Maribel Hastings
Posted September 26, 2024
The campaign of the aspiring Republican presidential candidate, Donald Trump, is seeking to attack the Democratic candidate, Kamala Harris, by running a well-known electoral strategy: exploiting racism and prejudice to sufficiently enrage their base, hoping that will help them win on November 5, even while alienating other voting groups.
The most recent attack is against Haitian immigrants, disseminating falsehoods that they are eating the pets of Springfield, Ohio residents. It is not true, but Trump, his vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance, and other Republican figures continue spreading the lie. The Haitian immigrant community in Springfield fears for their safety; they have even had bomb threats, and extremist groups like the Proud Boys are appearing in their city.
After all, the intention is to instill rejection not only toward immigrants but specifically toward immigrants of African descent and of color. This, in turn, allows them to attack Harris for being of African descent and of Indian descent. Prejudiced people are not going to distinguish between a Haitian and an African American. For them, it’s only about preventing a person of color from winning the presidency of the United States for the second time in history.
Racism has been installed at the center of the Republican presidential campaign without the hidden or coded messages of before.
The eight years of the presidency of the first African American president in the history of the United States, Barack Obama, gave way to the Trump presidency because a group of voters never got over that historic development. Although it is argued that economic anxiety was the principal reason many voters who supported Obama in 2012 voted for Trump in 2016, prejudice and xenophobia also played a central role. During the Obama presidency, racial polarization and the proliferation of white supremacist groups intensified.
Those groups reached record numbers under the Trump presidency, who emerged as a sort of “envoy,” giving voice to xenophobia, prejudice, and racism that would no longer be limited to fringe groups, but make a triumphant entry into the 2016 presidential campaign and, with Trump’s victory after that, settled into the very presidency of the United States.
That is why Trump launched his presidential campaign in 2015, attacking Mexican immigrants, calling them “criminals” and “rapists.” His disdain for Latin American immigrants and immigrants of color caused him to implement despicable public policies, like separating babies and children from their parents at the border. One of his first actions in 2017 was the Muslim ban that prohibited U.S. entry to immigrants from six Muslim countries. He tried to eliminate DACA. Previously he referred to Haiti, African nations, and El Salvador as “shithole countries”; he had already said that many Haitians “have AIDS” and are bringing it to the United States.
Trump’s dance with racism is not new. Near the end of the 1980s, he bought a full-page ad in The New York Times and other papers, calling for the death penalty for five Black and Hispanic young men accused of attacking and raping a white woman in New York’s Central Park. However, DNA evidence and the guilty party’s confession exonerated them from any blame.
Decades later, he was one of the primary promoters of the farce that Obama was not a U.S. citizen but had been born in Kenya, Africa. When he said Obama’s name, he emphasized his middle name, Hussein.
When seeking the nomination in 2016 and being praised by the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, the white supremacist David Duke, Trump faltered in his reaction. He later said that he “repudiated” Duke’s support. Years before, in 2000, Trump himself called Duke “a bigot, a racist, a problem.” Oh, the irony of it.
He rubs shoulders with anti-Semites and called neo-Nazi protesters in Charlottesville “fine people.”
Racism has been installed at the center of the Republican presidential campaign without the hidden or coded messages of before.
The Haitian community is one of the most rejected in this hemisphere. Whether they be poor people with limited education or professionals, they are discriminated against for their color. But when the attack comes from a former president of the United States, who wants to return to office, the door to violence is opened — in an election period that is already rather volatile.
The incendiary rhetoric of Trump himself has even provoked attacks on his person.
But Trump and his minions think that they are the ones being attacked by the “extreme left” and continue feeding the racism monster with dehumanizing rhetoric, with the hope that their backward vision will prevail at the polls.
Maribel Hastings is a Senior Advisor to América’s Voice.
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