Earlier on Sunday, in the same wink-wink manner with which he had “disavowed” the Ku Klux Klan, Mr. Trump said on NBC’s “Meet the Press”that he doesn’t condone violence, even as he justified and encouraged it. He defended the supporter who punched a young protester in the face in North Carolina last week and who said afterward that maybe he’d have to “kill him” next time, saying, “He obviously loves this country and maybe he doesn’t like seeing what’s happening to the country.”
Trump’s History of Encouraging Violence
Donald J. Trump has appealed to the raw anger of voters and encouraged crowds at rallies to use force against protesters who are disruptive.
Donald Trump, Chicago, and the Lessons of 1968
But it’s also clear that this is only Trump’s public slogan. The implicit one, increasingly difficult to avoid as the campaign winds closer to the nomination, is a masterstroke of racial populism: White Lives Matter.
.. The Chicago Democratic Convention protests were directed at a political establishment that was responsible for Vietnam, and more broadly for a sense that skewed national priorities had victimized ordinary citizens. Trump’s supporters are not animated by any literal war, but they are fully invested in a rhetorical one, and all the indignation, victimhood, and chaos-brokering of 1968 finds its reactionary equivalent in the current Republican front-runner.
Early dismissals of Trump (including mine) were rooted in a presumption that the public would see through the billionaire’s cartoonish braggadocio and ostentatious displays of wealth.
.. Polls conducted during the Obama era have consistently shown that large pluralities of whites believe that they, not blacks, Latinos, or Asian-Americans, are the primary victims of racism in contemporary America.
.. Trump is, in a very real sense, presiding over a White Lives Matter movement.
.. The low-tax, anti-government rhetoric that defines modern Republicanism has its roots in the simmering white resentments that emerged in the late nineteen-sixties, animated by the belief that the federal government had become a tool for redistribution of white wealth into the hands of undeserving black and brown communities. Donald Trump represents the full expression of that belief.
.. Earlier this week, a Trump supporter punched a black protester in the face. (Police for some reason then scrambled to seize and handcuff the protester, not the punch-thrower, though the punch-thrower was later charged with assault.)
Trump Is No Accident
You can see the continuing power of the orthodoxy in the way all of the surviving contenders for the Republican nomination, Mr. Trump included, have dutifully proposed huge tax cuts for the wealthy, even though a large majority of voters, including many Republicans, want to see taxes on the rich increased instead.
.. But demagogy and appeals to tribalism help more. Racial dog whistles and suggestions that Democrats are un-American if not active traitors aren’t things that happen now and then, they’re an integral part of Republican political strategy.
.. For the underlying assumption behind the establishment strategy was that voters could be fooled again and again: persuaded to vote Republican out of rage against Those People, then ignored after the election while the party pursued its true, plutocrat-friendly priorities. Now comes Mr. Trump, turning the dog whistles into fully audible shouting, and telling the base that it can have the bait without the switch. And the establishment is being destroyed by the monster it created.