Although Donald Trump’s unexpected 2016 electoral college victory over Hillary Clinton was explained by some pundits as a symptom of many American voters’ “economic anxiety,” others identified the TV reality star’s openly racist rhetoric and blatant demonization of immigrants, people of color and religious minorities as his main appeal.
While not forcefully examined in most U.S. corporate media, Trump has a long record of racist statements and actions during his time as a New York City real estate developer, Republican party candidate and one-term president.
In the 1970s, the Justice Department sued Trump for racial discrimination in the apartments he rented. In the 1980s, he purchased full-page newspaper advertisements calling for the death penalty for the black and Latino men in the Central Park Five case —who were later found to be wrongfully convicted of rape. Before his run for president Trump, falsely and repeatedly declared that Barack Obama wasn’t born in the U.S and wasn’t legally permitted to serve as president.
During his time in the Oval Office, Trump openly expressed empathy with white supremacists. After neo-Nazis and other right-wing extremists marched in Charlottesville, Virginia resulting in the murder of civil rights activist Heather Heyer, Trump responded to the violence by saying there were “very fine people on both sides.” Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with James Risen, a best-selling author and Pulitzer Prize winning former New York Times reporter, who explains why he believes that Donald Trump’s racism is the most important driver of his voter support, which is examined in his recent Intercept article, “Racism Is Why Trump is so Popular.”
JAMES RISEN: I think the truth is inescapable that Trump is a racist who has become popular because of his racism. I think that’s a completely obvious statement. And yet the press is afraid to say it. And that’s what really motivated me was, you know, my profession has been afraid of the truth.
SCOTT HARRIS: Well, James, you begin your article by talking about what many people interpret as the reason that so many voters have cast their ballots for Trump in 2016 and 2020 and will again in 2024. And that that reason we’ve heard, is economic anxiety. Tell us about how you interpret the reason we hear constantly from our media that economic anxiety is the reason why so many people overlook all of Trump’s well-documented flaws to vote for a guy because of economic anxiety.
JAMES RISEN: I’ve been deeply frustrated by that, too, because for many years I worked. I was a reporter in Detroit and I was there during the worst of the economic downturns for the auto industry and the steel industry. And if ever there was a time when purely economic anxiety was going to lead to right-wing demagoguery and, authoritarianism, it would have been in the 1980s not today.
The economics situation in the Midwest is much better than it was back then. And so it never rang true to me that that was why this was happening. And having been a reporter for many years, I know what it’s like to talk to people and to interview them. And in the space of a half-an-hour interview at a diner, no one is ever going to tell you the truth about why they voted for somebody.
They’re not going to admit, “Yes, I’m a racist.” And it was a very shallow form of reporting. And reporters were able to go in with a preconceived narrative. “I’m here in Michigan because people are upset about the economy.” It’s easy to get people to talk about something like that rather than saying to a reporter, “I love him because he hates black people.”
That’s just not going to happen. And so in a lot of ways, it was my own frustration with my own profession, which led me to write this and to think about it because it was so obvious to me, having spent a lot of time there, what was really going on.
SCOTT HARRIS: Well, James, in your article, you kind of suss out something that I remember as a quote from President Lyndon Baines Johnson. who once said, “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, if you give him somebody to look down on and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”
I think that gets to the heart of it. You want to speak on that?
JAMES RISEN: Yeah. I think that’s exactly what’s been going on for generations with the Republican party and Trump has been doing it on steroids. The Republican party has been built really on the idea that white working class voters are afraid of their social status in a society that’s becoming more and more diverse. And if you act like they are the victims of some giant conspiracy that will make them feel better, and they will not care that all of your economic policies are benefiting billionaires.
And that’s been the strategy, really, for a long time. But Trump has taken it to new levels, and he’s been much more open and explicit about how he is there for the white man, who is a victim of diversity, a victim of a woke society. And it’s all very transparent. And yet, the press doesn’t want to say that.
Listen to Scott Harris’ in-depth interview with James Risen (15:13) and see more articles and opinion pieces in the Related Links section of this page.
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