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Trump’s Dog Whistle Presidency
Trump’s campaign knew what they were doing when they tweeted a Nazi symbol and scheduled a rally in Tulsa on Juneteenth
On Thursday, two days before Donald Trump’s rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where the president will reportedly give a speech on race, his campaign ran an ad on Facebook decrying “far left mobs,” and displaying an image once used to mark prisoners in Nazi concentration camps. Business as usual for a president whose bigotry comes as easily as breathing.
Trump’s campaign responded to criticisms of the symbol — an upside-down red triangle — by claiming it was a common antifa logo (it is not). But debating the meaning behind the Trump administration’s many dog whistles — whether it’s the president calling Covid-19 the “Wuhan virus,” his anti-Semitic musings about George Soros, or his campaign’s use of imagery from white supremacist groups — is pointless. We know who Trump is.
Participating in an argument about semantics or symbols suggests that the president’s bigotry is up for debate. It’s not. Trump is profoundly, conspicuously, and proudly racist — we can take his words, and his campaign’s actions at face value.
It is not a coincidence that the president chose Tulsa — where white people burned a thriving Black district to the ground, murdering hundreds — for his rally and speech on the anti-racist protests across the country. Nor is it by chance that Stephen Miller, a white supremacist, is said to be writing the president’s speech. Trump chose Miller for the same reason he chose Tulsa and Nazi imagery: to inflame tensions and give a wink to the racists who support him.
Trump’s supporters would have us believe that his many racist comments — from calling Haiti, El Salvador, and African nations “shithole countries” to tweeting that young female congresswomen of color should “go back” to the “crime infested places from which they came” — are being misconstrued or taken out of context. They’ll say that the president’s detractors will call anything racist in an attempt to make him look bad.
The president doesn’t need to yell a racial slur for us to know he’s a racist — his dog…
