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In a Huffington Post article published Tuesday, the documentarian Michael Moore writes that he has it on good authority that Donald Trump never truly wanted to occupy the Oval Office, that he only wanted to raise his marketing profile, and that he is now engaged in a kind of self-sabotage to ensure that he does not win in November.
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Whether that’s true or not, it matters not a whit. If Donald Trump were to drop out of the race tomorrow, if his insults against people of color stopped suddenly, if he would cease to call for physical acts of violence, abruptly end his constant Twitter battles with grieving families, and evicting crying infants from his rallies, the damage to the country is done.
Trump need not wield state power for the menacing vitriol and hatred that his campaign inspired and even consolidated within a polarized population of more than 300 million people will endure long after the last ballot is cast in November.
Trump’s presidential bid has effectively been the match to light every popular form of bigotry that exists in the U.S. This article will explore, in two parts, exactly how Trump set an already seething nation afire.
Sometimes within the often narrow interests of electoral politics, strategic decisions based on immediate objectives can shine a light on the nation’s broader cultural, economic, political and demographic life.
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Trump’s demagoguery of the Mexican question in the 2016 Republican primary was such a moment.
Though a seeming footnote today, history will likely record Donald Trump’s drubbing of Jeb Bush in the Republican primary as far more politically significant than Hillary Clinton’s inevitable victory in the general election, in large measure because of the way in which he articulated a vision for the country’s future that resonated with Republican primary voters in a way that Bush’s did not.
Consider the dueling remarks the two men made on Mexican immigration at their campaign launch:
“Gather our cause of opportunity for all, the cause of all who love freedom and the noble cause of the United States of America." – Jeb Bush , June 14, 2015
“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” – Donald Trump, June 16, 2015
To provide context to Trump’s hateful victory in the Republican primary, it is important to recall that as early as April of 2014 many media pundits and outlets were already talking about the inevitability of the 2016 presidential election between Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush. Words like dynasty, nepotism, legacy and fatigue were in common use by media pundits to describe what looked to be another multi-billion-dollar election between two candidates of nearly indistinguishable policies. Cynicism against the duopoly was felt in segments of both political parties.
Even neocon commentators like David Frum posed the question “is this America or the final days of the Roman Republic?” Hyperbole and eurocentricism aside the flight direction for both wings of the capitalist war machine had seemed to have already set course more than two years before the date of the general election.
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Barack Obama's 2012 reelection – judged strictly from the standpoint of the electoral college – was even more significant than that of 2008, because it was the first time in generations that a Democrat won the White House without cracknig the solid South. This, many political analysts agreed, was because of the Latino vote. States that had previously gone for George W. Bush in 2004– New Mexico, Florida, Nevada, Colorado and Virginia– had switched over to Obama a decade later. Each of these states have either had a long standing Latino population or a fast growing one. And indeed George W. Bush the last Republican to get close enough to steal an election won a staggering 44% of the Latino vote. George W.’s biggest asset in regards to the winning over Latino voters had been Jeb and his family.
In order to beat Hillary Clinton, Jeb Bush – like most Republican strategists – rightly understood that he needed to win a significant portion of the Latino vote. No member of the Republican establishment was as capable of this task nor had as winning a track record in doing this as Jeb Bush.
Jeb Bush has made a political career off of “Hispandering.” He is a master politician at bridging the gap between the white Christian evangelical values of the GOP and the mythic “Sueno Americano” of many Latino voters. He appeals to this demographic by promoting the notion that this population is honest, family oriented and most of all hard working. This appeal would later be echoed by Tim Kaine is his characterization of Latinos as invested in “faith, familia y trabajo.”
This attempt to bring in Latino voters by both political parties essentially argues you are not what some you are. The attempts of Jeb Bush, whose political rhetoric has always been profoundly anti-Black, to bring Latino voters into the hard hat politics of “Reagan democrats” with arguments that they are more or less just like “family oriented white workers” has been a centerpiece of his political career.
Whatever his actually policies maybe vis a vis working people of any community, rhetorically Jeb Bush was fluent in the coded and explicit language of hopes and dreams, hard work and bootstraps in either language. His presidential campaign would be no different.
Jeb Bush cut several Spanish language ads. Made speeches in which he spoke both languages. Was interviewed repeatedly on Spanish language television. Shot a video celebrating Cinco De Mayo and the cultural, economic and political contributions of Mexican Americans to the US. For the oft disrespected Spanish speaking population of the United States of America to see a bilingual campaign come out of the party of Sensenbrenner, Pete Wilson and Joe Arpaio carried strong historic significance. So much so that on May 6th 2015, Comedy Central’s Daily Show ran a segment titled the “Legend of El Jebe” in which Al Madrigal joked about the broad appeal of Jeb Bush.
In short Jeb Bush calculated to win the general election he would need a large section of the Latino vote and he began his campaign for the Republican nomination as if he was already competing in the general election, as for two years he and the rest of America heard he would be.
Donald Trump also had a strategy. For years there has been growing discontentment with the Republican party establishment. The most obvious expression of this was the tea party. In far right wing circles the term RINO, Republican in name only, which had been around for decades but experienced a major revival. It became a rallying cry against figures like John Boehner, the ousted Eric Cantor, Mitch McConnell and less prominent Republicans throughout the country. Essentially much of the Republican base felt they had been abandoned by a party that was no longer sufficiently racist. The political demand for a white man’s party that extolled the values of white Christendom, western civilization, American exceptionalism and other such coded terms that stand in for white supremacy ran high. This gave rise to the tea party and is now providing the base of support for the Trump campaign.
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The long standing “Hispandering” of the Bush family in general and Jeb Bush in particular was not lost on this hateful crowd. Donald Trump who has built his campaign on a buffet of racism and misogyny strategically opened hard on the border and Mexicans in general.
He criticized Jeb Bush repeatedly for speaking Spanish. In bizarre racist irony, he cut a Willie Horton style advertisement called “Act of Love,” which showed several undocumented men accused of various violent crimes juxtaposed to Jeb Bush’s sympathetic quotes about undocumented workers.
Donald Trump tweeted then later deleted “Jeb Bush has to like the Mexican Illegals because of his wife." Jeb Bush’s wife Columba Bush was born in Mexico. By Donald Trump’s own account and the account of anyone following his campaign the centerpiece of his speeches was getting the crowd to chant “the wall” and his biggest cheers were drawn with the phrase “Mexico will pay.”
Within a few months of these attacks, slipping in the polls Jeb Bush began to use the term “anchor babies,” a slur that could easily be hurled at his own children. The politics of “Mexico will pay” decisively defeated the “Sueno Americano,” and rather that seeking some common ground, the country retreated to its respective corners, and hunkered down for the next round, of a bitter and protracted prizefight.
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Matt Sedillo is a poet, worker and artist living in Los Angeles. A two-time national slam poet, grand slam champion of the Damn Slam Los Angeles 2011 and the author of For What I Might Do Tomorrow published by Caza De Poesia 2010. His poetry has been published in anthologies alongside the likes of such literary giants as Amiri Baraka, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jack Hircshman and Luis Rodriguez.
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