By
Sean Illing
This is happening, people. This is really happening. Donald Trump
will be the Republican nominee for president of these United States. Let
that sink in.
The hot takes will abound in the days and weeks
ahead. Pundits will conduct the autopsy on Ted Cruz’s campaign. We’ll
ask why John Kasich quit. We’ll question if there’s still
any hope of a contested convention. We’ll express wonderment at how
quickly and awkwardly the Republican establishment surrenders to Trump.
Pay
particular attention to this storyline: Now that Trump has won, he’ll
continue to shift the tone and approach of his campaign. It was
announced
a few weeks ago, for instance, that Trump was “shaking up” his
campaign. He hired some veteran operatives and was preparing to
“professionalize” his operation.
The plan, we now know, was to quietly change the way Trump comports himself in public. What we got, as The Washington Post’s
Chris Cillizza
put it, was Trump 2.0. Trump 2.0 is kinder, more disciplined, less
bigoted. He’s a candidate who, as Cillizza writes, “will show unbound
delegates as well as party leaders and influencers that he can be
magnanimous, that he can be a uniting force within the party.”
Although
Trump has wavered in his execution, the pivot has been obvious. And now
that he’s running virtually uncontested, you can expect more of this.
During his speech last night, for example, there was no talk of Muslims
and luxurious walls on the Southern border; instead, he focused on trade
and a kind of half-baked economic nationalism. The rhetoric, though,
was far less divisive. This is Trump transitioning to general election
mode.
But here’s what everyone should
never forget:
No
matter what Trump now says, he owes his entire political existence to
bigotry. The inimitable James Carville recently
wrote a piece making what will, increasingly, be a critical point:
“I’m
a Catholic. I’ve seen enough baptismal water spilled to fill William
Taft’s bathtub ten times over. But it doesn’t take a Catholic like me to
understand the original sin of the Trump candidacy. His first act on
the political stage was to declare himself the head of the birther
movement. For Trump, the year 2011 began with the BIG NEWS that he had
rejected Lindsey Lohan for Celebrity Apprentice, but by April, his one-man show to paint Barack Obama as a secret Kenyan had become the talk of the country. Five years later, Trump is nearing the Republican nomination.”
Birtherism
is how Trump lunged into presidential politics. It was his first – and
loudest – dog whistle.
And the thing about birtherism, in addition to
being patently untrue, is that there’s no reason to believe it apart
from bigotry. To support the theory is to announce, in the clearest
possible terms, one’s own prejudices.
Again, Carville explains:
“Look,
I understand that there’s plenty of craziness to investigate in our
politics. Cruz believes that global warming is a hoax. Ben Carson
claimed that the Biblical Joseph built the Great Pyramid of Khufu. Heck,
once upon a time, George W. Bush famously thought the jury was out on
evolution. But Trump’s birtherism is far, far more important – for two
reasons. First, in my experience, when a politician says he doesn’t talk
about an issue, that’s precisely what you should ask him about. Second,
there’s another difference between being a birther and a flat-earther.
It’s possible to believe the Earth is flat and not be a bigot, but it’s
impossible to be a birther and not be one.”
Trump
doesn’t want to talk about birtherism anymore – for obvious reasons.
It’s bad public relations. The few times reporters have brought it up,
Trump dodges or bullies his way out of it. “I don’t want to talk about
that anymore,” he
told
Chris Matthews. But make no mistake: Trump knew exactly what he was
doing when he embraced the birther movement. “I don’t think I went
overboard,” Trump said in 2013. “Actually, I think it made me very
popular….I do think I know what I’m doing.”
I can’t say whether
Trump is a bigot or not, but I can say that he deliberately endeared
himself to bigots. If you want to understand why Trump is the
overwhelming favorite of racists, look no further than his birtherism.
If you want to understand why 80 percent of Trump supporters
believe
the “government has gone too far in assisting minority groups,” look no
further than his birtherism. If you want to understand why
exit polls
in Pennsylvania and New York and Wisconsin and Florida and Georgia and
New Hampshire and Ohio show that the majority of Trump voters support
his
proposed ban on all Muslims, look no further than his birtherism.
Trump’s
success springs from this “original sin,” as Carville put it. Many of
his supporters received the signal he sent in 2011 and have internalized
it; they know – or think they know – that Trump is one of them. Not all
Trump supporters are racists, of course, but a terrifying percentage
are. And that’s no accident.
That Trump has catapulted to the top
of the Republican Party, that he’s now the presumptive nominee, says a
lot about the GOP and our country. He’ll very likely lose in an
electoral landslide
to Hillary Clinton, but that’s beside the point. His campaign has
already done incalculable damage. He’s tapped into an undercurrent of
bigotry and exploited it for political gain. The results of that will,
unfortunately, survive his self-serving campaign. And no one, especially
in the media, should let Trump forget that.
This article was written by Sean Illing from
Salon and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network.
