October 29, 2020
HATE IS A TOUGH SELL IN AMERICA:
Trump's Racist Hail Mary to White Voters Isn't Working (Greg Walters & Trone Dowd, 10/29/20, Vice News)
At a rally in Michigan on Tuesday, the President accused Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota of hating "our country."Omar, who was born in Somalia, became one of the first two Muslim women ever elected to the U.S. Congress. Trump has repeatedly blasted her for her foreign origin."When I think of Somalia, I think of Omar," Trump said. "She likes telling us what we should do, how we should run our country."Stephen Miller, the Trump advisor credited with helping craft Trump's hardline anti-immigration policies, told reporters on a conference call Wednesday that a victory for Trump's opponent Joe Biden would "would incentivize child smuggling and child trafficking on an epic global scale." The remarks fit neatly into the wilder notions of the QAnon conspiracy theory, which holds that Trump is somehow secretly battling a mysterious group of cannibalistic child-abusers.The president's son-in-law and close advisor Jared Kushner said that Trump's policies are created to help the Black community break out of the issues they face in their communities during an interview with Fox News Monday, but said that the president "can't want them to be successful more than that they want to be successful."And so it went in the final days of Trump's pitch to America for a second term.Yet while Trump is far from the first American president to attempt to use racial divisions to campaign advantage, he's unique among recent major party presidential nominees in his brazenness, according to Julian Zelizer, a professor of history and public policy at Princeton University."He is upping the ante, and he is saying the silent part out loud, which matters," Zelizer recently told NPR. "By saying it out loud, he grants it more legitimacy, and he gives it presidential weight in a way that's different."
Posted by Orrin Judd at October 29, 2020 6:05 PM
