This week President Trump’s remarks repeatedly crossed the line between hectoring and hateful. He began by tweeting that four minority members of Congress critical of conditions at immigrant detention centres should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.” A day later this became “If you hate our country, if you’re not happy here, you can leave.” Refusing to acknowledge the xenophobia and racism in these statements – ever prominent aspects of Trump’s semi-literate nativism – he doubled down by saying that he didn’t have “a racist bone” in his body, before repeating a slur on Congresswoman Ilhan Omar that came straight from the rabid fringe of the American right: “There was a lot of talk that she was married to her brother. I don’t know anything about it. I heard she was married to her brother … I don’t know, but I’m sure there will be someone who will be looking into that.” The week ended with a Trump rally chanting for the deportation of the Somali-born Omar.
Although the spectacle of an American president launching personal attacks on non-white women who challenge him has produced widespread revulsion and condemnation, Trump clearly believes it will help his reelection. Asked about the chants at his North Carolina rally – a direct result of his provocative and fact-free descriptions of Omar’s supposed hatred of America – the New York Times reports “Mr. Trump disavowed the behavior of his own supporters in comments to reporters at the White House and claimed that he had tried to contain it, an assertion clearly contradicted by video of the event.”
Trump’s demagoguery is as dangerous as it is distasteful. In 2016 the British Labour MP Jo Cox was murdered by a man whose crazed nationalism had been stoked by far less incendiary remarks in the run-up to the Brexit vote. Talking about American citizens, and elected officials, as though their political differences immediately bring into question their true loyalty is pure McCarthyism and Trump’s obvious comfort with such tactics bodes ill for the 2020 campaign.
The GOP’s abject submission to Trump becomes more evident with each transgression against political decorum. A Reuters/Ipsos poll held after this latest outburst indicates that his net approval within the party rose by 5 percentage points to an astonishing 72%. That strongly suggests that the GOP, out of opportunism rather than principle, has become more like Trump’s base voters than vice versa. As a straw in the wind it is an extremely disconcerting omen of what will likely surface in the next 18 months of campaigning.
Of the many possible responses to this depressing turn of events, two deserve emphasis. First, Trump’s record of racist attitudes and behaviour, from housing discrimination to birtherism, is beyond doubt and any assertions to the contrary should not be taken in good faith. Second, Trump’s nativist fantasy about restoring a whiter, more prosperous yesteryear springs from his childish grasp of American history. In fact the United States’ strongest claim to distinction among modern nations is its attempt to transcend such divisions, to fashion a new country “of laws not men” instead of simply repeating the old errors of Britain and Europe.
Trump’s ability to annoy and provoke Liberals is a huge part of his attraction to the Republican base and surrounded by their adulation he will probably press further and further in this direction. But ethnonationalism is a genie that does not easily return to its bottle and Trump’s willingness to arouse such volatile political passions, so carelessly, should be seen for the deeply un-American and morally deplorable tendency that it is.
