist, writes that Trump’s reelection would be catastrophic and that “lying, playing to the lowest common denominator, cheating, and sowing division are all he knows.”
“By the time this book is published, hundreds of thousands of American lives will have been sacrificed on the altar of Donald’s hubris and willful ignorance. If he is afforded a second term, it would be the end of American Democracy,” she writes in “Too Much and Never Enough, How My Family Created The World’s Most Dangerous Man.”
Mary Trump is the daughter of Trump’s elder brother, Fred Jr., who died after a struggle with alcoholism in 1981 at 42. The book is the second insider account in two months to paint a deeply unflattering portrait of the president, following the release of former national security adviser John Bolton’s bestseller.
In her book, Mary Trump, who is estranged from her uncle, makes several revelations, including alleging that the president paid a friend to take the SATS — a standardized test widely used for college admissions — in his place. She writes that his sister Maryanne Trump did his homework for him but couldn’t take his tests and he worried his grade point average, which put him far from the top of the class, would “scuttle his efforts to get accepted” into the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where he transferred after two years at Fordham University in the Bronx.
“To hedge his bets he enlisted Joe Shapiro, a smart kid with a reputation for being a good test taker, to take his SATS for him,” she writes, adding, “Donald, who never lacked for funds, paid his buddy well.” White House spokesperson Sarah Matthews called the allegation “completely false.”
Mary Trump also writes, in awe, of Trump’s ability to gain the support of prominent Christian leaders and white evangelicals, saying: “The only time Donald went to church was when the cam
NEW YORK —
This combination photo shows the cover art for “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man”, left, and a portrait of author Mary L. Trump, PH.D. The book, written by the niece of President Donald J. Trump, was originally set for release on July 28, but will now arrive on July 14.