He loves it...

How Trump Changed After Charlottesville

The president used to seem rattled when people called him a racist. Not anymore.

By JACK SHAFER

Nobody understands the attention economy better than President Donald Trump. Whenever he slips from his coveted position as Topic A in the news, or whenever the news angle of the latest reports displeases him, you can count on Trump to bludgeon his way back to control the media agenda. This time it was with a series of tweets hammering four congresswomen of color as un-American, and telling them to go back where they came from.

Even in his desperate campaigns for attention, Trump used to draw a line, or at least show signs of observing a limit. That line was when he was accused of racism.

The last time Trump was widely reproached as a racist was in August 2017, after the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville. As the Washington Post’s Ashley Parker recently wrote, Trump kept amending his response to the riot. In his first take, he cited an “egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides.” When this was ripped for creating false equivalency, Trump tried again, unequivocally and explicitly damning racism, the KKK, neo-Nazis and white supremacists in a formal presser. I encourage you to read the entire speech. It sounds like he’s channeling Barack Obama, a realization that must have clawed at him. (According to Bob Woodward’s book Fear, Trump called the speech “the biggest fucking mistake I’ve made.”) So a day later he went to the microphone again, still “totally” condemning neo-Nazis and white nationalists, but also speaking defiantly from his heart. “You also had some very fine people on both sides,” once again using false equivalence to endorse racist radicals.

Even so, being called a racist seemed to rattle Trump. Questioned on the topic, he will insist he is the “least racist” person you’ll ever meet or claim not to have a “racist bone” in his body, as he tweeted this week. But those claims are now transparently false. His aversion to the racist label passed into history this week. He’s dropped the coded racist language he’s used throughout his career to make overt what was once covert.

Perhaps sensing that we’d forgotten about him—or perhaps to deflect our attention from his fraught friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, as Kathleen Parker surmised—Trump summoned all of his media powers last weekend to discharge his volley of tweets vilifying and maligning “the Squad,” House members Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ayanna Pressley and especially Ilhan Omar. If Trump’s plan was to take over the news with his tweets, it’s worked perfectly. For the past five days, the press, the Democratic presidential campaigns and the Congress have occupied themselves with the tweets’ racist content.

At a Monday Cabinet meeting, Trump parried the question of whether his tweets being called racist bother him. “It doesn’t concern me because many people agree with me,” he said. During the week, he escalated his attacks on the Squad. And at a Wednesday evening campaign rally in Greenville, N.C., Trump tore into Rep. Omar for seven minutes, inspiring the crowd to chant, “Send her back! Send her back!”

It was that chant, and not Trump himself, that made the most news at the rally. On Thursday, we learned that while willing to own his own racism, Trump isn’t yet to prepared to own the racism his speech arouses. He claimed that he was “not happy” with the chant! He insisted that he had tried to still the crowd by speaking very quickly! That was a lie, of course, which everybody called out. As the video shows, he paused and listened to the crowd’s chant for 13 seconds before speaking again.

Why has Trump suddenly come to terms with his racism? It’s always a mistake to ascribe everything Trump does to forethought and calculation. He’s too impulsive for that. But we know from his Wednesday comments (made before the rally) to the Daily Mail that he’s pleased about the noise generated by his attacks. That goes a long way toward explaining why he pressed the racism button all week, and it’s a strong clue that he will put his thumb on it during the campaign. “The only thing they have, that they can do is, now, play the race card,” Trump said, turning the race onus back on the Squad. “Which they’ve always done.” Omar probably delighted Trump on Thursday when she told Washington reporters that he was a “fascist.” Set your watch for his return fire.

Does Trump’s use of racist tropes indicate that he’s lost his political balance and fallen into the muck? Or does he know something about voters that the coastal elites don’t understand—that to be called a racist by the press and politicians will actually raise his status among people who think they’ve been treated unfairly by being called racists, too?

As New York Times reporters Annie Karni and Maggie Haberman wrote in June, Trump needs a target to stay focused on the campaign trail. Biden, they decided, would become that mark by which he would define his 2020 campaign. But instead, Trump seems to have decided to lay off the 24-candidate scrimmage that is the Democratic field for the time being, and make four junior brown and black female left-wing Democrats his opposition.

The music of Greenville cheering will surely embolden Trump to keep the Squad’s names on his tongue. Every time one of the Democratic candidates defends a Squad member from his racist words—as decency requires them to do—Trump will use to the occasion to nod and say: See, there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between these un-American, anti-Israel socialists and Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren or the rest of the field. Pointing to a growing economy and low unemployment, Trump will say, These are the wonderful things about America that these radicals want to take away.

Not since George Wallace ran for president as an overt racist in the 1960s and the 1970s has a national candidate so willingly and vocally embraced bigotry for political ends. Trump has our full attention now, and we have every reason to fear what he’ll do next to maintain that hold.