Rattled by Kamala Harris, Trump & Co. go full birther
Joe Biden’s selection of Sen. Kamala Harris as his running mate last week placed two facts on graphic display. The first is that Donald Trump, who is rattled by accomplished women generally, is deeply rattled by Harris, a former prosecutor who as a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee drilled holes in experienced dissemblers like Attorney General William Barr and Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. The second is that Trump’s re-election chances hinge on two tactics: discouraging citizens of color from voting in November or preventing them from doing so altogether, and ginning up the largest possible turnout of white voters disposed to think that non-whites threaten their way of life, if not their existence.
A recent Pew Research Center survey told us what we need to know about Trump’s path to retaining power. It found that Biden leads Trump among Blacks 89% to 8%, among Hispanics 63% to 35% and among Asian-Americans 67% to 31%. Among white men with college degrees Biden is ahead 58% to 41%; among white women with college degrees he leads 63% to 35%.
That leaves exactly one demographic group that favors Trump: white Americans without college degrees, and he leads among them by nearly two to one. Therein lies the simplicity of Trump’s battle plan: suppressing the vote in communities of color, and frightening the devil out of noncollege educated whites and pushing the view that he is the Preserver of White Power.
It worked for Trump in 2016, and he hopes it will work again in 2020. In the lead-up to Biden’s widely expected choice of Harris, the daughter of a mother born in India and a father born in Jamaica, Trump called the movement to affirm that Black lives matter “a symbol of hate,” stoking certain whites’ fear of Blacks with characteristic elegance. Touting his rollback of an Obama administration rule simply requiring local communities receiving federal funding to study racial discrimination and set goals for reducing segregation, Trump declared himself the savior of white America. “I am happy to inform all of the people living their suburban lifestyles dream,” he tweeted, “that you will no longer be bothered or financially hurt by having low income housing built in your neighborhood.”
Suburbanites, he continued, “are thrilled that I ended the long running program where low income housing would invade their neighborhood.” In order to make sure that there were no whites who missed the message, he told reporters on July 31, “You build low income housing and you build other forms of housing — also having to do with zoning — and destroy people that have lived in communities in suburbia. For years, they’ve lived there, and they want to destroy their lives and destroy what they have.”
If Trump has a distinctive hallmark, it is his lack of class, and he reminded us of it when Harris’ selection was announced. Born and raised in California, Harris is indisputably an American citizen. This did not stop Trump from pointedly encouraging the crackpot hogwash that Harris’ citizenship was an “open question.” “If she has a problem,” sneered Trump, “you would have thought she would have been vetted by sleepy Joe,” thereby encouraging Americans to ingest the snake oil that Harris had “a problem” when she has none. It was the very same racist claptrap that Trump had promoted about Barack Obama. Harris and Obama are both Black, you see, which Trump hopes will suggest that their citizenship is dubious. Trump’s Kool-Aid chorus picked up the refrain.
It’s Bigot Time in America, and our president sees each news cycle as a new opportunity to hit a new low. “We are in a battle for the soul of the nation,” said Joe Biden, and is he ever right about that.