Trump’s Latest Racist Ad is More of The Same

We Know Who Trump Is, Now We Have to Act Accordingly

Image from the Trump 2020 campaign.

On Thursday, President Donald Trump tweeted a meme critical of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden. It featured an image of two heavily-tattooed Latino gang members thanking Biden for allowing them to stay in the country.

Twitter was outraged by the blatant racism in this message.

Raw Story culled some of the comments.

“This is the kind of s**t that led to El Paso,” said Joaquin Castro. Another Twitter user compared it to the infamous Willie Horton ad.

Donald Trump’s Comments On Immigrants: They’re Rapists. They All Have AIDS | Velshi & Ruhle | MSNBC

But Trump has shown us who he is for the past three years, we shouldn’t be surprised by now. He won in 2016, by appealing to the racial fears of America’s rapidly shrinking white majority and he plans to use the same playbook in November.

Electing a Black President Was a Bridge Too Far

Say what you will about Trump, but he’s a cunning manipulator of public sentiment. I guess all demagogues are. He was able to tap into white America’s fears about the country’s changing demographics, anti-immigrant sentiment and anger at President Barack Obama.

Hatred of Latino migrants was also another large part of the Trump presidential campaign. He also featured Latino gang members in ads and promised to deport all undocumented immigrants. I guess Trump’s confederacy of dunces didn’t realize he’s made a habit of hiring undocumented workers for decades. And while he was running for president he had undocumented workers at one of his resorts, a fact later revealed in a 2009 New York Times article.

Looking back, I underestimated the rage that Obama’s presidency generated. His election was something that simply was not meant to happen. A black man with a Muslim last name in the White House? That meant a black man was your superior, and to many white people that was a bridge too far.

And you could see it in their actions. Lt. Col. Terry Latkin took Obama to court claiming that he wasn’t a U.S. citizen and therefore wouldn’t recognize his orders to go to Afghanistan. (Latkin lost the case and was later court-martialed. )

Politicians also carried out petty acts of disrespect. Obama’s picture was taken down in the Oklahoma legislature and Mary Fallin, former Oklahoma governor didn’t meet him at the airport when he arrived for a visit. Jan Brewer, former Arizona governor, stuck a finger in Obama’s face when he arrived at an Arizona airport.

These were symbolic acts. They meant, “We don’t respect Obama and don’t recognize him as the commander-in-chief.” I mistakenly thought that a black man serving as president wouldn’t be a big deal since society had moved forward. The backlash towards Obama and the election of Donald Trump are proof that it was a huge deal.

The Trump presidential campaign was chock full of racism. He created his national platform by claiming he was going to uncover the truth about Obama’s birth certificate. This was BS, but many Americans lapped it up. Former Rep. Joe Walsh used to be a birther and is now stridently anti-Trump. He admitted that he knew questioning Obama’s birthplace was wrong, but it played well with his audience.

War Against Latinos

Hatred of Latino migrants was also another large part of the Trump presidential campaign. He also featured Latino gang members in ads and promised to deport all undocumented immigrants. I guess Trump’s confederacy of dunces didn’t realize he’s made a habit of hiring undocumented workers for decades. And while he was running for president he had undocumented workers at one of his resorts, a fact later revealed in a 2009 New York Times article.

But this is not surprising. These messages are racist propaganda and propaganda works by appealing to the emotions. Fear and anger are powerful motivating factors that drive people to the polls. Unfortunately, few Trump followers realized his message was nothing but smoke and mirrors.

However, Trump’s presidency was more of the same. Hiring neo-Nazis to work in the White House and set policy, slashing refugee numbers, favoring immigration from mainly white countries and, to top it all, referring to African countries as “sh*tholes” and claiming Haitians “all have AIDs.”

Trump Supporters Back His Views

Unlike, The New York Times, I’m not going to pussyfoot around. (Executive Editor Dean Baquet said the paper would let readers decide if Trump was a racist.) Trump is an open white supremacist, there is no discussion on the issue. And that’s why his supporters like him. I was shocked when I watched the HBO documentary “After Truth,” and a Trump rally attendee said he backed Trump because he would support “his white, Christian way of life.”

Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts has witnessed this in years of correspondence from Trump supporters. Pitts said they often claim that allowing a black man to run the country would drive us to ruin and say all black people are “on welfare.”

“Such people validate the verdict of a growing body of scholarship that says, in the words of a new study by University of Kansas professors David N. Smith and Eric Hanley, ‘The decisive reason that white, male, older and less educated voters were disproportionately pro-Trump is that they shared his prejudices and wanted domineering aggressive leaders …’” said Pitts.

Last week boneheaded Trump supporters protested shutdown rules in Michigan. They also showed up with Nazi and confederate flags, managed to block ambulances from transporting patients to the hospital and exposed themselves to the coronavirus.

Trump’s latest anti-immigrant message is more of the same. We know who he is, now we have to act accordingly and show him the door.