USA TODAY International Edition
Trump’s minority outreach can’t erase his racist appeals
This is apparently minority outreach week for Donald Trump. The Republican presidential nominee plans to meet with black and Hispanic activists on Thursday. Earlier in the week, he made a pitch to minority voters during a speech in Ohio. And he said he will soften his calls for deporting all 11 million undocumented immigrants estimated to be in this country.
It is not hard to see why Trump would attempt such a pivot. Polls show black and Latino voters overwhelmingly supporting his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton. His standing among minority voters is so poor that to compensate, he would need roughly 64% of white voters, a threshold that no non- incumbent candidate has reached since popular vote tallies have been recorded. And many white voters, including many Republicans, are so queasy about Trump’s inflammatory tactics that they’d be hard pressed to vote for him.
But if his outreach seems a bit strained and insincere, there is good reason. Trump is not, like 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney, merely a candidate trying to move back to the center on immigration after being forced to tack right in the primaries. Trump is, rather, a leading force in recasting the GOP as a party of white resentment.
While establishment figures in the GOP took Romney’s loss as a call to adopt comprehensive immigration reform and find other ways to appeal to voters of color, Trump reasoned that the party needed to double down on the white vote. His attacks on Mexican immigrants, his unworkable calls for mass deportations, and his plan for a border wall paid for by Mexico were red meat for working- class voters resentful of America’s changing face. His criticism of an Indiana- born judge of Mexican heritage was, in the words of House Speaker Paul Ryan, R- Wis., “the textbook defi- nition of a racist comment.”
Trump has long used issues of race and ethnicity to help brand himself. In the 1980s, he generated publicity by demanding the death penalty in a highly sensationalized case in which four black and Latino men would be convicted ( and later exonerated) of beating and raping a white jogger in New York’s Central Park. Years later, he laid the groundwork for his campaign with his shameful assertion that President Obama might not have been born in the United States.
In the primaries, Trump’s incendiary comments and actions worked well enough with white working- class voters long taken for granted by the party elite and receptive to his messages on trade, immigration, affirmative action and gun rights.
In the general election, however, Trump faces an electorate far too diverse and decent to be moved by appeals to bigotry. Hence, his abrupt outreach, which seems directed as much to allay whites’ qualms as to attract minority voters.
Is it good that Trump sees the need to expand his base and temper his tone? Sure. Is the pivot believable? Hardly. While politics often requires flexibility and compromise, Trump has played the race card for far too long to credibly reshuffle the deck in the closing weeks of the campaign.