It used to be that you had to go to the dark recesses of the web to find white supremacist memes about immigrants of color poisoning the blood of the nation. In 2024, those memes are now distributed by one of the two major political parties in the United States, using a platform owned by the world’s richest man.
“Import the third world. Become the third world,” Donald Trump’s official campaign account posted on X, billionaire Elon Musk’s more racist version of Twitter. The post was accompanied by side-by-side images, one of an idyllic suburban home hanging an American flag, the other (“Your neighborhood under Kamala”) a group of largely Black men.
Very fine people these immigrants are not, according to the Republican Party’s candidate for president. Elect Vice President Kamala Harris, whose biracial background is both confounding and upsetting to the Trump-Vance ticket, and the message is clear: White folks might see people of color — Black men, even — in their very own neighborhood.
It’s nothing new for the 78-year-old Trump, a man who was sued by the Department of Justice more than 50 years ago for allegedly refusing to rent apartments to Black people (the case was settled with a promise not to discriminate in the future). It is, in fact, a replay of his 2020 strategy, when — falling behind in the polls, then as now — he warned that radical leftist Joe Biden would “destroy our suburbs,” his campaign bolstering that claim with an ad showing an elderly white woman facing a home invasion.
As it turns out, crime has dramatically fallen under President Biden, following a record spike in homicides under Trump, and our tracts of precious single-family housing are still there, not yet destroyed by sensible, mixed-use development with decent public transit. If the “woke left” is indeed “waging a full scale war on the suburbs,” as the Trump campaign asserts on its website, their military outposts must be disguised as a Panera Bread.
That this is nothing new for Trump is a commentary on the fact that, pushing 80 and visibly declining: This is is who the guy is — he cannot change; there will be no pivot.
Not all Republican voters are white, of course, nor are they all out-and-out racists. Putting aside questions of complicity, the fact is that millions of Americans are content to put their head in the sand and convince themselves that vote for the GOP in 2024 is a vote for lower taxes, if nothing else. Turn off the TV and don’t look at your phone and you might just be able to convince yourself that the guy from “The Apprentice” is just a competent businessman who will “fix” an economy that remains the envy of the world.
But Trump makes it hard to ignore him; that in turn makes it hard for other Republicans to explain away his and his campaign’s obvious racism, which has its appeal to a large section of his base but in turn makes it harder to win over, say, a majority of suburban white women still mad about losing their reproductive freedom.
“I think what they want is someone who’s going to care about them,” Nikki Haley, Trump’s former ambassador to the United Nations, said Tuesday on Fox News. “They want someone who’s focused. They want someone who’s going to talk about the status of education right now in this country ... They want someone to talk about home ownership and how hard it is to own a home.”
Haley, who has pledged to vote for Trump despite previously calling him “unhinged,” “diminished” and “not qualified to be the president of the United States,” is unlikely to now believe there is a softer, kinder version of Trump who can resist playing the race card; she is more likely to be running for 2028. But she’s not alone in wishing, publicly, that Trump would be something that he’s not.
“The winning formula for [former] President Trump is very plain to see: It’s fewer insults, more insights and that policy contrast,” ex-adviser Kellyanne Conway said this week on Fox Business.
“The problem I have with Kamala Harris is not her heritage, it is her judgment,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., chimed in recently. “I would encourage [former] President Trump to prosecute the case against Kamala Harris’ bad judgment.”
Whether in denial of just feigning it, the impact of such entreaties is likely to be the same. Trump may know, on some level, that his best chance to win is to continue lying about the economy — he’s set to do so in a speech in North Carolina — but he absolutely, and demonstrably, cannot change. He is too old for that. Republicans who aren’t on board with that can either recognize their own bad judgment and quit the party, now completely dominated by its MAGA faction, or embrace what it has become.
