Remember the swing voters
Eli Stokols at Politico on the other hand thinks Trump’s game of Tease the Black Journalists blew up in his face.
“She was always of Indian heritage and she was only promoting Indian heritage,” Trump said, prompting audible gasps and murmurs, according to reporters in the room. “I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago until she happened to turn Black and now she wants to be known as Black.”
Trump continued to make the same point about Harris’ ancestry even as one of the moderators, ABC News’ Rachel Scott, interjected that Harris attended an historically Black college and has always identified as Black.
“She was Indian all the way and then all of the sudden she made a turn and she became a Black person,” Trump said.
…
The interview marked Trump’s first major attempt to pivot a campaign designed to defeat Biden toward a younger and more challenging opponent, and laid bare the difficulties the Republican nominee and his movement more broadly may have in taking on a woman of color without veering into misogynistic, racist invective. While many in Trump’s base may agree with his blunt assessment of Harris as a political token, it may reinforce the former president’s vulnerabilities with swing voters heading into the final stretch of what looks to be a very close election.
Ah the swing voters. I always forget about the swing voters. They’re too subtle for me.
Just hours after the event, Trump appeared to double down on the idea that people of mixed backgrounds can’t identify as more than one ethnicity, posting a video on his Truth Social account showing Harris, in his words, “saying she’s Indian, not Black” and calling her a “stone cold phony.”
Ok so Trump is 100% German; his mother’s contribution has nothing to do with the matter, he’s all his father’s idenniny. Hey I don’t make the rules.
Trump’s comments about Harris’ mixed heritage drew an immediate rebuke from the White House, where press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was read Trump’s quote questioning Harris’ race during a press briefing.
“As a person of color, as a Black woman in this position … what he just said, what you just read out to me is repulsive, it’s insulting,” Jean-Pierre said in response. “No one has any right to tell someone how they identify. “
Repulsive and insulting are of course the goal.
In his most watched public appearance since Harris took over for Biden atop the Democratic ticket, Trump’s coarse, cutting and at times snappish responses, including calling one of Scott’s questions “nasty,” showed him to be very much the same person he has always been despite the assassination attempt earlier this month that he initially claimed had changed his outlook and approach.
Yeah well nobody believed that. Nothing changes Trump. Nothing can change Trump. He has this little tiny core character-engine and all it can do is turn out the same old crap. It can’t be altered in any way, it can only be turned off.
Trump took issue with the first question he was asked, as Scott ticked off a number of past comments that many have seen as racist: questioning former President Barack Obama’s American citizenship, telling four congresswomen of color to go back to where they came from, describing Black district attorneys as animals and attacking Black journalists for questions he deemed “stupid.”
“Why should Black voters trust you after you’ve used language like that?” Scott said.
Trump responded defensively: “I don’t think I’ve ever been asked a question in such a horrible manner.” He called ABC a “fake news network” and dismissed Scott’s question as “disgraceful.”
Yes sure it’s the question that’s disgraceful, not the behavior the question is about.
Let me explain this with a Venn diagram (wait, can I even upload images?)
If not I probably can.
As long as the Harris campaign stays above it all it seems mostly all upside. Talk up abortion rights and the economy and let the ancient racist dig his own hole.
“Veering into” misogynistic, racist invective?! It’s Trump’s natural element. Where has this reporter been? You’ve got to be “out” of something before you can be in danger of veering into. Might as well wonder whether a shark that’s fifty fathoms deep might “veer into” the sea.
Of course we all live in our own little bubbles these days, and despair can distort the perspective of anyone including me. Still, from where I stand, the general tone of the conversation still sounds too much like 2016, when so many liberals and lefties were talking and acting as if Trump’s followers were supporting him by mistake, because they just didn’t know how awful he truly was, and would start abandoning him in droves as soon as they realized their mistake, hence the many confident predictions that his base would turn against him whenever he said or did something outrageous (i.e. whenever he said or did anything at all). It’s as if the 2016 election, all the scandals of Trump’s first presidency, his two impeachments, his endless legal trouble, and even his attempted coup d’etat (!) never happened, and we were still basically dealing with a normal, democratic politician who just happened to have a somewhat “unconventional style”. In the end, as we all know, all of Trump’s supposedly career-ending scandals didn’t stop him from gaining votes between 2016 and 2020.
So as much as I sincerely hope I’m wrong, I’ll be surprised if he doesn’t win again*. I almost wrote “pleasantly surprised” out of old habit, but I can’t honestly say I find anything “pleasant” about any of the available options, although there can be no doubt as to which candidate would be the lesser evil. If I’m right, then that will be it. Forget about “taking back power next time”. There won’t be a “next time”. I’m sure there will be (some parody of) an “election” in 2028, but it will be as meaningless as the next “election” in Russia.
* Not the popular vote, to be sure, but as the title of this post reminds us, he doesn’t need the popular vote to be first past the post.
This is what happens when your brain is on trans ideology. This is not about how Harris “identifies”, it is about material reality. Yes, things may be more complicated for people of mixed heritage, but just ask E. Warren about identifying as a minority.
POC are not disadvantaged because of how they identify – if this were the case, it would just be their own fault for not identifying as white. Race discrimination is something you experience because of how society identifies you, not how you identify yourself. People are the passive object of their discrimination, not the active subject. This should be obvious, but despite the fact that we get told all the time that men identifying as woman is totaly not comparable to white people identifying as black, the language has now spilled over and even in cases like this the question suddenly is not whether Harris is black, but whether she identifies as black.
Gender ideology muddles the thinking even on other subjects and makes it more difficult to actually talk about race. Well-done, people on the left.
[…] a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on Remember the swing […]
#4 BK
I don’t think there is any particular downside in her also making observations and criticisms of Trump’s character and that of his administration. There is plenty of fodder for commentary that is relevant to the circumstances of a great many Americans, as his character flaws will have policy consequences affecting millions.
Mention it for sure, but everyone knows he’s an unpleasant, racist piece of shit. It’s helpful that he’s reminding the voters just how true that is but just another round of “Orange Man Bad” (Orange Man *Very* Bad if there’s any question how I stand on Lord Cheeto) is a distraction. Make the case for all the good things the current administration has done and what you intend to do in the future while skewering all the stupid economic policy outlined at the RNC…
A distraction from what? You surely don’t think I have any delusion that I can affect the outcome.
As for Orange Man Bad, that’s just childish.
Sonderval @ 6
Back before I rejected the whole concept of “identify as”, I remember conversations about whether I “identified as” Black, and who was “allowed” to “identify as” Black. To me, back then, it was a question of which aspects of one’s background one considered important, and could not be made up out of whole cloth. At the time, the issue focused on people like Tiger Woods, and whether people of Black background were trying to “pass” if they didn’t “identify as” Black. Later came the false (Dolezal) or mistaken (Warren) claims.
This conflict between Trump and Harris reminds me very much of those conversations. They are arguing over whether someone of Black background is required to “identify as” Black, and sidestepping entirely the need for that background in the first place, the material reality of ethnic background and skin color.
@OB #10:
No, I’m not under any delusions there, I’m expressing my hopes for how the Harris campaign will conduct itself. “Orange Man Bad” is just a shorthand, regardless of what the idiots/liars say about “Trump Derangement Syndrome”. There seems to be a fair number of people who will acknowledge and agree with the idea that he’s a racist, evil monster but then will go on to complain about a McDouble being nearly four dollars.
If going on about how evil he is happens to be the Harris campaign’s strategy then I’m with Bjarte, Trump’s victory is as inevitable as it was before Biden finally bowed out. As it happens I’m not nearly as pessimistic.
Ah. Never mind then.
This POLITICO article, What Donald Trump Doesn’t Understand About Race In America, I thought was pretty good and relevant. The author, Teresa Wiltz, talks about her own experiences fielding the “what are you” question, and how, in the US, any Black ancestry makes you Black, regardless of your “racial identity”.