Washington Post (Plum Line)
By Greg Sargent
September 8, 2015
The New York Times had a great piece over the weekend that carried this blunt headline:
Republicans Fear Donald Trump Is Hardening Party’s Tone on Race
Careful
readers will note the appearance of the word “race.” The hook here is
Donald Trump’s mockery of Jeb Bush for his preposterous effort to appeal
to Latino voters
by speaking their language, and multiple Republican officials are frank
about what this (and other Trump-isms) indicate about the real source
of Trump’s appeal:
Since
he entered the race in June with a declaration that Mexican immigrants
were rapists and drug traffickers, Mr. Trump has given voice to
conservative activists’ unease
with America’s changing demography. But his attack last week on Jeb
Bush for speaking Spanish on the campaign trail set off a new, more
intense wave of anger from Republicans who say they believe that Mr.
Trump’s widely covered provocations are becoming toxic
for a party struggling to appeal to nonwhite voters.
“Knocking
somebody because they have the skills to reach out to another community
that has plenty of conservatives is political malpractice,” said
Representative Tom Cole,
Republican of Oklahoma. “If we’re going to be a majority party in the
21st century, we’re going to have to be a multiracial, multiethnic and
inclusive party.”…
Amid
an increase in murders in a number of cities and the high-profile
killing of police officers, Mr. Trump has been infusing his speeches
with calls for “law and order.”
Echoing former President Richard M. Nixon, he has said that a “silent
majority” will join him in taking back the country, and he has said he
will rid heavily black Ferguson, Mo., Baltimore and Chicago of gangs and
“tough dudes.”
“That’s
not a dog whistle; that’s a dog siren,” Rick Wilson, a Florida-based
Republican strategist, said of Mr. Trump’s references to cities, gangs
and policing. “When
he first started saying ‘silent majority,’ I didn’t think he understood
the historical antecedents, but now I believe they very much do.”
To
recap: Nearly half of likely Iowa GOP caucus-goers support rounding up
the 11 million and deporting them, and nearly three quarters of Trump’s
Iowa GOP supporters do.
National polls have shown that majorities of Republicans agree with
Trump’s most base pronouncements on immigration. It’s true that many
Republican voters have significantly more nuanced views on the issue,
and it’s also true that the rise of Trump-ism probably
has multiple causes. But there’s no ignoring the fact that large
numbers of Republican voters agree with Trump’s specific immigration
views and policy prescriptions, and that this just might be playing some
role in fueling his appeal.
What
appears to be new is that leading Republicans — in the above Times
piece — are openly acknowledging the racial component to this appeal.
It’s
debatable, of course, whether this sort of “dog-whistling” is a recent
GOP development. It’s also worth noting that all this hand-wringing
about Trump’s “tone” is
a bit of a dodge, since the GOP’s problems with Latinos on immigration
go well beyond Trump. Many Republicans are unwilling to embrace any
solution for the 11 million, even as they fudge on whether they should
all be deported; Trump has simply forced that
grand evasion out into the open.
Still,
the open grappling with the fact that many Republican voters are
responding to Trump’s crude racial “dog whistling” in particular seems
to signal a new level of
awareness of — and alarm about — the true nature of the Trump threat.
Whether they will actually confront this threat in any meaningful sense
is another question entirely; Jeb Bush, to his credit, has been
genuinely calling out Trump-ism for what it is and
challenging GOP primary voters to rise above it, but he seems awfully
lonely out there. Whatever the answer to that question, this new level
of alarm comes as top Republicans are no longer sure whether Trump-mania
will burn itself out anytime soon. But that
brings us to our next item.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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