President Donald Trump is wielding America's racial tensions as a reelection weapon, fiercely denouncing the racial justice movement on a near-daily basis with language stoking white resentment and aiming to drive his supporters to the polls. The incendiary discourse is alarming many in his own
NEW YORK — President Donald Trump is wielding America's racial tensions as a reelection weapon, fiercely denouncing the racial justice movement on a near-daily basis with language stoking white resentment and aiming to drive his supporters to the polls.
Though Trump has long aired racially divisive language and grievances in the public sphere, his willingness to do so from behind the presidential seal — and on his Twitter account — has reached a breakneck pace in recent days as the nation grapples with racial injustice. “Those who seek to erase our heritage want Americans to forget our pride and our great dignity, so that we can no longer understand ourselves or America’s destiny,” Trump said Friday at the base of Mount Rushmore. “In toppling the heroes of 1776, they seek to dissolve the bonds of love and loyalty that we feel for our country, and that we feel for each other. Their goal is not a better America; their goal is the end of America.
His comments are an apparent descendant, a half-century later, of Richard Nixon’s coded outreach to white voters known as the Southern Strategy. Trump himself has embraced Nixon’s phrase “the Silent Majority” to describe his own supporters. “The 2016 debate about immigration was about the future of sovereignty, the American worker, and our culture. The issues that involve race now are completely different,” said Sam Nunberg, a former Trump campaign adviser.
“Defending the Confederacy and racial dog whistles is not going to help win the suburbs. He is solely focused on a small part of his base when he should be looking to grow his support,” said Alex Conant, a Republican strategist who advised Sen. Marco Rubio's presidential bid. “If Joe Biden proposed tearing down Mount Rushmore, that would be a huge opening for Trump. But Biden is not doing that.
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