Donald Trump’s crisis-riven presidency entered a new phase last week when he launched a blatantly racist Twitter attack on four progressive congresswomen of color, telling them that they should “go back” to the countries they came from. The targets of the verbal assault were House Reps. Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan. This, despite the fact that three of the four legislators were born in the U.S. and the fourth, Omar, is a U.S. citizen who came to America as a child refugee from Somalia.
The original attack by Trump was compounded when, at a campaign rally in Greenville, North Carolina on July 17, the president’s supporters lustily chanted, “Send her back,” in an echo of an earlier Trump rally chant, “Lock her up,” directed at Hillary Clinton. After widespread condemnation of the remarks and chant in the media, and by Democrats and a very few Republicans, Trump falsely claimed he had tried to halt the chants, but later stood behind his initial attack, charging that the congresswomen, were not “capable of loving our country.”
The Democratically-controlled House of Representatives voted 240 to 187 on July 16 to condemn the president’s attack on the four congresswomen as racist. Only four Republicans supported the measure, in the first House rebuke of a president in more than 100 years. Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with William Rivers Pitt, senior editor and lead columnist with Truthout.org, who explains why he believes that Trump’s blatant racist rhetoric and actions are part his re-election campaign’s electoral strategy.
WILLIAM RIVERS PITT: The long and short of it is that this is a campaign tactic. He won in 2016 while losing the popular vote because he won the white vote by more than 20 percent, which is not unheard of. The Republicans always win the white vote by enormous margins. The reasons why candidates like Bill Clinton and then Barack Obama were able to win is because all the other voters, of which there are many millions, came out. Trump managed to arrive in a perfect storm where a great many of those other voters, 49 percent of them, chose to stay home on Election Day and allowed him the margin to exploit. He has a very narrow course to re-election in 2020 and before he needs anybody else, he needs those white voters to come out for him in droves. It’s been a safe bet in the United States to gamble on white grievance in politics for as long as there’s been politics in this country.
So what he’s trying to do is pull back the group that got him elected in the first place. He’s really, I believe, leaning on immigration and all of the racial issues surrounding that because a significant portion of his voter base – you know, a fair portion of it anyway – over the course of the last two years has come to realize that economically speaking, this guy hasn’t kept a great many of his promises. The farmers in particular out in the Midwest and out West are getting clobbered by his tariffs, which are going on and on and the tariffs have begun to expand into the larger business community, some of which supported him for the idea of the tax cuts, which they wound up not really getting. And now these tariffs are cutting into Chinese investment into American companies, which was in the hundreds of millions of dollars and is now all but dried up. So barring any slate of actual policy achievements that he has managed to accomplish aside from a $1 trillion tax cut for a small group of people you and I will never meet, this sort of tactic is one of the only clubs he has in his bag. And he is exactly shameless enough to use it as brazenly he has.
BETWEEN THE LINES: William, I did want to ask you about the Democratic party here. What did you make of the Democratic party’s response in the House of Representatives with condemnation of Trump’s words, but not Trump himself? Many people were very upset that there wasn’t a real more upfront and direct condemnation of Donald Trump for what he stands for.
WILLIAM RIVERS PITT: There’s been a white thumb on the scale in this country since the first European boot hit the dirt, and one of the rules of the House were written by a slave owner. One of the rules of the House is that you can’t disparage the president of the United States directly. Nancy Pelosi was trying to thread that needle by calling his words racist and not him racist. Okay if you’re a Republican Joe Walsh, yelling “You lie,” at Barack Obama during his first day of the Union address. I’ve said for an incredibly long time that one of the single greatest strengths that the modern Republican party enjoys in this country is their utter and complete lack of shame. Anything and everything is on the table for use against the opposition if it gets them five yards down the field. And because it’s about winning, it’s not about being right and it’s about protecting the interests that they are there to protect. The Democrats are still playing by these Marquess of Queensberry Rules and they get run off the road every single time.
The censure vote, the condemnation vote that happened – it was like so much else, it was theater. It didn’t have any teeth. They had to say something. It would have been better if they had been more aggressive with it. But had they gone and called the president of the United States a racist on the floor of the House of Representatives, they would have given up the Republicans the opportunity to have the parliamentarian come down on them and give them all the rest of the day off. And they would have been within the rules to do so.
I’m not standing in front of Nancy Pelosi. I loved the clapping at the State of the Union. And of course I loved facing him down over the government shutdown. But I think that Nancy Pelosi has served this country very poorly, in the intervening months, particularly on the matter of impeachment and on slapping down her own members of her own caucus who are the beating heart of the Democratic majority in the House. And especially in the energized base out there. If you want to lose this election in 2020, keep on doing stuff like that. The establishment will always protect itself first. And, that is what she has been about.
For more information, visit Truthout at Truthout.org to see Truthout articles by William Rivers Pitt.
