If President Trump’s recent messaging about Biden and Democrats wanting to destroy the suburbs wasn’t already so obvious enough an appeal to Whites’ fears of Brown and Black hordes invading their neighborhoods, today he removed all doubt.
Via White House pool reporter Yamiche Alcindor, from Trump’s news conference today:
We all know that Trump is a racist, and that his political career has been built upon appeals to White racism and White identity politics, but it’s still astounding when he states his racist intent so explicitly.
In this regard, Trump has done us all a huge favor. We all know Republicans have made the same appeals to suburban Whites for half a century now, but they’ve managed to mostly couch their appeals in veiled, weasel-y language, like “local rights” and “preserving the neighborhood’s character” (although to be fair many rich White liberal NIMBYs have long used the same tropes to keep high-density housing — less affluent minorities in other words — out of their neighborhoods).
But Trump has stripped away all of that bullshit, and not just on this particular subject but on what American conservatism truly is. For a long time they tried to fool us all by claiming they were only motivated by a solemn desire for limited government, fiscal responsibility, and lower taxes. But Trump’s takeover of American conservatism made unambiguously clear that it was all really just about White identity politics and the politics of racial and cultural resentment.
Even after Trump is defeated this fall, we must make sure that conservatives can never again hide what they’ve so explicitly and enthusiastically revealed themselves to be.
