Right now, Donald Trump would be expected to run on peace and prosperity. But he’s not. Instead, he’s gunning to further shred the social fabric. Trump, the prime mover of birtherism – false claims that Barack Obama was born in Kenya – loudly broadcasts that his re-election bid will be moored in race-baiting and nativism. It is no longer a dog whistle: America’s cold civil war rages hot.

Trump’s Wednesday night performance in Greenville, North Carolina, introduced a brand new chant, “Send her back!”, which targeted Representative llhan Omar, a Somali-born Muslim. Already, the latest Reuters-Ipsos poll shows the president gaining support from Republicans as a result of his latest offensive. As he observed: “I do think I am winning the political fight … I think I am winning it by a lot.”

In other words, Trump will attempt to paint “the Squad” – Omar and her colleagues Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib and Ayana Pressley – as an updated version of Willie Horton. Horton was the black convicted murderer and rapist whom the Bush 88 campaign used to bring down the then Massachusetts governor, Mike Dukakis, Bush’s Democratic opponent. In Trump’s view, the freshman quartet are poster children for a diverse and left-leaning Democratic party.

Congress has proved to be a useful punching bag, and Trump’s take is that the Democratic House of Representatives can again play that part. In 1948, Truman scored an election day miracle after relentlessly pounding away at a Republican-controlled “do-nothing Congress”, which was as much on the ballot as Truman’s formal opponent, Tom Dewey.

In the run-up to his North Carolina rally, Trump tweeted: “The Democrats in Congress are getting nothing done, not on drug pricing, not on immigration, not on infrastructure, not on nothing! Sooo much opportunity, yet all they want to do is go ‘fishing’.”

As for Dukakis, he was an anti-death-penalty governor who presided over a prisoner-furlough program. On his watch, Horton terrorized a Maryland couple while on a weekend pass. Said differently, even if an old-fashioned north-east pol like Joe Biden is at the top of the ticket, Trump will attempt to cast the Squad as Biden’s running mates. The Republican party has done this before.

Trump has made Ilhan Omar the face of his re-election strategy Read more

Going back in time, the Bush campaign repeatedly attacked Dukakis on crime, the pledge of allegiance and Boston Harbor. But the Democratic nominee idled about. When Bernard Shaw, CNN’s debate moderator, asked Dukakis how would he respond if his wife were raped and murdered, Dukakis gave a bloodless answer. Instead of venting righteous anger at his inquisitor, Dukakis lamely reiterated his stance on capital punishment.

In 2016, Trump attacked Gonzalo Curiel, the judge who oversaw the Trump University fraud case, for simply being a Latino. The fact that Curiel’s brother, Raul, had served in Vietnam was irrelevant to Trump, a draft-dodger. Likewise, Trump had no compunction attacking the parents of Humayun Khan, an army captain and a Muslim, who was slain in Iraq as he tried to save his men. Today, Trump sits in the Oval Office.

In contrast to Curiel and Khan, the Squad evokes broader visceral disdain from Trump’s most loyal core of older white and evangelical voters. Not surprisingly, The Squad is a regular target for attack by Fox News. And on Tuesday night, only four Republicans broke ranks in the vote to condemn Trump’s racist tweets.

Still, unlike 1988, the Democrats have demonstrated a capacity for pushing back. They retook the House last November. This week, for the first time in more than a century, they rebuked a sitting president.

Trump’s bigotry has finally earned official ire. His presidency echoes that of Andrew Johnson, Abraham Lincoln’s impeached successor. It was Johnson who openly disparaged granting free black Americans the right to vote on the grounds that it would place them on the same plane as poor white people.

The latest NBC-Wall Street Journal Poll shows the leading Democratic contenders running competitively against Trump despite low unemployment and a record-high stock market. The same poll has Joe Biden leading Trump by nine points, with Biden’s prospective coalition mirroring the electorate that handed the speaker’s gavel to Nancy Pelosi.

Trump’s gambit is by no means foolproof. Bush 41 tried to claim Truman’s mantle in 1992 and was skeptically received. In 1976, Jerry Ford railed against a “vote-hungry, free-spending congressional majority on Capitol Hill”, but came up short. Ford lost to Jimmy Carter.

For the moment, the Democrats appear united again by Trump, the party’s fissures temporarily cauterized by the president’s venomous rage. But with election day 2020 more than 15 months away, the Democrats cannot take party unity or electoral support for granted. Like Truman, Trump has already pulled off one upset and, as was the case in 2016, America’s cultural divide will again be staring voters in the face.