Trump leans into 'lynching and white vigilantism' as his campaign comes apart: columnist
Former President Donald Trump is falling back on his oldest and most dangerous tactic as his campaign falters near the finish line, Salon's Chauncey DeVega wrote Tuesday — inciting racial hatred and violence.
This, the columnist wrote, is how best to understand his promotion of the lie that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio are eating people's pets, which has triggered harassment and even bomb threats in the community.
Far from apologizing, Trump is turning up the heat, inflaming tensions at a recent New York rally with a story about "young American girls being raped and sodomized and murdered by savage criminal aliens.”
"The mainstream news media and political class — and many among the general public — are responding with shock and disgust that Trump and his agents would traffic in such obvious white supremacist and racist conspiracy theories that are dehumanizing and inciting violence against innocent people," wrote DeVega.
"However, alongside that disgust and outrage is a general failure to understand how these attacks against the Haitian community – which are auxiliary to the larger campaign of racism and misogyny against Kamala Harris — are part of a much older history of white supremacy and racist conspiracy theories and violence in America."
The former president has always dabbled in these sorts of tactics, from whipping up a call for death against the now-exonerated "Central Park Five" to his conspiracy theories about former President Barack Obama not being born in the United States. But he is tapping into a much older ugliness in American politics, DeVega wrote, adding that these kinds of lies and mass racial panics are commonplace throughout U.S. history in response to demographic change.
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"Trump’s lynching and white vigilantism appeals are part of his strategy of eliminationist rhetoric about non-white migrants, immigrants, and 'illegal aliens' where he promises, like Hitler, to purify the blood of the nation by purging the human vermin," wrote DeVega. Moreover, Trump, by holding his rallies at the locations of former "sundown towns" that used a mix of laws and terroristic threats to exclude nonwhite people, he is sending a clear signal about his intentions.
"Donald Trump, his MAGA movement, and the other neofascists are enemies of multiracial pluralistic democracy and the good society," DeVega concluded — and Vice President Kamala Harris and the political media "have less than 60 days before Election Day" to drill this into voters' heads "if they want to stop Dictator Trump and his authoritarian movement from taking power and inflicting great pain on Americans on both sides of the color line."