Trump Just Ran The Most Racist Campaign In Modern History ― And Won

“After months of spewing racist remarks about Kamala Harris and ginning up his base about invasions at the border and the promise to harm millions of immigrants, Donald Trump will once again be the president of the United States.

Despite his naked racism and misogyny and attacks on his political opponents, the American people have chosen to send him back to the White House. 

Candidates use the last days of their campaign to make their final case before the American people. They say the thing you want voters to remember as they’re casting their votes on Election Day. The last thing Trump wanted millions of Americans to hear from him and his campaign? A cacophony of bigotry.

Trump chose to host a rally in New York City that was reminiscent of a Nazi rallyheld there 85 years ago. He was set to speak in front of thousands of his fans in his hometown — but first, more than two dozen surrogates would get on stage to make the case for him. 

Comedian and podcaster Tony Hinchcliffe compared Puerto Rico to a pile of garbage, said Black people carve watermelons on Halloween and made crude comments about the sexual habits of Latinos.

David Rem, who the campaign said is a childhood friend of Trump, called Democrats “degenerates.” Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson said Harris was a “Samoan, Malaysian low-IQ” person. (Harris’ father is Jamaican, and her mother is Indian.) The only comment the GOP attempted to do damage control on was the “joke” about Puerto Rico.

Having such explicit racism on stage during a rally for a presidential campaign speaks volumes about the Republican Party and America at large.

White conservative ideology, and by extension, Trump, has long been threatened by the sense that full racial equality was just on the horizon. It is not an accident that Trump began his political career after America elected its first Black president. 

During their own presidential campaigns, famous Alabama segregationist George Wallace promoted keeping the races separate and George H.W. Bush deployed an ad implying his opponent Michael Dukakis would let violent Black criminals out of prison. Ronald Reagan touted his love of “states rights” at a speech in Mississippi near the site of where civil rights workers had been brutally murdered 16 years earlier. Critics viewed it as a wink to racist white Southern voters.

Still, no other major-party presidential candidate has embraced explicit racism the way Trump has. 

Trump entered the political foray during the Obama administration by leading the charge in the false claims that the president was secretly born in Kenya and thus ineligible to be president. A few years later, in a now infamous scene, he would come down the escalator at Trump Tower to announce that he was running for president himself and referred to Mexican immigrants as criminals and rapists.

His major policy promise was to build a wall along the southern border. As president, Trump instituted a ban on people from several majority-Muslim countries entering the country, told three members of Congress who are women of color to “go back to where they came from,” and tried to send in the military to squash racial justice protesters. 

His reelection campaign in 2020 was marked by more of the same. During his speech accepting the GOP’s nomination, Trump said Democrats wanted to release “criminals” into suburban neighborhoods and declared on X that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts,” referring to Black Lives Matter protesters. 

Much of that seems tame compared to the 2024 campaign. 

As he addressed a sea of smiling white faces waving signs that said “Mass Deportations Now!” at the Republican National Convention, Trump officially became the party’s presidential candidate for a third time. It was a prelude to what was to come.

Fresh off an assassination attempt, Trump delivered the longest speech in national convention history. His campaign was reportedly giddy as President Joe Biden’s poll numbers kept sinking and Democrats were losing faith in the president’s chances of winning reelection.

But then Biden dropped out, and the Democrats quickly coalesced around Harris as the replacement. Now, the racist candidate had to run against a Black and South Asian woman. 

And as the campaign stretched on, Trump managed to not only outdo t segregationists and states rights defenders, he managed to outdo himself.

Perhaps his most dangerous rhetoric started after a woman posted on social media about a friend of a friend whose cat went missing — and said she suspected that it had been abducted and eaten by Haitians living in town.

Trump, who has never heard a racist Facebook rumor that he didn’t love, turned it into a campaign message by repeating the lie on the debate stage. Already flustered by Harris — who had merely said his political rallies weren’t that great — Trump began ranting and raving and sputtering, “They’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats.

It didn’t matter how many times it was disproven, how many Republican officials in Springfield, Ohio, begged the campaign to stop, or how many bomb threats in the state kept kids out of school, Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) went all in.

A new refrain began. Trump and his sycophants weren’t using the old refrains about immigrants like they were taking American jobs or were lazy and living high off the government hog. Now, they were harming your pets, spreading disease and stealing housing that should be going to white U.S. citizens.

The rumor had remarkable staying power. All of a sudden, it wasn’t just Springfield that was overrun with Haitian immigrants — towns all across the U.S. had to brace for hordes of Haitian refugees, who would be piling up on buses destined to take over lily-white enclaves.

Trump also dabbled in eugenics, falsely claiming that immigrants are genetically predisposed to murder. “We’ve got some bad genes in this country,” he said during an interview with conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt. His plan for immigration is mass deportations that would tear families apart and ensnare U.S. citizens, putting immigrants in camps and executing migrants who commit violent crimes.

Only days after it was clear the Democrats were going to rally around Harris as Biden’s replacement, Trump went to Detroit to take questions from reporters at the National Association of Black Journalists’ annual convention.

“I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black,” he said as the crowd in the room gasped. “So, I don’t know, is she Indian, or is she Black?”

Instead of being embarrassed by seeming to be confused by mixed-race individuals, the Trump campaign doubled down. Trump held rallies where he displayed articles calling Harris the first South Asian woman to be elected to the Senate as if that proves she isn’t really Black. (Harris was not the first Black woman elected to the Senate.) 

It wasn’t long before Trump’s comments inspired his surrogates to go even further and attack Harris for codeswitching. Fox News’ Peter Doocy and Jesse Watters questioned why she had a different accent at different times, implying that she was pretending to be Black.

Trump went on to crisscross swing states, warning of an invasion of people from “countries no one ever heard of.” He repeated right-wing fever swamp rumors about apartment complexes in Colorado that were being taken over by Venezuelan immigrants. 

Trump claimed entire cities were being held hostage by immigrants with “military supreme” weapons. His campaign posted racist memes on social media implying that voting for Harris would mean hordes of Black people would move into your neighborhood. He said that any Jewish person who wasn’t voting for him needed to have their head examined. Trump repeatedly said that he should win the Black vote — because, after all, the immigrants coming over the border were taking “Black jobs.”

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