Donald Trump Proves Once Again Why Republicans Use Bigotry To Win Elections

By Danny R. Johnson

WASHINGTON, DC – When all the politicians, Republican Party Establishment big wigs, and Conservative Political Action Committee and Super PACs who participated in and sponsored the 2016 Conservative Political Action Conference, which concluded this past Saturday in National Harbor, MD, rail about crime, immigration, welfare or Big Government, they are often really talking about race.

There may not have been much mentioning of Donald Trump’s name during the CPAC event last week, but one thing was clear: The notion that the Republican front-runner is a racist hadn’t really sunk in.

“What did he say to think he’s racist?” said Michael Nabjer, a retired white blue collar Trump supporter from South Texas who was dressed head to toe in “Make America Great Again” gear.

When presented with some recent examples, Nabjer offered his own assessment of Trump’s character. “I don’t think he’s racist,” he said. “How did the man become a successful billionaire if he would treat people like crap?”

Nabjer was one of several CPAC attendees who expressed confusion to San Diego County News as to why so many Americans believe Trump is a racist.

On a national level, the association between racism and Trump is less disputed.

U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) told reporters earlier this week that whoever becomes the Republican nominee has to reject any group or cause built on bigotry — a reference to Trump’s doggedly reluctance days before to disavow the prominent white supremacist David Duke, who has endorsed Trump and just so happens to be a resident of the state of Louisiana. (Trump has since called Duke “a bad person who I disavowed on numerous occasions.”). It was speculated by the cable news media talking heads that Trump did not want to alienate the Duke supporters and “anti-minorities” supporters so close to the March 5 Louisiana Primary, which he handily won.

Three white nationalist leaders have banded together to form their own Super PAC in support of Trump, even though Trump doesn’t want their support so the media is told.

The American National Super PAC funded a robocall effort during the South Carolina Primary, the New Hampshire Primary, and the Iowa Caucus, which was organized under a separate group called the American Freedom Party. On its website, the American Freedom Party says it “shares the customs and heritage of the European American people.”

In a recent interview with CNN, Jared Taylor, online editor of AmRen, the media outlet of the white nationalist group called American Renaissance, stated that “…Most white people would prefer to live in majority white neighborhoods and send their children to majority white schools, and deep in their bones, they are deeply disturbed by an immigration policy that is making the United States majority non-white,” said Taylor. “So when Donald Trump talks about sending out all the illegals, building a wall and a moratorium on Islamic immigration, that’s very appealing to a lot of ordinary white people.”

Politically sophisticated demagogues don’t yell “Nigger”, “Wet Backs”, or “Jew Boy” anymore. They’ve learned better. Just as David Duke shed his Klansman’s sheets and Nazi uniform back in the 1980s for the well-groomed banality of a suburban stockbroker, he traded in his bigoted rhetoric for a slick new glossary of coded appeals to racial resentment, market tested over the past two previous decades of the 1960s and 1970s by mainstream conservative politicians.

When Duke, followed Richard Nixon’s lead, denounced hiring “quotas,” many among his white working-class supporters heard him saying, the government is going to give your jobs to African Americans. When Duke, like Ronald Reagan, castigated “welfare queens,” nobody has to be told what color they are.

Which is why white supremacists such as Taylor use code words to disguise their support for Trump:  “They will say that I support Donald Trump because he’s going to send away all illegal immigrants and build a wall and that he wants to put a moratorium on Islamic immigration, and I will say that what this means is that he wants immigrants who will assimilate to our Western values. And I’m all for that, and I think all of the people in New Hampshire are all for that, too.”

Republicans Exploited Racial Tensions for Decades

Mitt Romney, the former 2012 Republican Presidential Nominee, observed lately in the course of denouncing Trump on the eve of the March 5 primaries and caucuses, “If he succeeds, it will be by appearing to run on a racist platform.” Yet the sad truth is that Trump has been exploiting a political style and strategy that Governors, Senators and Presidents have been using to win elections since 1968, the year Democrat George Wallace demonstrated that white populism, stripped of overtly racist language, could attract support outside the South.

Disguised race baiting persists in politics for a simple reason: it works. “Some of us would like to get beyond this business of scaring people and dividing them against African Americans, Latinos and Muslims,” says one of George W. Bush’s closest political operatives shared with me at the CPAC gathering, “but it’s hard to argue against a formula that’s seen as successful.”

The tactic has succeeded best in states and districts where the minority population is large enough that whites can be made to feel threatened by it. When George Brown ran for re-election as Tennessee’s first African American supreme court justice in 1980, he was quoted as saying he got more support from white hillbillies who had never met an African American professional than he did from whites in the Nashville area, where, Brown says, “a lot of whites think they know about African Americans.”

The continuous sluggish economic conditions, 9-11, threats from ISIS to the Homeland, and lack of blue collar jobs, has created heighten racial and social tension since the 1980s. The country is more polarized than ever since the election of the first African American President, Barack Obama. According to the Institute for Policy Studies, Washington, DC, “Wages in the United States, after taking inflation into account, have been stagnating for more than three decades. Typical American workers and the nation’s lowest-wage workers have seen little or no growth in their real weekly wages.”

Racial tactics can backfire if they are ill-timed or overly strident. Many white voters will abandon any candidate who they judge has crossed the line into blatant racism, which is why we see some of Donald Trump’s support among white Republican primary voters tapering off.

Several top political aides, including the late Lee Atwater, counseled President H.W. Bush to sign the civil rights bill passed by Congress in 1989, rather than make an issue of quotas so long before his next campaign. “Quotas are a legitimate issue,” said one G.O.P. strategist at the time, “but I thought it couldn’t be sustained for 24 months without making a mistake. And when you make a mistake on this issue, it’s a big mistake because it gets you labeled racist, and there’s nothing more sensitive with our yuppie constituency.”

While many politicians are accused of employing racial euphemisms, all deny guilt. The line between legitimate debate and appeals to racism is often fuzzy and turns on the good faith and background of the candidate. Candidates rarely play the race card as baldly as the late former North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms did in 1990 in his race against Democrat Harvey Gantt, the African American former mayor of Charlotte. Helms, who refers to African Americans as “Freds” and had for decades been hostile to civil rights legislation, was eight points behind Gantt three weeks before the election. Then he ran an 11th-hour TV ad showing the hands of a white man crumpling a rejection slip for a job that had been reserved for a “racial quota.” Many Republicans as well as Democrats denounced the ad for inflaming racial animosity. But it worked: Helms came from behind to win, 52% to 48%.

In other cases, however, Republicans as well as conservative Democrats protest that many African Americans and liberals are too quick to cry “racist” at any attempt to discuss explosive, racially tinged issues such as welfare, immigration, crime and affirmative action. “There is no reason for Republicans to be ashamed to talk about racial preferences in terms of equal opportunity,” says former Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele. “You’re probably going to get called a racist, but that won’t stick if you establish credibility on these issues by spending time among African American people, Latinos, and other people of color in businesses, organizations, schools and on street corners,” debating them instead of talking about them.

Former Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Jack Kemp, who used to spend more time among working-class African Americans and minorities than any other H.W. Bush adviser, said that “if you don’t have a positive message to balance talk of racial quotas, you’re going to come across to African Americans as discriminating.”

Disenfranchised White Blue Collar Workers Are Easily Exploited

In the 1992 New York Times Best Seller, Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics, written by Thomas and Mary Edsall, wrote that race “is no longer a straightforward, morally unambiguous force in American politics.” Instead, the Edsalls contended, considerations of race permeate voter attitudes toward such issues as taxation, immigration, government programs, equal opportunity, public safety and moral values. Racism alone, they say, fails to explain why large numbers of white, formerly Democratic voters have defected to the G.O.P. Worse yet, from the Democratic standpoint, blasting the defectors as bigots instead of exploring the complicated reasons for their disaffection only angers them. “Democratic liberals’ reliance on charges of racism guarantees political defeat,” the Edsalls write, “and… guarantees continued ignorance of the dynamics at the core of presidential politics.”

Which explains the reason why the David Dukes, George Wallaces and Donald Trumps of our times can easily exploit the economic and cultural insecurities of southern and mid-western white blue collar workers.

Though some Democrats hope Trump will sully the G.O.P. as a racist party, Democrats must share the blame for Trump’s success and the rising national appetite for Trump’s scapegoating style. Leaders of both parties attribute Trump’s appeal to rising unemployment among white blue collar workers and immigration, yet as Democratic strategist James Carville once stated in a Times Magazine article in the 1990s, a native of Louisiana, observes, it is Democrats who are held most responsible for “failing to define ourselves as we traditionally have, as the party that defends the interests of working people of all races.”

Polling and focus-group studies by both parties show that working-class voters increasingly believe the system is loaded in favor of the rich, immigrants and the poor, at the expense of the middle class. “They see that the top of America and the bottom don’t operate by the same rules as the rest of us,” says Elaine Kamarck, a former senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute in Washington. “The big executives run companies into the ground and give themselves big bonuses. The immigrants are here illegally and take jobs from blue collar workers, engage in crime and have babies they can’t afford, while the average American worker is barely getting by.”

These voters consider both parties to be controlled by wealthy campaign contributors but view the Democrats as also beholden to other “special interests,” including African Americans and other minority groups. Many of Trump’s supporters “don’t resent African Americans and Latinos as African Americans and Latinos,” says a Republican pollster. “They resent them as special-interest groups that gets special favors.”

Democrats also must share with Republicans the responsibility for the barrenness of political debate in which Trump has thrived. When the subject is welfare or public subsidy programs as Obamacare, for example, few leaders of either party point out that the major programs for the poor constitute about 8% of federal spending–far less than the value of corporate tax breaks and other welfare for the wealthy.

“You can’t write off Trump’s voters as racists,” says Mary Matalin, American political consultant well known for her work with the Republican Party. “Trump is talking about things people really care about: high taxes, crummy schools, crime-ridden streets, welfare dependency, illegal immigration, equal opportunity. A lot of politicians on both sides of the political spectrum aren’t talking about these things,” she emphasized.

The Wealthiest 1% Club Will Call the Shots

In the words of the veteran Washington insider Jared Bernstein, senior fellow at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities and former chief economic advisor to Vice President Joe Biden, “There’s this notion that the wealthy use their money to buy politicians; more accurately, it’s that they can buy policy.” Environmental policy, for example, when it comes to energy moguls like the Koch brothers.

And tax policy. Especially tax policy. Bernstein was quoted in one of the most important stories of 2015 – an investigation by The New York Times into how tax policy gets written. Unfortunately, this complex but essential report appeared between Christmas and New Year’s and failed to get the attention it deserves. Here’s the heart of it: With inequality at its highest levels in nearly a century and public debate rising over whether the government should respond to it through higher taxes on the wealthy, the very richest Americans have financed a sophisticated and astonishingly effective apparatus for shielding their fortunes. Some call it the ‘income defense industry’ consisting of a high-priced phalanx of lawyers, estate planners, lobbyists and anti-tax activists who exploit and defend a dizzying array of tax maneuvers, virtually none of them available to taxpayers of more modest means.

Operating largely out of public view — in tax court, through arcane legislative provisions and in private negotiations with the Internal Revenue Service — the wealthy have used their influence to steadily whittle away at the government’s ability to tax them. The effect has been to create a kind of private tax system, catering to only several thousand Americans.

That “private tax system” couldn’t have happened without compliant politicians elected to office by generous support from the donor class. As the right-wing billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife put it: “Isn’t it grand how tax law gets written?”

Sam Pizzigati knows how it happens. He’s been watching the process for years from his perch as editor of the monthly newsletter Too Much!  Reminding us in a recent report that “America’s 20 richest people — a group that could fit nicely in a Gulfstream luxury private jet — now own more wealth than the bottom half of the American population combined, a total of 152 million people,” Pizzigati concludes that one reason these and other of America’s rich have amassed such large fortunes is that “the federal tax rate on income in the top tax bracket has sunk sharply over recent decades.”

So here’s the real value of all that campaign cash and lobbying largesse: underwriting a willingness among legislators and government officials to bend the rules, slip in the necessary loopholes and look the other way when it comes time for the rich to hide their fortunes.

Until American voters come together and unify under one common interest and shared destiny instead of divisions and distrust of each other, the Donald Trumps, political institutions and Super PACs will continue to fleece and exploit our fears and prejudices for their satisfaction and personal gain.

Danny R. Johnson is San Diego County News’ National Political News Editor.