Trump is ratcheting up the racism. Political pros say Biden should let him

With just over four months remaining until the general election and poll numbers in free-fall, Donald Trump has ratcheted up his use of incendiary, divisive, and racist language in a scorched-earth attempt to galvanize what remains of his political base and keep them motivated to vote for him.

At his poorly attended campaign relaunch in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Trump invoked one of his favorite targets from a year ago, Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar. A Somali-American who came to the US as a child refugee, Omar was one of a quartet of female Democrats of color who the President suggested should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime-infested places from which they came” in a tweet, not long before a campaign rally where he basked in the energy of a crowd chanting “send her back” in reference to the first-term congresswoman.

But while Trump and his advisers were deliberately vague about which “place” he was suggesting Omar “go back” to last year (while vehemently denying that he meant to say she should return to Somalia), he abandoned all pretense in Tulsa last week by declaring that Omar “would like to make the government of our country just like the country from where she came”.

The President has also resumed his practice of referring to Covid-19 (the virus responsible for killing more than 120,000 Americans) as “the China virus,” and has used the blatantly racist term “kung flu” on two occasions over the past week.

And since the beginning of what has been more than a month of continuous protests over police brutality and racial inequities in the criminal justice system, Trump has repeatedly described protesters as “thugs” while explicitly criticizing the Black Lives Matter movement. While being interviewed by Sean Hannity on Thursday, the President also revived another common trope from his 2016 campaign by suggesting that crime in large “Democrat-run” cities with large black populations is worse than in Afghanistan, Guatemala, or Honduras.

“You look at Honduras, Guatemala — all of these different places, we have cities that are worse — in some cases far worse. Take a look at Detroit, take a look at what's happening in Oakland, take a look at what's happening in Baltimore. And everyone gets upset when I say it, they say oh, is that a racist statement. It's not a racist — frankly, black people come up to me, say, thank you, thank you, sir, for saying it,” Trump said, adding that living in such cities is “like living in hell”.

Not since the days when Alabama governor George Wallace sought the presidency on a pro-segregation platform has an American presidential candidate used such explicit appeals to bigotry to court voters and hold their attention.

Jennifer Mercieca, an associate professor in Texas A&M University’s communications department who studies presidential political speech, said Trump’s rhetoric has taken a much darker turn in recent weeks.

“Trump has consistently, since 2015, used coded racist language to amplify racist sentiments without taking responsibility for it… He's taken advantage of an appeal to racism, without overtly saying that he was a racist and in fact denying that he's a racist,” said Mercieca, the author of Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump.

But while Mercieca said Trump’s return to targeting Omar and his use of racist terms like “kung flu” is part of a strategy of creating “us versus them” narratives for his supporters, it’s unlikely that doing so will activate enough people to allow him to keep his support at 2016 levels. He has “lost the agenda” because of the coronavirus pandemic, the economic crisis it has caused, and the civil rights protests that have swept across the country over the last month, she added.

Yet such tactics are nothing new for Trump, who kept both the press and rival campaigns in a constant state of outrage four years ago with outrageous statements such as his claim that Mexican immigrants were bringing crime and drugs to the country, and his call for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” after a mass shooting in San Bernardino, California.

Trump and his advisers believe that by keeping the temperature of his rhetoric at such a high level, he can keep his political base — which they estimate is roughly 40 percent of the electorate — engaged and motivated, while drawing in enough white voters who lack college degrees to eke out swing state victories. In this way, they hope he will scrape 270 electoral college votes and keep former Vice President Joe Biden’s campaign and Democratic Senate candidates off-balance.

But while modern campaigning doctrine calls for candidate gaffes (or intentional racist remarks) to be amplified and capitalized upon with a “war room” style rapid response operation, veteran Democratic pols and campaign experts say the best thing Biden and other Democrats could do to respond to Trump is to do little to nothing at all.

“I think the best way for Democrats to handle it, especially Joe Biden, is you call it what it is, and then you move along and keep going with what you were talking about,” said Michael Starr Hopkins, a Democratic communications strategist who served as ex-Maryland Representative John Delaney’s national press secretary during his primary campaign.

Hopkins said Biden has heretofore been successful at not allowing Trump to dictate the terms of how the former vice president runs his campaign, even as Trump has stopped couching appeals to bigotry as jokes because his low poll numbers have “unshackled” him.

“His [Biden’s] campaign is very much like he is — it's kind of slow and steady. You know what you're getting, you know who he is and there's not going to be a lot of highs, but there's also not going to be a lot of lows,” he said. “I think this election is the outlier election where people want someone who, for better or for worse, is a little boring.”

Hopkins added that the Biden campaign has done a good job of “not giving oxygen to the ridiculousness of the Trump campaign” because “at a certain point, the more you argue with them, the harder it is to tell who the idiot is”.

“They will have to respond to these things over time,” he added, “but they're keeping America focused on what's important, and that's Donald Trump's failed response to coronavirus, the fact that the economy is in a recession, and that… across the board, we're seeing people go into the streets and protest at levels we haven't seen since 1960’s.”

Mercieca echoed Starr’s suggestion that the best strategy for Biden to deal with Trump’s racist rhetoric is to do nothing — but she added that if Biden or his campaign explicitly calls out Trump’s racism, they must take care not to activate his supporters’ defensiveness about being called racist. Instead, she said, they should “move up a layer with the public discourse” by stressing the need for the country to have “an honest dialogue about race” and keep voters’ focus on the contrast between the two candidates in terms of whose behavior is presidential and whose is not.

While Hopkins and Mercieca both suggested that Trump was working from a deliberate strategy, veteran Democratic strategist James Carville posited that Trump is actually trying to lose the election by pushing ahead with base-pleasing policies — such as supporting a lawsuit to have the Affordable Care Act ruled unconstitutional — which have little support from most of the country.

“It's really the only time I've seen somebody say ‘let’s keep the 41 [percent support] at all costs,’ and I think he's probably gonna lose some of them,” Carville predicted.

Carville said that because Trump keeps pushing ahead with tactics that make it harder and harder for him to win, there’s not as much reason for the Biden campaign to expend resources on the type of rapid response operation that he pioneered during President Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign. This is in part because the press does a good job of covering Trump’s public appearances, many of which are quickly turned into ads by anti-Trump groups like The Lincoln Project.

“Once you engage, you never get out,” he said. “You don’t need to go on offense if your opponent keeps shooting into his own goal.”