The color line runs straight through every aspect of American society. It's a constant that remains despite the fiction of American exceptionalism and the many myths about whiteness, both big and small, which pretend racism and white supremacy are somehow the backstage or side stage instead of the main stage of American life.
Donald Trump, his advisors, campaign managers, propagandists, surrogates, and consultants — most notably the psychologists and other experts on the human mind and emotions who are in his employ (as they are in both campaigns) — certainly know and understand the power of racism and white supremacy in American (and global) society and how to manipulate it.
As Election Day rapidly approaches, the question is how many Americans want to eat the poisonous slice of racist American pie that Trump and his surrogates are serving?
Trump is a political entrepreneur. He is making decisions based on information, advice, and yes, his instincts. As with all political campaigns, some decisions will be correct and others will prove wrong.
Ultimately Donald Trump is a rational actor. This fact stands apart from if one agrees or disagrees with his goals. To that point, Trump’s escalating racism and white supremacy are a strategy and decision that he and his agents believe will give them the best chance to take power.
The most recent and very bold move in Trump and his campaign’s white supremacist political campaign against Kamala Harris and the Democrats is the conspiratorial lie that Black Haitian immigrants are killing and eating white people’s dogs and cats (and presumably other pets) in Springfield, Ohio.
For more than two weeks, the mainstream news media, members of the Democratic Party and many everyday Americans have been disgusted and aghast at these easily disproven and very dangerous lies and smears of an entire community of people. There is also the hope that Trump’s (and his surrogate mouthpiece and vice-presidential candidate JD Vance’s) racist and white supremacist conspiracism will backfire, alienating more potential voters than it will bring to him.
But Donald Trump does not need to win a majority of the electorate. His base is rock solid at 47 percent; his MAGA political cultists and other followers will not abandon him; they are dead-enders. Trump only needs to win over enough voters — specifically the angry, disaffected, and racially resentful white voters in the key battleground states — to take back the White House. A series of new public opinion polls suggest that Trump and his campaign’s white supremacist and racist air raid gambit (as opposed to the more “subtle” racist and white supremacy of “modern racism” with its “dog whistles”) may actually be working — or at the very least may not be substantially hurting his chances of victory in November.
At the Guardian, Sidney Blumenthal discusses new polling data from YouGov (conducted between September 11 and 12):
Trump knows in his bones that his supporters will believe anything he says. If he ever feels they will abandon him, he cannot shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue. He does not require any evidence, not even spectral, to trigger their need to demonstrate unswerving faith. Once he speaks, declaring miracles, he is certain his supporters will fall to their knees. And, mirabile dictu, a majority, 52%, say it’s true that “Haitian immigrants are abducting and eating pet dogs and cats,” according to a post-debate YouGov poll. Only 5% are willing to confess the heresy that it is “definitely false”, while 25% are agnostically “unsure”.
Trump’s lie about “eating pet dogs and cats” is his best-polling lie. It polled nine points better among his supporters than his lie that “in some states it is legal to kill a baby after birth”. It polled 24 points better than his lie that “public schools are providing students with sex-change operations” and 44 points better than his lie that “noise from wind turbines has been shown to cause cancer.” The raw numbers dictated the emphasis of his fiction.
The illogic of his demagogy gives Trump no pause. He has railed that immigrants are stealing “Black jobs”. He says the Haitians of Springfield are illegal. But they are in fact legal and of course black. They are the black people usurping the “Black jobs”.
Trump knew before he uttered his lie in the debate about “eating pets” that it was untrue.
New polling research from CBS News/YouGov (conducted September 18-20) further demonstrates the effectiveness of Trump and his propagandists’ lies about Springfield and their appeals to white supremacy, racism, nativism, ethnocentrism, and general anti-Black sentiment. At the Washington Post, Philip Bump explains:
That same poll also asked Americans why they thought Trump amplified false claims about Haitian immigrants eating pets in Ohio. Six in 10 Americans think the desired outcome was to make immigrants feel uncomfortable, though only 3 in 10 Republicans agreed. About two-thirds think the intent was to make people fearful of immigrants, with 4 in 10 Republicans agreeing. About 6 in 10 Americans also thought the goal was to “raise awareness about larger issues of immigration” — with 9 in 10 Republicans agreeing.
It’s an elegant summary of what’s happening. Trump’s dishonest demagoguery about immigrants, aimed obviously at stoking people’s fears about immigrants coming to the United States, is polished up by Republicans until it shines with the glow of public policy. Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), didn’t talk about Springfield, Ohio, until the right-wing conversational bubble started lighting up with baseless allegations about pets. That’s when Trump and Vance saw a political opportunity. The result in Springfield was threats against community leaders and the migrants — but Trump gets a pass on that, too. Nearly 6 in 10 Republicans think the threats were probably unrelated to the claims Trump and Vance amplified.
In fairness, immigration is one place where Trump has a stated policy position: Deport people in the country illegally. But there’s no detail beyond that, even as Vance argues that “illegal” is subject to interpretation. Trump’s campaign wants people to vote on the “policy” of immigration, by which he means that he wants people to center fear of immigrants (a subset of the broader fear of change around which his politics orbit) when they’re casting a ballot.
The great irony of the YouGov question about whether “personal qualities” should drive votes is that Trump’s politics have always centered primarily around his personality. He is angry at the people his supporters dislike and pledges to lash out against them, traditions and institutional checks be damned. But most people understand that you shouldn’t say you like Trump’s toxic rhetoric and perpetual punching down. So they say they’re voting on policy … which means the mechanisms by which Trump punches down.
Lies and “facts” are just ammunition for the Trump-MAGA and larger right-wing and “conservative” propaganda and disinformation machine and its assault on reality with the goal of getting and keeping power. For example, in an interview with CNN host Dana Bash, JD Vance basically admitted the Springfield story is a lie: “The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes….If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”
The right-wing news media entertainment echo chamber is a closed episteme and experience machine that is excellent at speaking to and triggering the anxieties and fear and delusions of its audience and then creating a self-sustaining feedback loop that keeps them immersed in the system. It is one of the most powerful and effective propaganda systems ever created.
There is a huge market for Trump and the MAGAfied Republicans and the larger neofascist and “conservative” movement’s hate politics. As decades of research by social scientists and other experts has repeatedly demonstrated, racism and white supremacy in their various forms are central to the brand name of Trumpism, the Republican Party, and the “conservative” movement and larger right wing in the post-civil rights era. Trump and his surrogates' overt racism provides a type of visceral thrill and excitement for his MAGA followers. In that way, like other fake populist and charismatic leaders, Trump is a symbol, totem, and hero who they can live through vicariously. As I have warned many times these last eight years, Donald Trump gives his followers permission to be their worst, true, horrible selves. He speaks for them; in many ways, they are the collective extension of his will and mind.
A sobering new poll from CNN further supports the logic of Trump’s hate campaign and how wide and deep the base of support for his brand of nativism, racism, and white supremacy may in fact be among the American public. Among the CNN poll’s findings are that “a third of Americans believe diversity is a threat to the nation's culture, a number that's tripled since 2019.” The new CNN poll also found that “53% of Republican and Republican-leaning registered voters say they consider growing diversity a cultural threat. While that number has fluctuated over the past eight years, it’s the first time over that period that a majority of Republican-aligned voters have taken that position. In the summer of 2016, as Trump clinched the GOP presidential nomination, it was 39%; that dipped to 20% in 2019 before rising to 40% last spring amid the run-up to the 2024 Republican presidential primary.”
Once again, Donald Trump and his political advisors, propagandists, and other operatives are not crazy or stupid or whatever other name the liberals, progressives, centrists in the news media and among the Democratic Party and general public would like to call them. Trump and his MAGA brain trust have a plan, and they are sticking with it. At the time of this writing, Harris and Trump are essentially tied in the polls.
