CHICAGO – Just a month after it began, Donald Trump’s nascent presidential bid appeared over. “He’s not a war hero,” Trump said of Arizona Senator John McCain last July. “I like people that weren’t captured, okay?” In insulting a former Republican presidential nominee—and Vietnam veteran, to boot—Trump seemed desiring of an out.
Trump instead got an up; his poll numbers shot to 25 percent, solidifying his frontrunner status en route to the GOP’s 2016 presidential nod.
It seemed nothing would do Trump’s campaign in:
- inciting violence against protestors at rallies;
- labeling undocumented Mexican immigrants criminals and rapists;
- attacking the parents of a Muslim American serviceman slain in Iraq, who spoke at the Democratic National Convention; i
- nsinuating Second Amendment activists take literal aim at Hillary Clinton;
- bragging on camera about his penchant for sexually assaulting women (with numerous women stepping forward to offer supporting testimony of his “locker room talk”); and more.
Despite such behavior—or, as some have argued, perhaps because of it—Donald Trump looks forward to being sworn in as the 45th President of the United States in January.
The American left continues to reel from Trump’s surprise victory. In its soul searching, the left has tossed out numerous theories: insufficient turnout of young minority voters, the James Comey’s late game reopening of the Clinton email investigation, and misogyny.
How great a role any of these factors may have played is hard to determine. But they each miss a greater point: Trump’s rhetoric pays homage to American tradition. Trump’s rhetoric is—well, foreign—to modern political campaigns, but some have suggested it is altogether unprecedented. It is far from this:
You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract.
Lee Atwater famously alluded to dog whistle rhetoric, an embattled incumbent in the 2016 presidential election cycle. American politicians have been stumping sideways since the rise of Nixon’s Southern strategy of which Atwater was chief architect. The shift Trump has ushered represents not departure, but revival.
In his newly released book, Last in Line: An American Destiny Deferred, researcher Jamal Mtshali invokes America’s tradition of incendiary political rhetoric of which Donald Trump is the latest representative.
America’s climate change has been drastic. As Mtshali observes, “Although Obama’s path to the White House depended on retreat from fiery rhetoric [in the Jeremiah Wright controversy], Trump’s demagoguery has razed that road en route to the rebirth of a nation.”
“Rebirth” is right. Trump is serving up more than just talk. With his appointments of Steve Bannon, Michael Flynn, and Jeff Sessions to his cabinet, all whom have ties to the unrelenting far-right, Trump is showing that his policy will too pay homage to his predecessors whose idea of America was one homogenous.
It was Lincoln, sparring Douglas, who vigorously refuted notions that he suggested “all [races] were equal…in intellect”; his firebrand successor, Andrew Johnson, who assured “splay-footed…thick-lipped” blacks that the US was the domain of “the Anglo-Saxon race”; Woodrow Wilson who screened Birth of a Nation at the White House; and others who, in public and private contexts, were conversant in the tongue many falsely credit Trump with inventing.
But, of course, all that was just the times. Or was it? Trump’s election suggests otherwise.
Mtshali suggests real hazards lie in rhetoric. Mtshali’s book parses race disparities in the US justice, education, health care, and economic systems, gaps he argues are public policy constructions.
He says, “Incendiary, racialized rhetoric bears likeness with systemic disparity in that both are once-overt phenomena that have largely become covert.” Thus, it’s not the times that have changed, but the modes of expression.
If Mtshali is right, Trump’s administration—which is already formulating policies for deporting Mexicans and banning Muslims, among other unconstitutional acts—does indeed portend the rebirth of a nation.
Jamal Mtshali lives in New York City and is a 24-year-old native of Columbia, South Carolina. He has a bachelor’s in philosophy from Amherst College. Jamal has experience in research and organizing. His interests are law, public policy, and literature. Last in Line is Jamal’s first book.
