August 12, 2019

Here’s How Donald Trump Can Fix His Racist Branding Problem

Wang Ying/Xinhua via ZUMA

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The Washington Post has a headline today that makes you go hmmm:

I think we all have a pretty good idea of how Trump could avoid being called a racist. He could stop saying racist stuff all the time. Easy peasy.

For my money, I probably wouldn’t call Trump a racist and I definitely wouldn’t call him a white supremacist. I’d call him a race-baiter. I know I’m out of sync with leftist orthodoxy on this, but words and phrases have actual meanings and I think language works better when we respect their differences:

  • A white supremacist is someone who believes as an ideology that the white race is inherently superior to and should dominate all other races. Adolf Hitler was a white supremacist. Jefferson Davis was a white supremacist. For that matter, pretty much everyone in Europe (or descended from European stock) before about 1900 was a white supremacist.
  • A racist is someone who believes different races have different inherent abilities but doesn’t have any consistent ideology to back it up. They just don’t like folks from other tribes (and they do like being top dog).
  • A race-baiter is someone who may or may not be personally racist but is perfectly happy to make money or win political office by appealing to racists.

Trump is a race-baiter. But is he personally racist? Beats me, and I almost don’t care anyway since I think a race-baiter is generally worse than a racist. Racism comes in various degrees, but sometimes it’s just the result of upbringing and expresses itself as little more than a casual, personal, low-level hostility. Race-baiting, by contrast, is invariably cold-blooded and mass-focused almost by definition. It’s cynical and selfish and demonstrates a willingness to stoke hatred for little more than short-term personal gain.

Genuine white supremacists are thin on the ground these days and don’t wield any serious political power. Racists come in all stripes, but their power has been dwindling for decades and their attitudes have largely been driven out of the public square. They’re still dangerous but getting less so—and that trend will continue as long as political elites make racism publicly intolerable. The only thing that can change this is a resurgence of race-baiting, and that makes race-baiters the most dangerous of them all. Fox News is far worse than their viewers and Donald Trump is far worse than his base.

Those are the people to fight, not the yahoos who yell “Send them back!” at Trump rallies. Without Trump, they’d just be sitting at home and occasionally telling off-color jokes to their buddies. It’s only with people like Trump around that they become toxic.

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WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

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And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

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