Donald Trump demonstrates every day that he is truly America’s first White President. The former president's latest display of the behavior that earned him such an ignominious title occurred at a recent rally in Pennsylvania during which Trump singled out Republican Rep. Byron Donalds.
“That one is smart. You have smart ones and then you have some that aren’t quite so good.” Trump did not offer any explicit explanation for who the "not-so-good ones” are.
Byron Donalds is a Black man. He is also a prominent Trump campaign surrogate. Trump’s “praise” of Donalds as one of "the smart ones" is quite familiar to most Black Americans. It is a version of such white racist language and logic as “you are not like the other ones” or “you are so articulate.” The underlying assumption is that Black people as a group are stupid, dumb, unintelligent, inherently childlike and primitive, possess “bad culture” and in other ways are inferior to white people.
White Americans and most other non-Black people in this society almost certainly understand Trump’s meaning as well. Racism is a cultural practice and set of widely understood and learned behaviors. In that way, Americans are highly “literate” in racism and white supremacy even if they do not consciously subscribe to such values and beliefs.
Trump’s “praise” of Donalds is part of a larger pattern where the corrupt ex-president identifies “his” so-called special African-Americans to metamorphically — if not literally — pat on the head at his rallies and other events. Trump does this as a way of immunizing himself against charges that he is racist. It is a version of the “my best Black (or brown) friend” defense that many white people use when confronted by their racist behavior. In reality, such praise, especially from someone like Trump who is generally of poor character and has repeatedly shown himself to be a racist and a white supremacist, is an insult and act of gross condescension towards any self-respecting Black person.
In his new book, Trump’s nephew, Fred Trump III, alleges that the corrupt ex-president uses racial slurs against Black people in private. Donald Trump’s public praise of Black people is disingenuous poison.
As author and political commentator Keith Boykin explained in a post on X/Twitter, “Trump’s describing Rep. Byron Donalds today as one of the 'smart ones' continues his disturbing racial pattern of tokenizing Black men for his political needs.”
The claim that there are “good Blacks” and “bad Blacks” is an example of old-fashioned racism where, by some standard established by white people (in this case a white man such as Trump), the “good Blacks” are compliant, happy and grateful, do not challenge white society, and fulfill societal expectations and stereotypes that are in agreement with white fantasies about Black people as being happy in a subordinate status and who place the emotional and other needs of white people above their own.
Several weeks ago, at the National Association of Black Journalists conference in Chicago, Trump attacked Kamala Harris’s personhood as a Black woman, suggesting that she is some type of racial trickster figure who can’t make up her mind if she is Black or Indian. This is another example of Donald Trump being so arrogant and racist as to decide, per his criteria as a 78-year-old white man, who the "real" and "fake", and the “good” and the “bad” Blacks are.
Trump has made similar claims about “good” and “bad” members of other ethnic and racial minority groups as well. For example, Trump has repeatedly described Jewish Americans who do not support him and the Republican Party as being “bad Jews" who need to "have their heads examined." During a July radio interview, Trump agreed with the host’s slur that Kamala Harris’s husband Doug Emhoff is a “crappy Jew.” [For Donald Trump, given his extreme egomania and other pathological behavior, the most important criteria for deciding who is a “good” or “bad” person is if they like him or not.]
Last week, MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell offered an explosive critique of Donald Trump and his long history of racist and white supremacist behavior. During an extended monologue, O’Donnell pondered is Donald Trump “the most racist president in history who has not owned slaves?” It will be the task of historians and other experts to answer O’Donnell’s question. Based on the evidence, their answer will likely be quite damning.
Donald Trump’s racist and white supremacist praise of Byron Donalds as one of the “smart ones” is not “harmless,” a “gaffe,” or just Trump “riffing.” Such behavior is part of a centuries-old political strategy in America.
Trump is a political entrepreneur. His behavior is based on a calculation, correct or not, that it will pay political dividends. Here, Trump and his advisors have decided that racism and other “politically incorrect behavior” will be a net gain because Trump’s followers and other potential voters will respond positively to it. Based on the evidence, such a conclusion is not an unreasonable one.
For example, those white Americans who hold racist and racially resentful values towards Black and brown people are more likely to support the Republican Party and Donald Trump than they are the Democrats. Trumpists are also much more likely to hold racist and white supremacist values than are the general public. Contrary to the mainstream news media’s repeatedly disproved conclusion that it was (white) “working class” anxiety that drove Trump’s support in 2016 and 2020, political scientists and other experts have shown that it is actually white racism and white racial resentment that were and are the primary determinants of support for Trump(ism). A majority of Trump and Republican voters now believe in the antisemitic white supremacist Great Replacement conspiracy theory that non-whites are being “imported” into the country to “replace” white people. Other research has shown that a large percentage, if not the majority of white Republicans and Trumpists, would support a dictatorship in America instead of sharing equal political and social power with non-whites.
“Identity politics” can be either helpful to society or destructive of social cohesion and democracy itself. When used to bring people of different races, religions, and gender identities into the larger structure of society — to empower and lift up those who’ve traditionally been oppressed — identity politics becomes a platform for ultimately ending itself; once everybody has equal opportunity, it’s no longer needed.
The dark side of identity politics occurs when the dominant race/religion/gender (in today’s America that’s white Christian men) identifies people who aren’t part of their group as an “other” and uses this otherness as a rallying cry to enlist members of the powerful in-group against the “outsiders.”
This is what the GOP has been doing ever since 1968, when Richard Nixon picked up the white racist vote that Democrats abandoned in 1964/1965 when LBJ pushed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act through Congress.
Nixon talked about his white “silent majority.” Reagan emphasized “states’ rights” to suppress the civil and voting rights of minorities. GHW Bush used Willie Horton to scare white voters in 1988 the same way his son vilified Muslims to win re-election in 2004. And, of course, Trump has been “othering” nonwhite people and women ever since he started his notoriously racist and hateful birther movement in 2008.
Quite predictably, Donald Trump’s racist and white supremacist “praise” of Byron Donalds was not widely covered by the mainstream American news media.
Racial attitudes and beliefs are not about what is in someone’s heart, their intent, or bad words. Instead, racial attitudes and beliefs are a normative judgment about society, how it should be organized, and which groups and individuals should be privileged or not based on their perceived racial identity or other group membership. As such, a politician or other leader’s racial attitudes and beliefs are inherently an important matter of public concern and “newsworthy.” But the mainstream news no longer views Trump's racist behavior as meriting much attention because it is not new or novel (“it is all just Trump being Trump” and “Everyone knows already!”). Such a decision normalizes white racism and white supremacy and minimizes its negative impact on Black and brown people and American society as a whole.
At this point in the election, Trump’s preliminary racist (and sexist) attacks on Kamala Harris have not been effective. Polls and other research show that Trump may actually lose independent and other voters outside of his base because his racism and other crude behavior are viewed as being another indication that he is a chaotic and disruptive figure who American society needs to move past.
The challenge for Trump and his campaign is going to be how to modulate the racist, white supremacist, and other attacks in such a way as to damage Kamala Harris by presenting her as someone “out of step” with “real Americans” without being so overt as to push away non-MAGA voters — or perhaps even mobilize them against him.
In an excellent new essay at CNN, Stephen Collinson highlights how Trump and his campaign are attacking Harris’ racial identity as representative of her supposed untrustworthiness: “He and his running mate, JD Vance, implied her mixed race — heritage that millions of Americans share — is evidence of a sinister 'chameleon'-like character that also explains policy reversals on energy and immigration. In an ugly moment, he amplified a sexually themed social media slander against her. And his dark campaign ads allege she will slash Social Security benefits by welcoming millions of undocumented migrants to the country.”
Collinson continues, “Trump’s invective amounts to some of the most hardline political rhetoric in years, even by his own standards, and means the next two months are likely to be brutal.
The question is whether this barrage of negative attacks is merely successful in stoking feelings of existential anger Trump uses to drive his base to the polls, or whether it begins to tarnish Harris at the margins in battleground states.”
At this point, Harris is not emphasizing her racial background, identity or the truly historic nature of her presidential campaign. Instead, she is offering a more hopeful and positive vision of America’s future as compared to the darkness, chaos, negativity, and threats of revenge and dictatorship offered by Trump.
Sooner rather than later, Kamala Harris is going to have to directly and forcefully respond to Trump’s racist, sexist and other vile attacks on her personhood. She cannot continue to just brush them off or use them to mock Trump.
When Harris finally directly engages Trump on these matters it will be an opportunity to claim (even more) moral authority and to frame the 2024 election as a referendum on the country’s national character. Kamala Harris is a quintessential American. Ultimately, Harris’s life story as the child of immigrants, and now the first Black and South Asian woman to be nominated by a major party as its presidential candidate, is a powerful weapon that can be used to beat back the new Jim and Jane Crow apartheid and an attempt to bring American back to the worst part of its history that Trump and his neofascist MAGA movement represent.
