An ugly rant... or a deft political move?
NOT for the first time, Donald Trump has sparked outrage after a string of messages he posted on Twitter. And, not for the first time, noone is quite sure whether he has once again let his big mouth run away with him – or deftly skewered his enemies through social media.
The topic this time is race – a perennial concern in America given its history of slavery and segregation – and now, thanks partly to the inexorable rise of identity politics, the issue that most sharply divides the left and right.
In America (as in Britain), ordering any member of an ethnic minority to ‘go back’ to where they came from is a racially charged taunt that has been shouted over the centuries at every new wave of immigrant arrivals, from Irish to German, Chinese and Hispanic.
Trump’s critics have therefore seized on his words. They claim he was acting like a ‘white supremacist’.
Such was the crudeness of the president’s outburst, it has revived the question of whether he is an out-and-out racist or simply someone who cynically exploits antiimmigrant, white nationalist sentiment for his own political ends.
The fact is that Trump has faced – and denied – accusations of racism since the early 1970s, when his family property business was accused of discriminating against black tenants.
Since, he has delivered ugly tirades against immigrants crossing America’s southern border. During his campaign for the presidency, he said these Latinos were ‘bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists’.
When neo-Nazis violently protested at the removal of a statue of a pro-slavery American Civil War general, Trump attracted fury for saying: ‘Not all of those people were white supremacists by any stretch... You had some very bad people in that group, but you also had... very fine people – on both sides [of the debate].’
It is therefore no surprise that Trump has refused to back down after the latest scandal. Instead, he has increased his rhetoric and accused the quartet of women of
being the real racists – because, he alleges, they hate the US.
For many Americans, patriotism trumps all other virtues. In questioning their love for America, Trump may therefore be playing a canny political game.
The Democratic establishment is very wary of the four women – nicknamed the ‘Squad’ because they are firebrand, media-savvy and popular first-term congresswomen who all share similar hardleft views.
Many of the Squad’s causes – such as the payment of reparations to the descendants of slaves and the abolition of America’s immigration police – seem almost designed to horrify the older, more moderate voters. One of his targets is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who, at just 29, is the youngest holder of any of the 535 seats in Congress and known as ‘AOC’ to her 5million Twitter followers.
THE representative for the gritty New York districts of the Bronx and Trump’s native Queens, she is of Puerto-Rican descent and has called US border detention centres ‘concentration camps’.
Another Squad member is Ilhan Omar. The 37-year-old has attacked Israel and blamed America for the humanitarian crisis in
Venezuela, which is more often seen as being ruined by its feckless, repressive socialist rulers.
In another comment that riled the Democratic establishment, the other two Squad members, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib, described the Declaration of Independence – America’s founding document, held by many as almost a sacred text – as ‘sexist, racist and prejudiced’.
Collectively, the four women and their allies support policies – including universal free healthcare and strict minimum-wage laws – that many Americans shun as ‘socialist’.
Democrat leaders have therefore rallied against the Squad for having policies they see as undergraduate, unelectable and naive. Nancy Pelosi, the senior Democrat and speaker of the House, sneered that for all their millions of social media followers, they have no following where it matters: Washington. No doubt Mr Trump will be delighted that he has succeeded in focusing voters’ attention to the Democrats’ more radical wing and away from his more moderate opponents.
But some senior Republicans are concerned that instead of allowing voters to dwell on the plus-points of the president’s administration – such as the booming economy – he has offended millions of Americans and once again shifted attention back to his own personality.