Could Anything trump Trump’s Migrant Bad Genes Theory as Racism on Steroids?

Could Anything trump Trump’s Migrant Bad Genes Theory as Racism on Steroids?

The Color of Money?

“You know now, a murderer — I believe this — it’s in their genes. And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.” 

Donald Trump during an October 7th interview, discussing immigrants.

What if? Racism matters more to white elites that it does to Black and Hispanic voters? What if? “It’s the economy, stupid” just might be the common ground between white Chrisian nationalists and Americans of color? What if? Gender issues bother Americans of color just as much as they trouble conservatives? What if? Educated elites with tolerance and progressive values are viewed with skepticism and disdain by a vast pool of working-class Americans without reference to race? Remember that 65% of adult Americans do not have a bachelor’s degree or better. What if? A vitriol-smearing, racist, lying candidate, one who is clearly the spokes-candidate for white supremacists, will make you feel safer and whom you believe will restore your earning/buying power, even though you are person of color without at college education? If you are a Democratic strategist, you just might swallow hard and say… “oooops.”

First, let’s start with what many Democratic leaders see as Trump’s obvious autocracy message with an air of racial superiority. Who of color would ever vote for that white-biased, racist candidate? Donald Trump has always been obsessed with “good genes” and spouts that with relative frequency, today and campaigns past, as LA Times columnist, Jackie Calmes, points out on her October 10th editorial: “Donald Trump’s fascination with genetics, especially his own ‘good genes’ of the white European sort, as well as the ‘bad genes of the you-know-which types, has always been creepy. I won’t compare him to Hitler; I leave that to historians and JD Vance.

Here’s [JD] Vance in 2016, before Trump’s election: Writing to a former Yale Law classmate, Vance mused, ‘I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical a—hole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad … or that he’s America’s Hitler.’

“Trump’s obsession with genes is disturbing enough for signaling his belief in the long-discredited, racist theory of eugenics, the idea (embraced most famously by the Nazis) that selective breeding — eliminating undesirables — can improve a nation’s population. The former president is unabashed in spreading his belief in ‘racehorse theory,’ the human version… Often he merely brags in passing about his own superior breeding. ‘I mean it’s a good gene pool right there,’ he once said, pointing at his head, to NBC’s Lester Holt. He often drops such boasts into his rambling rally monologues. But occasionally, Trump says something so outrageous about other people, the ones with supposedly bad genes and — wouldn’t you know it? — darker skin, that the Hitler talk starts all over again. Trump just doesn’t care, even as he aspires to lead a melting pot nation.

“But Trump was on a roll. He told [conservative Hugh] Hewitt, ‘You know now, a murderer — I believe this — it’s in their genes. And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.’... Last year, in an interview with a far-right website, he said that immigration is ‘poisoning the blood of our country.’… Robert Jones, founder of the Public Religion Research Institute, told NPR, ‘Trump has clearly crossed into the domain of Nazi ideology openly.’ (Hitler, in ‘Mein Kampf,’ decried the threat of Jewish blood in Germany: ‘All the great civilizations of the past became decadent because the originally creative race died out, as a result of contamination of the blood.’)… And Trump’s White House chief of staff and former Marine Gen. John F. Kelly said he urged Trump to stop praising Hitler, only to have the then-president insist, ‘Hitler did a lot of good things.’”

Clearly, no self-respecting Black or Hispanic American could ever support the most racist presidential candidate since Woodrow Wilson, right? And then we look at the slow migration of Black and Hispanic voters joining their “left behind” blue-collar white workers, still harboring ill will toward those “globalist” Democratic elites, who are joining forces and saying “enough” to the Democratic Party they believe abandoned them. It’s not as if the Dems have lost a majority of these voters… but enough who, election after election… are beginning to defect to the MAGA masthead. That slow erosion, particularly evident in male voters of color, just might be enough to shift this election to Trump and a GOP congressional majority. It is a trend worthy of a survey.

Writing for October 14th The Morning, NY Times news feed, David Leonhardt addresses the numbers behind what might be the “Big Democratic Miscalculation”: “The Democratic Party has spent years hoping that demography would equal destiny. As the country became more racially diverse, Democrats imagined that they would become the majority party thanks to support from Asian, Black and Hispanic voters. The politics of America, according to this vision, would start to resemble the liberal politics of California.

“It’s not working out that way. Instead, Americans of color have moved to the right over the past decade… The latest New York Times/Siena College poll offers detailed evidence. The poll reached almost 1,500 Black and Hispanic Americans, far more than most surveys do… For most Americans, race is a less significant political force than many progressives believe it is — and economic class is more significant…

“The past four years have highlighted the ways that Democrats exaggerate the political importance of racial identity. Joe Biden, after all, promised to nominate the first Black female Supreme Court justice (which he did) and chose Kamala Harris as the first Black vice president — who has now succeeded him as the Democratic nominee. Yet Harris has less support from Black voters than Hillary Clinton did in 2016… [Inflation] during Biden’s presidency further angered many people. In our poll, only 21 percent of Hispanic working-class voters said that Biden’s policies helped them personally, compared with 38 percent who said Trump’s policies did.

“More generally, many voters have come to see the Democratic Party as the party of the establishment… Trump’s disdain for the establishment appeals to dissatisfied voters of all races. As my colleague Nate Cohn points out, a sizable minority of Black and Hispanic voters think ‘people who are offended by Donald Trump take his words too seriously.’…

“The Democrats’ second big problem is that they have wrongly imagined voters of colors to be classic progressives. In reality, the most left-wing segment of the population is heavily white, the Pew Research Center has found. While white Democrats have become even more liberal in recent decades, many working-class voters of color remain moderate to conservative… These voters say crime is a major problem, for instance. They are uncomfortable with the speed of change on gender issues (which helps explain why Trump is running so many ads that mention high school trans athletes). On foreign policy, Black and Hispanic voters have isolationist instincts, with the Times poll showing that most believe the U.S. ‘should pay less attention to problems overseas and concentrate on problems here at home.’

“Immigration may be the clearest example. Many voters of color are unhappy about the high immigration of the last few years. They worry about the impact on their communities and worry that new arrivals are unfairly skipping the line. In our poll, more than 40 percent of Black and Hispanic voters support ‘deporting immigrants living in the United States illegally back to their home countries.’” As major unions refuse to endorse Harris and down-ballot Dems, this seems to confirm that this much more a class issue than a racial issue. Dems have a lot to learn. $$$

I’m Peter Dekom, and it seems that the old axiom that social issues rise only when bellies are full, and life is perceived as “good,” seems to define contemporary America rather well.