Trump denies attacks on Elijah Cummings are racist

Rep. Cummings

It really should not come as much of a surprise that once again, Donald Trump is race baiting - since it worked for him so well in 2016, sending him to the Oval Office; yet it would not be inaccurate to say that this has not been a national momentum, for many white Americans who  resented the black civil rights movement of the 1960s, taking their grievances underground to send the racist cartoons, jokes, and using derogatory language of race.

Trump had a trial run with his “birther” attacks on President Obama, and demands for his birth certificate, to “show” he was not born in Kenya, but the U.S. and thus ineligible for the presidency.

While that seemed ludicrous to some, but yet the stage was set and the fast forward to Trump’s latest Twitter rage, attacking Rep. Elijah Cummings of Baltimore; but also reveals a defensive crouch because Cummings is about to subpoena cell phone records of his daughter Ivanka and son-in-law, Jared Kushner; so now the wrath of the mighty is combined with, what most people recognize as the key to winning those undecided independent voters, to give him an edge beyond the 44 percent support that has almost become standard polling when covering President Trump.

As CNN noted on Monday, “Pinching the racial nerve of US society is behind his attacks on Democratic Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland and the whole city of Baltimore as well as his efforts to vilify four progressive lawmakers -- all women and minorities.”

The rhetoric is getting nastier by the day, exceeding his previous attacks on the Squad -  the four liberal lawmakers, led by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the House of Representatives.

To date: “This latest episode involves Cummings, chair of the House Oversight Committee, who is overseeing multiple investigations of Trump and top administration officials. Trump tweeted over the weekend that Cummings' district is a "disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess."

One thinks of the baby blimp balloons that Londoners saw, on the president's two visits to Queen Elizabeth, but while this is amusing to some, it goes even deeper as Trump revists, his old playbook, in effect extending his “shit hole” descriptions of some African communities; knowing that this target of urban blight, viewed by his base as the exclusive domain of black urban Americans, he brings it front and center, for his base.

While many New Yorkers previously thought of him as a con man, it’s necessary to see how clever he truly is, in battle, and that this is what the 2020 election is about for Trump: a fight to the finish to keep his self-proclaimed position.

In the absence of his father, Fred, to spend millions to keep him  afloat in university, and business,  the fight to keep the top job, is at the core of these crude remarks.

The question that roils across the wide-planked floors of liberal elites, and their supporters, is just who are the people this rhetoric is intended for?

“The audience for these attacks wasn't voters in Baltimore or anywhere near it, just as the audience for Trump's vicious attacks on immigrants isn't people who live in border areas or cities. It's the base of supporters in the South and in the Rust Belt who handed him electoral victory in 2016 and who he hopes will do so again.”

"He is exciting his base," said Andra Gillespie, a political scientist at Emory who is an expert on race and politics. "He's reminding folks based on their resentments, stoking their resentments, that there are all these testy people who are saying we should do this or we should do that and they shouldn't have this much power.”

We have a history here, of course, Nixon’s southern strategy, while not a bright line, has some resonance, but who can forget President Reagan’s description of the “welfare queen” in her Cadillac, as the television audience nudged each other and Mrs. Reagan, clapped in approval.

“But there is a direct line from Nixon's coded "law and order" campaign in 1968 to Ronald Reagan's warnings against "welfare queens" in 1980 and beyond, according to a recent piece by Angie Maxwell, a University of Arkansas political scientist.

"Trump, in many ways, is no anomaly. He is the very culmination of the GOP's long Southern strategy," she wrote.

Going even further we can now see that this is indeed the direction that the country has taken, and is going, and on a more direct path than some can acknowledge.

“There is evidence that his efforts to further divide the country are working. In a Pew study released in April, 58% of Americans said race relations in the US were bad, 56% said Trump has made them worse and nearly two-thirds said people are expressing racist views more with Trump as President.”

Even abroad in the horrific shootings in the mosque in New Zealand, the shooter, while dreading Trump’s politics, praised his xenophobic racism.

The support, near hero worshiping, that he has gained from white supremacists adds further to the racist label. Even more disturbing were the damaging pictures of the Charlottesville marchers wearing his trademark informal uniform of khaki pants, white golf shirts and red caps emblazoned with the tagline, of his own campaign, “Make America Great Again.”

In a previous column, last October, we wrote about Trump’s remarks about the Puerto Rican hurricanes. They bear worth repeating:

“The recent hurricanes and tornadoes in Texas, Florida and Puerto Rico have resulted in great personal and economic damage to the United States, but they have also added to the perception that President Donald Trump is a racist. While Texas and Florida faced equally damaging loss of life and property as did Puerto Rico, it was only Puerto Ricans that were told that they were expecting too much from the federal government and that they needed to do more on their own, an oft repeated phrase from whites towards blacks in their struggle for civil rights during the 1960s.”

The race optics became even worse with his condemnation of the NFL players protesting the ill-treatment of black men, by some of the nation’s police and by mostly black players, joined with his verbal recommendation to “get that son of a bitch off the field,” if he did not stand for the national anthem.

“Circling back to Charlottesville, we get the lion’s share of remarks when he said that there was blame on both sides, as hundreds of white supremacists marched towards a group or bedraggled, mostly University of Virginia undergraduates, protesters, angry about the invasion of their town to support an untenable position.”

Winning independent voters to his side, is the goal, and the remembrance that 54 percent of Americans did not vote for him, in 2016, must be a constant reminder as he sends out the attack tweets, and organizes his rallies, with the roar of the crowd, and chants of “Send them home!”

The Hill has reported that “President Trump on Tuesday said his ongoing barrage of attacks on Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) and the city of Baltimore are not part of a larger political strategy, telling reporters he's "pointing out facts" in repeatedly criticizing the city's conditions.

"There’s no strategy. I have no strategy. There’s zero strategy," Trump said upon returning to the White House from a trip to Jamestown, Va.

"All it is, I’m pointing out facts," he added. "The most unsafe city in our country is Baltimore."

Turning back to his prior attacks on some African countries, we read this: “The president has waged a days-long onslaught of criticism directed at Cummings and the city of Baltimore. He has denigrated the city as a "very dangerous & filthy place" where "no human being would want to live" and claimed Cummings is racist.”

And, almost unbelievably, we have this assertion, in true Trumpian style, "If the news reported it properly of all of the things I’ve done for African Americans ... I think I’d do very well with the African Americans," Trump said. "And I think I'm doing very well right now."

The president rejected “the findings of a new Quinnipiac University poll that found 80 percent of black voters believe Trump is racist.”

A recent poll also revealed that nearly one-third of independent voters would not vote for Trump, and as political observers have long acknowledged, for presidential races, it’s all about the numbers.