Divisive rhetoric

Trump’s race playbook: Excoriate the left and enthrall his base

Reigniting his racially divisive rhetoric, Trump is testing whether an amped-up version of his 2016 strategy can deliver victory again in 2020.

By NANCY COOK

With 16 months until the next election, President Donald Trump is making a key plank of his strategy clear: lean into racially divisive statements and other inflammatory rhetoric.

Instead of doubling down on the excellent state of the economy, his raft of conservative judicial appointments or his potential second-term agenda, Trump is launching bombs to excite his base and rile up progressives. He’s showing little concern for civility, political correctness or the longtime stature of the office of the presidency, facts that his supporters like because they view him as telling-it-like-it-is authentic, the ultimate anti-establishment candidate.

The president’s fiery tweets Monday and over the weekend marked the latest instance of the president seizing on the nation’s most divisive fault lines ahead of his reelection bid. The themes he’s choosing to highlight for 2020 are starting to resemble the same dark ones from 2016 — only on steroids and in far plainer, blunter language.

His targets included the Rev. Al Sharpton, the civil rights activist and TV pundit; Democratic Rep. Elijah Cummings, chair of the House Oversight Committee; and the city of Baltimore, where roughly 62 percent of the residents are African American. That came after launching his Twitter attacks on four Democratic women of color earlier this month.

“Is this really your campaign strategy? Attack as many people of color as possible?” Sharpton shot back in his own tweet, after listing off the 10 politicians and people of color who Trump has gone after in recent weeks.

Numerous Democratic presidential hopefuls were quick to condemn Trump’s comments and race to defend Sharpton, who California Sen. Kamala Harris said was an activist who “has spent his life fighting for what’s right and working to improve our nation, even in the face of hate.”

Former Vice President Joe Biden recently called Trump “more George Wallace than George Washington,” comparing him to the segregationist former governor of Alabama who ran for president four times and employed his own strategy of stirring up racial divisions.

But one Republican close to the Trump campaign called the president’s tweets on Baltimore, which is part of Cummings’ district, helpful because they show Trump pays attention to poverty in the inner cities and feels African American voters have been poorly served by Democrats for decades. The operative did not believe the rhetoric or ongoing tweets hurt the president’s campaign in any way.

“It engages in a fight — head on,” this person said. “Ask yourself: How many African American votes does he lose because of this?”

That what-has-he-got-to-lose approach comes because Trump won just 8 percent of the African American vote in 2016 while Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton won 89 percent, according to exit polling. Latinos and Asian voters also overwhelmingly supported Clinton, while Trump won 57 percent of white voters’ support and Clinton won 37 percent. It was the support of white voters, who were very animated by Trump’s restrictionist immigration policies, that handed him the election.

One Republican political strategist and longtime Trump critic warned that these race-based tactics may not be as effective for Trump in this upcoming election cycle as they were in 2016, when Trump had the advantage of running against Clinton, whom conservatives have loved to hate for decades.

“Trump’s reelection will be about him — his personality and his language. He will be the focal point instead of the Democratic nominee,” said John Weaver, a GOP political consultant who worked as the chief strategist for Gov. John Kasich’s presidential campaign in 2016 and for Sen. John McCain’s two presidential bids. “The more offensive he is, the harder it is to earn the support of suburban women, college-educated voters, young people and people of color. It is a mass issue. There are only so many people who fit into the profile of finding the president’s language not offensive, or at least, excusable.”

That could present challenges for the Trump campaign as it attempts to chart a narrow path to victory through states such as Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, all of which Trump won in 2016 by less than 1 percentage point, or roughly 80,000 votes, while losing the overall popular vote.

In 2020, the Trump campaign hopes to woo new supporters in states like Colorado, Oregon and New Mexico. It also wants to cut into the Democrats’ support among African American voters by emphasizing the landmark criminal justice reform bill and the low unemployment rate among the nation’s blacks. Trump’s ongoing racially divisive tweets and his attacks on female lawmakers of color make that more of a dissonant pitch.

The director of communications for Trump’s reelection campaign, Tim Murtaugh, said the president has an excellent record of accomplishment for black Americans, “though it doesn’t fit into the media’s narrative.” Among those accomplishments, Murtaugh cited wage growth, a low unemployment rate, criminal justice reform and Opportunity Zones created by the Republican tax bill.

“Of the 3,000 inmates released so far under the First Step Act, more than 90 percent were black,” he added. “This is the president’s real record in the black community.”

Trump has always employed an us-versus-them mentality in business, his 2016 campaign, the White House and now heading into 2020, where he rewards loyalists and tears down any politicians or institutions critical of him. That includes Cummings, whose committee has been heavily involved in the Democrats’ various investigations into the Trump orbit.

One of Trump’s latest tactics is to try to turn Democrats’ own words against them, by saying that Sen. Bernie Sanders was also critical of Baltimore and equated it to a “THIRD WORLD COUNTRY!” as Trump tweeted Monday.

In 2015, Sanders as a presidential candidate toured West Baltimore and there, spoke about the area’s poverty. “Trump’s lies and racism never end,” Sanders tweeted Monday. “While I have been fighting to lift the people of Baltimore and elsewhere out of poverty with good paying jobs, housing and health care, he has been attacking workers and the poor.”

Trump and his campaign maintained throughout the weekend and into Monday that the president’s tweets about Baltimore had nothing to do with race — and were merely leaning into comments Democrats like Sanders have made before. “The media has made this a racial issue, when it is nothing of the sort. It is notable that no one has challenged the president’s description of Baltimore’s condition,” Murtaugh said.

The Baltimore Sun chastised the president for both the substance of his comments and the tone of his rhetoric, writing in an editorial that “Mr. Trump sees attacking African American members of Congress as good politics, as it both warms the cockles of the white supremacists who love him and causes so many of the thoughtful people who don’t to scream.”

“It was only surprising that there wasn’t room for a few classic phrases like ‘you people’ or ‘welfare queens’ or ‘crime-ridden ghettos’ or a suggestion that the congressman ‘go back’ to where he came from,” the editorial continued about Trump’s specific attacks on Cummings.