GREENVILLE, N.C.- President Donal Trump campaign rallies often have a microcosm of angry tribalism, which is not new. The same thing happened on Wednesday night when during one of his rallies, his supporters grew aggressive of Somali-born Democratic congresswoman.
“Send her Home” and “Treason!” were the words and phrases thrown at the campaign supporting Mr. Trump's tweet attacking the said congresswomen. But these chants didn’t sit well will many Republican members of Congress. They denounced the chants as xenophobic and racist. Initially, the president was indifferent to these angry words, but he quickly praised them a day later.
But for Democrats, the rally and the aggressiveness of Mr. Trump and his supporters had only one impact. And that is: That this general election will focus on identity, race and his brand of politics- the white grievance.
Until this incident, the 2020 field tried their best to ignore the provocative language of the American President. Rather they talked about policies and talking about making changes to the justice system, maternal health or looking into ways to diffuse the wealth gap.
But now many feel that they have to take a different approach to Mr. Trump’s provocative behavior.
New Jersey’s Senator Cory Booker, says, “This election will be a referendum, not on Donald Trump, but a referendum on who we are and who we must be to each other, but this is going to get worse before it gets better.”
Also, California’s Senator Kamala Harris, a woman of color who also ran for president, says, “When we’re on that stage together in the general, I know he’ll try to pull the same thing with me,” Ms. Harris said. “But I’m fully prepared for that. I’m up for it. Because he is small. He is wrong. He is a bully.”
She says that his comments were unpleasant and unwelcomed, but they were not surprising.
The comments also didn’t sit well with former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. who said that Mr. Trump is “tearing at the social fabric of this country.”
The rally brought a lot of Democratic candidates together supporting each other against Mr. Trump. But still, they haven’t agreed on how the future presidential nominee will combat the racial and discriminative words Mr. Trump spoke. Will they talk about it openly in their campaign or will they only talk about jobs and the economy?
Often we have seen Democratic leaders especially who had ties to Hillary Clinton’s and Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, follows a strategy of ignorance. They would respond to the provocative words only to redirect the debate to kitchen-table issues like wage and health care.
But, there is a Democratic group of grass-roots organizers and pollsters who believe that the President’s action and racist words amount to a solid playbook of white identity politics. It is meant to convince white voters of the idea that their fates are under threat by a diverse America. They argue in favor of supporting these issues head-on.
“Just as much time and resources as the nominee spends on targeting and messaging around health care and wages and climate change, they should spend an equal amount of resources around an alternative racial vision for the country,” said Cornell Belcher, a prominent pollster who worked with Mr. Obama. “This isn’t a goddamn distraction.”
For most progressives, it is not only about winning the 2020 election. It is more about the fact that American identity is at risk. Ms. Archila, co-executive director of progressive group center for popular Democrats, believes that the chants of “send her back” were a permanent ideology of the Republicans which is bigger than Mr. Trump’s word.
Ms. Harris in an interview said that Democrats are now better equipped to combat Mr. Trump’s discriminatory language as voters now know that he hasn’t delivered any of his promises. She said, “He has a rap sheet now. Maybe before someone said, ‘Oh, it appears he’d run a good business,’ and there was this aura surrounding him. But now he’s been exposed for who he is.”
But the question is, will such a strategy work in a universe which Mr. Trump’s Twitter feed keeps reshaping?
According to Mr. Biden, it can. He is a leading Democrat in the national polling. He also said in 2017, that his decision to run for president came after he saw Mr. Trump’s reaction the rally of white nationalist in Charlottesville.
“There’s always in every society an underbelly that has racist and xenophobic tendencies; thank God it’s a minority,” he told the crowd at the Los Angeles fund-raiser. “From the day Trump ran, he’s been trying to appeal to that underbelly.”
The last five years have seen a huge shift amongst Democrats, especially amongst white Democrats on issues of identity and race. 2016, was the first time a major number of white Democrats agreed on the fact that discrimination is holding back the black people.
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