Trump wants to make America hate again

Today may go down in history.

If Donald Trump does as well as polls indicate, Tuesday, March 15, could be remembered as the day Trump virtually locked down the Republican nomination.

And he’s done it by conducting the most superficial, ridiculous campaign in American history.

Trump has promised everything from a new health care plan that will be cheaper and better in every way to a bizarre vow that during the holiday season people will say “Merry Christmas.”

He says nothing about how he would carry out his alleged agenda.

(Would people be arrested for saying “Happy holidays?” Judging by the threats he hurls at protesters, perhaps so.)

I used to think the William Henry Harrison campaign of 1840 was the dumbest campaign ever. That was the year that Harrison was hailed as the candidate who drank hard cider, which doesn’t strike me as the most important qualification to be president.

But I’d take Harrison over Trump. I might take his skeleton over Trump.

How did we get here? Consider this quote from an unnamed Republican who despaired of his party’s future.

“I’m very much afraid that we’re well on the road to becoming the white supremacy party,” he was quoted saying. “And there’s no turning back.”

You can understand why a Republican today might feel this way, given Trump’s rambling, hate-laced speeches.

But that’s not a contemporary quote. It’s from a column by Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, dated June 24, 1963.

That’s not a typo. More than a half century ago, Evans and Novak reported the comment after speaking with members of the Republican National Committee.

(Before dying of brain cancer in 2009, Novak used to spend time at his summer home in Fenwick Island.)

Ian Haney Lopez, a professor of law at the University of California, Berkley, brought up that long-ago newspaper column at a conference about money, race and politics held last week in Washington, D.C.

The conference was sponsored by Common Cause.

People tend to view Trump as unique, Lopez said. But in many ways he’s the logical extension of a tactical decision to lure Southern Democrats into the Republican Party by making appeals based on race.

In 1968, Richard Nixon sailed that so-called Southern Strategy into the White House.

Trump, of course, has been inciting fear of “others” since the beginning of his campaign, when he warned about “Mexican rapists” coming to America.

He’s also stoked fear of Muslims, and his attacks on President Obama go back to the last election, when he was the most prominent promoter of the “birther” conspiracy. (Typically, Trump never released the information his investigators supposedly found.)

But Haney Lopez advised voters to look beyond Trump’s faux populism and see what he’s actually proposing: a massive tax cut for the rich.

That’s the real issue: money and power.

“Race is not the main point,” he said. “The main point is power.”

The loyalties of the very rich, Haney Lopez said, “are to other very rich people. They can be from Russia. They can be from Saudi Arabia. They can be from Mexico. They can be from whatever … country offers them a tax shelter.

“They don’t care that much about whites in the United States, because they don’t care that much about people in the United States,” Lopez said.

“That’s why they’re busy off-shoring all the jobs and off-shoring all their profits. Race and Big Money go together, most importantly, in this sense that Big Money has realized that it can use race against the rest of us. That’s the really dangerous connection.”

Race, he said, is just another wedge issue. It’s used to convince people that the biggest threats to their lives come from people of other races, “rather than understanding that the real threat comes from corporate power.”

Even more frightening, these corporations “are more than ever global and disconnected from the fate of this country and its working people,” Haney Lopez said.

“The elites,” he said, “have a tremendous desire to see the American people fracture and at each other’s throats.”

“At each other’s throats” might sound like an exaggeration or a metaphor, but check out Trump’s campaign rallies. It’s for real. Unlike Trump’s campaign platform.

Trump may talk about bringing back American jobs for the middle class. In office, he’d be more likely to help his fellow plutocrats.


Don Flood is a former newspaper editor living near Lewes. He can be reached at floodpolitics@gmail.com.