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Trump is in trouble, so he's reaching for his ace in the hole: hate
This is a perilous political moment for President Trump, which means that it’s time to pay a visit to the well of resentment and hatred that got him to the White House.
This week, the president has promoted two stories — an imagined oppression of white farmers in South Africa and the murder of an Iowa woman named Mollie Tibbetts — that offer a vivid illustration of how he and the entire conservative movement use race-baiting to keep the Republican base in a state of agitation and anger, the better to take the focus away from issues that could weaken the standing of the president and his party.
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The answer lies in the fact that Trump is not an outlier within the GOP. It’s not as though he dragged an unwilling party toward the use of race-baiting as a core political tactic. He’s only the most visible manifestation of a strategy that reaches back decades and today is on a constant hair-trigger. There’s a network of conservative media outlets and political figures always on the lookout for ways they can promote hate, fear and resentment among white people. When something like Tibbetts’ murder happens, they swing into action. Trump’s own involvement actually comes only after he has been alerted to the case by this network.
So on Wednesday, the morning of that rally, Axios reported that “Former Speaker Newt Gingrich emailed Axios’ Mike Allen to make sure that we’d be covering” the Tibbetts story, which was already in heavy rotation on Fox News. Gingrich — who is more responsible than any other single figure for America’s slide into vicious, bitter partisanship over the last couple of decades — explained that “If Mollie Tibbetts is a household name by October, Democrats will be in deep trouble. If we can be blocked by Manafort-Cohen, etc., then GOP could lose [the House] badly.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2018/08/24/trump-is-in-trouble-so-hes-reaching-for-his-ace-in-the-hole-hate/?utm_term=.f3a7aa746897
This week, the president has promoted two stories — an imagined oppression of white farmers in South Africa and the murder of an Iowa woman named Mollie Tibbetts — that offer a vivid illustration of how he and the entire conservative movement use race-baiting to keep the Republican base in a state of agitation and anger, the better to take the focus away from issues that could weaken the standing of the president and his party.
-----------
The answer lies in the fact that Trump is not an outlier within the GOP. It’s not as though he dragged an unwilling party toward the use of race-baiting as a core political tactic. He’s only the most visible manifestation of a strategy that reaches back decades and today is on a constant hair-trigger. There’s a network of conservative media outlets and political figures always on the lookout for ways they can promote hate, fear and resentment among white people. When something like Tibbetts’ murder happens, they swing into action. Trump’s own involvement actually comes only after he has been alerted to the case by this network.
So on Wednesday, the morning of that rally, Axios reported that “Former Speaker Newt Gingrich emailed Axios’ Mike Allen to make sure that we’d be covering” the Tibbetts story, which was already in heavy rotation on Fox News. Gingrich — who is more responsible than any other single figure for America’s slide into vicious, bitter partisanship over the last couple of decades — explained that “If Mollie Tibbetts is a household name by October, Democrats will be in deep trouble. If we can be blocked by Manafort-Cohen, etc., then GOP could lose [the House] badly.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2018/08/24/trump-is-in-trouble-so-hes-reaching-for-his-ace-in-the-hole-hate/?utm_term=.f3a7aa746897
Hate, fear and bigotry. That's the Republican platform.
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