Trump's Racist Appeal To The Suburbs Is Backfiring
Trumps Racist Appeal To The Suburbs Is Backfiring
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/cafe/trumps-racist-appeal-to-the-suburbs-is-backfiring
Trump is trying, and failing, to build a new wall between cities and their suburbs.
TPM Illustration/Getty Images
By Peter Dreier
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August 6, 2020 4:55 p.m.
President Donald Trump has failed to build a physical wall between the U.S. and Mexico, but now he wants to build another wall between Americas cities and their suburbs. In recent weeks hes sought to stoke white resentment with inflammatory rhetoric directed at white suburbanites. But so far they dont seem to be buying what Trump is selling.
In a speech on the White Houses South Lawn on July 16, Trump warned that if Joe Biden is elected president, he will totally destroy the beautiful suburbs. Suburbia will be no longer as we know it. Biden and the Democrats, Trump claimed, want to defund and abolish your police and law enforcement, while at the same time destroying our great suburbs.
The next day, in a remotely-televised rally with supporters in the key battleground state of Wisconsin, Trump said that Democrats wanted to eliminate single-family zoning, bringing who knows into your suburbs, so your communities will be unsafe and your housing values will go down. It was a statement that clearly played on racist fears.
On July 23, Trump tweeted a message targeted to what he called
The Suburban Housewives of America. He warned that Biden will destroy your neighborhood and your American Dream. I will preserve it, and make it even better.
He doubled down in another tweet on July 29: I am happy to inform all of the people living their Suburban Lifestyle Dream that you will no longer be bothered or financially hurt by having low income housing built in your neighborhood, he ranted. Your housing prices will go up based on the market, and crime will go down. I have rescinded the Obama-Biden AFFH Rule. Enjoy!
That last tweet referred to his decision to throw out an Obama administration rule, adopted in 2015, called Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH). The policy had given muscle to the Fair Housing Act, which Congress passed in 1968, by requiring local governments to demonstrate that local policies like zoning rules and the allocation of housing subsidies dont exclude low income housing or exacerbate racial segregation....................................