It occurs to me that there may not be a single adult in America who has not yet seen at least one of Donald Trump’s campaign speeches or interviews, and those of us who are dyed-in-the-wool news junkies have been watching his media appearances for the past 25 years. What we have learned through the course of those repeated exposures is that he is uniquely incapable of changing his rhetoric, pivoting to a different message, or employing a fresh strategy.
His campaign managers, along with 60 percent of the electorate, cringe every time he opens his mouth. He is notoriously undisciplined, often struggles to decode the prepared remarks on his teleprompter, and then, unable to read what is right in front of him, gives up and goes rogue.
The motto of his previous campaign managers was “Let Trump be Trump,” but one suspects that they arrived at this conclusion after seeing that he was never going to be able to demonstrate even a shred of self-restraint. Expecting otherwise would have been an exercise in futility. It seems likely that the same combination of angst and resignation afflicts his current campaign staff as well, since Trump appears unable to stand in front of a microphone without saying something deeply derogatory about someone.
Going rogue is nothing new for Trump. He took out a full-page ad in The New York Times in 1989 calling for the death penalty for five young Black men falsely accused of a rape in Central Park that they did not commit.
After spending years in prison, they were finally exonerated and released—no thanks to Trump. He would have happily executed five young men whose only crime was walking through Central Park while Black, and no one should be surprised that he has yet to offer them an apology.
Mr. Trump went before Congress in 1993 to whine and complain about Native Americans having what he considered an “unfair” advantage in the casino business. Before he was done airing his petty grievances, he managed to state that the native tribes who operate casinos “don’t even look like real Indians.”
One wonders what he thought Native Americans were supposed to look like in 1993. Did he think they would be wearing feathered bonnets, animal skins, and war paint? Evidently, he expected all Native Americans to look like they were on their way to audition for “Custer’s Last Stand.”
In 2011, Mr. Trump insisted that Barack Obama was born not in the United States but in Kenya. That was a lie, of course, as anyone anchored to reality understood at the time. The impetus for this assertion was Trump’s underlying belief that Black people are unfit to hold office, so he cooked up a meritless—and deeply offensive—birther allegation. Mr. Trump then claimed to have sent a team of private investigators to Hawaii, where they would finally unearth irrefutable proof of Obama’s foreign birth.
Needless to say, Trump had done no such thing—he was just making up another lie on the fly, which has always been his singular gift—and was somehow unable to admit the stupidity of his birther assertion until he himself ran for president in 2016. During his campaign he was buttonholed by a gaggle of persistent reporters and grudgingly conceded that Obama was born in the United States.
Recently, Mr. Trump continued his practice of flaunting his social and racial animus by appearing at a National Association of Black Journalists event, insulting the female moderator as “late,” “rude,” and “disrespectful” (Trump hates being challenged by women and really hates being challenged by women of color), and insisting that Kamala Harris, whose father was Jamaican and whose mother was Indian, had recently “turned Black” as a “DEI” candidate.
Harris has always identified as both Southeast Asian and Black. She attended Howard University, is a life-long member of AKA, the oldest of the Divine Nine sororities, and was an active member of the Congressional Black Caucus. She celebrates her Indian heritage as well, and is proudly biracial. Evidently, Trump is either unaware or unconcerned that biracial individuals make up over 10 percent of the electorate, and those who identify primarily as Black make up another 12 percent.
Not content to leave any voter unrepulsed, he went on to insist, for the millionth time, that undocumented Latino migrants were stealing Black jobs. Given that he has already branded undocumented Latinos as “drug dealers and rapists,” the implication seems to be that Black people are criminals, too. Or perhaps he believes that Latino and Black people are only capable of competing for low-skill, low-wage jobs, which is equally insulting.
There is nothing Donald Trump loves more than a good stereotype, and insulting two ethnic groups in a single sentence probably felt to him as if he had just won the lottery.
Voters of Hispanic heritage make up 13 percent of the electorate. Let’s add that to the 10 percent of voters who are biracial and the 12 percent of voters who are Black. In one 30-minute public appearance, Trump managed to offend 35 percent of the electorate, proving once more that he is so politically tone deaf that someone should equip him with bilateral hearing aids.
His campaign staff, who were undoubtedly standing directly off stage with their mouths hanging open as they watched their candidate implode in front of a live audience, finally yanked him off the dais midway through his appearance. Unfortunately, they waited too long: They allowed him to insult a roomful of Black journalists for half an hour, on camera. It was too late for damage control, and too late to consider the wisdom of allowing their candidate to have a racist meltdown on national TV.
It should have been a foregone conclusion; any campaign aide who does not expect Trump to enter a room and immediately offend most of the people in it is simply not paying attention.
Trump specializes in the politics of subtraction and division, and it is a voter-turnout strategy that is notoriously flawed. Most politicians seeking to win their races practice the politics of addition and multiplication. They want to attract as many voters as possible so that they can build a vibrant coalition of enthusiastic supporters. This is why the Republican Party keeps losing national elections: They seem to think that offending as many voters as possible will somehow lead to electoral success. How many times they will have to learn that the politics of subtraction and division leads to defeat is anyone’s guess.
Donald Trump won the presidency once, although he lost the popular vote by millions. By his second run, the American electorate was well acquainted with his signature mélange of narcissism, bullying, and incessant lying, and decided they had had more than enough of Mr. Trump. Now he is running again, using his tired old playbook of racism, antisemitism, misogyny, bald-faced lies, and bullying. To paraphrase a well-known adage, insanity is doing the same dumb thing over and over, yet somehow expecting a different result.
Mr. Trump is clearly a big fan of that unfortunate model. He is hard at work alienating all of the voters whom Harris is more than willing to embrace. He seems not to understand that they were the very same voters who elected both Barack Obama and Joe Biden.
The only people in America who will be likely to cast a vote for Mr. Trump will be the MAGA faithful. They love hearing their biases and resentments amplified, which is why they adore him. The family that hates together, stays together. The MAGA minions are baked in the cake.
Sadly, they appear to be one of only two ingredients in the recipe: They supply plenty of vitriol and dystopian shadow PACs with barrels of cash act as the leavening agent. If you mix those two things together and expose them to Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric, you, too, can produce a really ghastly electoral soufflé.
Cooking tip: It collapses immediately when the rest of us vote.
If Mr. Trump thinks that his return to the White House will be guaranteed if he can just drive away enough voters, then he has not yet grasped the straight-forward mathematics of addition and multiplication. This is not to say that his voter-turnout machine is ineffective—quite the contrary. His current strategy will likely lead to massive voter turnout this November, and a decisive victory for Kamala Harris.
Thanks Donald, and keep up the good work.
