What Trump is talking about when he talks about race

And why it puts him on a course to defeat

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Last Wednesday, after a week or more of Kamala Harris basking in positive media coverage and enjoying a surge in the polls (she now leads Trump by 1.5% on average), Trump tried to seize back control of the news cycle. And he did it by returning to one of his favorite subjects: race.

The venue, as I think you know by now, was a National Association of Black Journalists event in Chicago. Trump took questions for about thirty minutes before his aides pulled him off the stage, and the result was a Biden-debate level disaster.

It’s important to look at this event in context. Trump and his campaign have been talking for some time now about how they’re making a serious play for African-American voters. Biden won black voters by a huge margin in 2020, getting about 90% of their votes. But his numbers had been slipping with this group over the last few years, just as they’ve been slipping with pretty much every other demographic group. Rather than seeing this as part of Biden’s overall problems, the Trump campaign’s somewhat troll-ish response was to claim that Trump was making serious in-roads with African-Americans.

Then Kamala Harris entered the race.

Like any other group, African-American voters are not a monolith. But it’s clear that if you take an old and broadly unpopular white guy out of the race and replace him with a dynamic, popular African-American, then that’s going to firm up your numbers with African-Americans. And so it did. But Harris’ entrance into the race did much more than that - it vastly increased the standing of Democrats in pretty much every demographic group, so much so that current polls and forecasts now have her narrowly winning the election.

As a result, Trump entered the event in Chicago with two problems. One was that his sort of troll-ish claim to be trying to seriously win over African-Americans was out of the window. But the other, much broader, problem was that he was now haemorrhaging voters everywhere. And that meant with the white voters that he actually cares about and needs to win this election.

And so the stage was set.

If there’s one thing Trump knows well, it’s the power of racial division. America’s dark racial history is the raw material out of which he has fashioned much of his political appeal. It’s his safe space. Faced with the choice between doubling down on winning the support of racists or making good on his talk of a multi-racial coalition, he is never ever going to choose the latter.

The result was a blustering, offensive tirade. The most talked about moment came when Trump seemed to question if Harris is actually really a black woman, claiming that she used to identify as Indian-American and only recently chose to identify as black because it would bring her some unspecified political benefit. This is a flagrant lie, not only because Harris has always identified as black, but also because - as Nikole Hannah Jones pointed out in an article yesterday - being black is not a choice, it’s a characteristic assigned to you by others. People don’t choose to be black; society makes that choice for them.

As always with Trump, it’s hard to tell if he really is as dumb as he sounds, or if he just thinks his supporters are. I lean towards the former, but either way, the point here seems to be to somehow make the idea of a biracial identity seem alien, even phoney - as if race itself is just some giant hoax perpetrated on decent white folks in order to scam them. It’s a viewpoint profoundly out of touch with the reality of modern America, in which upwards of 30 million people identify as multiracial and tens of millions more have a family member who does. Certainly there are also people who will see things the same way Trump does, but is it enough to win him the election?

Trump’s attempt to portray Harris as some strange and alien individual is also evident in the way that he keeps mispronouncing her name, sometimes saying KAH-mala and other times KUH-mala or Kah-MAL-a. The purpose of this, as John McWhorter pointed out in an excellent column, is to underline her supposed foreignness. If she has a name that nobody even knows how to pronounce, or has no set pronunciation, he seems to be saying, can she really be one of us? It’s cheap, dime-store racism. It will certainly work with some people, but is it enough to win him the election?

Nor was Harris Trump’s only target at the Chicago event, during which he made clear that he disdains black people as a whole. He repeatedly criticized the interviewers, moderators and others present as incompetent, rude and offensive, deploying the sort of language which he always deploys against critics who are women, people of color, or both. Perhaps the most revealing exchange of the night was the opening one, which went like this:

INTERVIEWER: Mr. President, we so appreciate you giving us an hour of your time. I want to start by addressing the elephant in the room, sir. A lot of people did not think it was appropriate for you to be here today. You have pushed false claims about some of your rivals, from Nikki Haley to former President Barack Obama, saying that they were not born in the United States, which is not true.

You have told four congresswomen of color who were American citizens to go back to where they came from. You have used words like animal and rabbit to describe black district attorneys. You’ve attacked black journalists, calling them a loser, saying the questions that they ask are, quote, stupid and racist. You’ve had dinner with a white supremacist at your Mar-a-Lago resort.

So my question, sir, now that you are asking black supporters to vote for you, why should black voters trust you after you have used language like that?

DONALD TRUMP: Well, first of all, I don’t think I’ve ever been asked a question so — in such a horrible manner, the first question. You don’t even say, hello, how are you? Are you with ABC? Because I think they’re a fake news network, a terrible network. And I think it’s disgraceful that I came here in good spirit.

Here we see Donald Trump confronted not with some list of made-up grievances, but with a question which is mostly just a collection of his own words, which he is then asked to defend. Any politician who came to speak to representatives of a particular group which they had previously insulted in the most offensive terms would expect to be asked about those insults. But Trump’s reaction isn’t to try to defend himself or even to lie and say his words were taken out of context, but to attack the interviewer as “disgraceful” and “horrible”. It underlines the fact that for him, the role of African-Americans in his version of America is to play their assigned role as a punching bag, and otherwise to be silent. Speaking up or questioning him is a disrespectful disgrace. And at the same time, he suggests, they ought to vote for him!

How exactly this election will go is still anyone’s guess. Many things have happened and still remain to happen. Trump got drop the racism and veer back to talking about the economy, as pretty much every other Republican desperately wants him to do. But at least we can now drop the pretence that Trump sincerely cares about winning African-American votes, or that he’s anything other than a vile bigot. And an election fought on those terms is one he’s very likely to lose.