Trump’s toxic tactics aim to boost radicals

We are used to Donald Trump making outrageous statements but even by his standards the tweets of the past few days have surpassed all that have gone before. His attack on four non-white Democratic Congresswomen, and specifically the suggestion that they should “go home” if they did not like what was going on in America, was not only offensive but fatuous.

Three of them were born in the US, one just a few miles from Donald Trump’s own birthplace in New York City. Since the president’s mother was Scottish and his paternal grandfather German it is an odd understanding of the immigrant roots of the country he leads that those who are unhappy with its politics should be classed as outsiders.

The clamour among Democrats is for Mr Trump to be denounced as a racist, which in their political lexicon is the gravest of all crimes and one that disqualifies anyone from high, or indeed any, office. It is a toxic accusation which the president has tried to deflect by insisting he was referring to the far-left politics of the women in question, not their ethnicity. But while that is unlikely to assuage the anger he has caused, even in his own party, is there a strategy at work here?

As with the internal Republican battle in recent years between the establishment and the radical Tea Party movement, the Democrats are locked in bitter political infighting over the direction they should take. Mr Trump resolved the Republican issue by hijacking the party and remaking it in his own image. The Democrats are facing a similar attack from the Left which is embodied by the self-styled “Squad” – the four Congresswomen targeted by Mr Trump.

Ahead of the primaries to choose the Democrat to run against Mr Trump next year, he wants to bolster the radical politics of the likely candidates in the certain expectation that Americans will recoil from their socialist agenda. Like Jeremy Corbyn in Britain, their rhetoric is often critical of their own country and supportive of those who might be considered its enemies.

Mr Trump’s language is unacceptable in normal political debate but he does not give a fig for that. He wants to cause consternation among the Democrats by encouraging the cause of the radicals seeking the nomination in the hope he is up against one of them. Then he believes he will get a second term.