As U.S. racial views evolve, Trump sticks with incitement.

WASHINGTON — President Trump on Wednesday suggested that painting the words “Black Lives Matter” on New York City’s Fifth Avenue would amount to a “symbol of hate,” complaining that such an action would be “expensive” and “denigrating this luxury Avenue.”

That came shortly after a threat by the president to veto the Pentagon’s budget legislation should it include a measure to take the names of Confederate generals off military bases, which he denounced as being sponsored by “Elizabeth ‘Pocahontas’ Warren (of all people!)”

That came only hours after his declaration that he “may END” a federal housing regulation aimed at desegregating neighborhoods, which he claimed has had “a devastating impact” on America’s suburbs.

And that came roughly a day after he retweeted a video of supporters in an almost entirely white Florida retirement community shouting “white power” from a golf cart.

Sinking further behind former Vice President Joe Biden in the presidential race, Trump in recent days has indulged in a string of blatant appeals to racism.

Coming at a moment when Black Lives Matter protests appear to be shifting Americans’ views on race, his move has confounded many political strategists in both parties, who question why Trump believes such appeals will help him dig out of the increasingly deep hole in which he finds himself.

“What voters are looking for is a way to get balance and peace back in the nation and in the White House,” said Peter Hart, a veteran Democratic pollster. “Everything he does is confrontation.”

In a political moment shaped by the death of George Floyd, Trump has positioned himself as the political heir of George Wallace, said Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian at Rice University in Houston who noted that Wallace, the former governor of Alabama, and Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina both failed in their attempts to win the presidency on openly white supremacist platforms.

“History will look at the Trump years as being a reactionary, rightwing movement that saw America was becoming 60% nonwhite and panicked,” Brinkley said. “When the economy crashed and George Floyd was murdered, Trump had cement feet. He went back to a tired old playbook, and he lost the center in America. If you were a conservative, centerright voter, you’re now looking to get rid of him.”

A raft of recent nonpartisan polls backs up that assessment. With only four months left until Election Day and the country convulsed by protest while still in the throes of a worsening pandemic, Trump trails Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, by double digits nationally and in a growing number of swing states. His support has eroded among some of those who backed him four years ago.

While Trump appears to believe that appeals to racial resentments will cement his support among his core voters, the issue clearly hurts him in the wider electorate.

Only 35% of voters said they had confidence in the president’s ability to “effectively handle race relations” and only 15% said they were “very confident,” according to a Pew Research survey released Tuesday. A majority of those polled, 55%, also said Trump had “changed the tone of political debate in the U.S. for the worse” as opposed to just 25% who said he had changed it for the better and 19% who said not much change either way.

Hardedged exploitation of race has been a recurring theme in Trump’s career, but the current rampage represents a shift of sorts. At times over the past year, he has tried to appeal for support of Black voters, touting his backing of reforms in federal sentencing laws, among other issues.

Trump initially declared himself “an ally of all peaceful protesters” during a Rose Garden address on June 1, just as unmarked federal troops were teargassing protesters near the White House gates in order to clear Lafayette Square for his photoop with a Bible outside a church. He has met with Black families whose loved ones have been killed by police officers, but has also offered more fullthroated support to law enforcement while seeking to define protesters generally as lawless thugs.