Donald Trump once told a crowd of evangelicals that he never felt that he had to ask God’s forgiveness for anything … which is the pure essence of Trump. It doesn’t matter if he’s caught calling for the execution of innocent teenagers, or cheating on his pregnant wife with a porn star, he’s never going to say he’s sorry. Not even to God. So it’s no surprise that Friday morning finds Trump octupling down on his attack on House Judiciary Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings, Cummings’ home town of Baltimore, and everyone whose skin isn’t a nice healthy shade of tangerine.
In a Friday morning tweet, Trump snickered over the burglary at Cummings’ home, using it as an opportunity to gloat. Unfortunately for Trump, he apparently didn’t learn of the burglary until the AM, so he had to settle for just going after the entire community in general at his Thursday night rally. And he didn’t stop with Baltimore. Trump made the theme of his speech that American cities are shi#holes.
As The Washington Post reports, Trump used that rally to jump completely behind one of the memes that has dominated the racially charged politics of Republicans for decades: the idea that urban areas are “infested” hellholes of crime and poverty, presided over by Democrats who have only made things worse with liberal policies. Trump called federal tax dollars going to urban areas “stolen money” that was “wasted” by Democrats. Then he claimed that Baltimore was more violent than Afghanistan, and that “conditions of Nancy Pelosi’s once great city of San Francisco are deplorable” as part of a general attack on America’s cities.
Notably absent from Trump’s cranking-up of this old racist favorite was any mention of the fact that more and more Americans are choosing to move to those urban areas. Or that those urban areas also contain the nation’s greatest success stories. Or that those cities actually produce far more tax dollars than they consume. Or a single suggestion of how things might be improved. Or … hey, where is Donald Trump from, anyway?
But there was no doubt that Trump will continue to reliably spin this tired old record, while adding his own ugly rendition of how America’s most vibrant, diverse, and successful areas need to be punished for not being like the shrinking and crumbling communities—the ones genuinely propped up by taxes paid in those cities—from which Trump scrapes his support. Because that divide is Trump’s power source.
Trump is already on the air with television commercials for 2020, calling every Democratic candidate a “radical socialist,” and he was also hammering on that theme at his Thursday night rally in Ohio. As The New York Times reports, Trump declared that “a vote for any Democrat in 2020 is a vote for the rise of radical socialism and the destruction of our great, our beautiful, our wonderful American dream.”
Yes. The dream of inheriting a billion dollars from your slum-lord father and using it as a platform to attack the people trying to pull themselves out of the conditions men like Fred Trump created. The dream of being able to divide people by race, put children in cages, and use the White House as not just a bully pulpit, but like you’re a schoolyard bully. Hopefully that dream is in peril.
But the crowd, the “nearly all-white crowd,” according to reports, cheered on Trump’s claims about rat-infested, crime-ridden “deplorable” cities and his attacks on “socialist” programs, like trying to give them health care. Don’t expect those attacks to stop. Expect them to get crueler and even more explicit. Because that’s the only direction that Trump’s dial turns.