Trump, Putin played risky racial politics
Now our old divide is a national security danger
Vladimir Putin finally admitted something that has been obvious to anyone but fans of President Donald Trump who’ve trained themselves to believe, or at least parrot, the denials of their God Emperor: Putin wanted Trump to become president. “Yes, I did,” the president of Russia said when directly asked about his preference during a news conference with Trump in Helsinki.
That Putin sought to elect Trump has long been clear to our intelligence agencies. And though Russian interests have now been indicted for “large scale cyber operations” to interfere with the 2016 election, they also focused generally on dividing Americans by sowing “distrust towards the candidates and the political system in general.”
And how did Putin’s forces seek to divide us? Largely in the way Americans are already most divided — by race. The roughly 3,500 Facebook ads created by the Russian-based Internet Research Agency “consistently promoted ads designed to inflame race-related tensions,” USA TODAY reported.
Dividing Americans over race is the true art of Trump’s deal. By demanding the first black president’s papers, he found a path into politics that he had been seeking since at least 1988. While mainstream Republicans shrugged off birtherism, large majorities of the GOP favored the theory that President Barack Obama had faked his own birth, even eight years into his presidency.
In 2015, Trump’s instincts took his racism to new levels by labeling all but “some” Mexican immigrants as criminals and rapists. Again, he tapped into the fire over changing demographics among the GOP’s white base that few national Republicans were willing to blatantly poke. His campaign skyrocketed; the party’s decades of building a majority by winning the South had made its voters extraordinarily susceptible to Trump’s barely veiled racism.
Trump was not once confronted about his birtherism during more than two dozen GOP debates and forums — likely because his opponents realized the attack would hurt them more than Trump. His mission was to win by finding “missing white voters” in the socalled Rust Belt. And with Putin’s help, it worked.
During Trump’s recent trip to Europe, Putin’s investment in him paid its most massive returns, and not just because Trump is fraying the NATO alliance. He also attacked immigration as “changing the culture,” echoing Europe’s far right populists.
Combine this race-based attack on immigration with Trump’s defense of Nazis and Ku Klux Klan members who marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, and it’s obvious that not since Woodrow Wilson screened “Birth of a Nation,” D.W. Griffith’s glorification of the Klan, at the White House has any U.S. president done more to give white supremacists aid and comfort.
Now, America’s race problem has become a national security problem, enabling the most effective attack on our democracy by a foreign power in our history. Fortunately, new research suggests voters are swayed when racial tactics are exposed as a scam that helps guys like Trump and Putin.
Activists canvassed 800 homes in Minnesota for a Demos Action experiment to test which rebuttal worked better against classic racial dog whistles when candidates argued for tax cuts and railed against “illegal aliens.” One message was silent about race. The other called race out and said the candidate “wants to pit us against each other in order to gain power for himself and kickbacks for his donors.” Confronting race proved more effective. More research is needed, but this suggests the path to transcend racism used as a strategy is through it, not around it.
Race is our Achilles’ heel. Putin and Trump have grabbed us by it. We need to perform a heel transplant now, in midsprint. That won’t be easy — but Democrats who struggled with how to appeal to the white voters who helped elect Obama, without abandoning the people of color who are their stalwart base, should recognize that leaving racial politics to Trump isn’t just cowardly and ineffective. It’s dangerous.