Friday’s front-page New York Times story by Lisa Lerer and Michael Gold demonstrated how far the paper will go to eviscerate Trump no matter what he’s doing, whether he’s appealing to “white Christians” or minorities: “Trump’s Lamenting Appeal to Nonwhite Voters -- Blame and Grievances in a Discordant Play of Identity Politics.” (Note that “Black” is capitalized throughout, while “white” is not.)
For more than a decade, former President Donald J. Trump fueled his political rise with dark appeals to white Christian voters, warning of immigrants coming for their jobs and nefarious efforts to undermine what he describes as the country’s true heritage.
Now, facing a neck-and-neck race against the first Black woman to win her party’s nomination, Mr. Trump is branching out.
He has repeatedly accused migrants of poaching “Black jobs” and “Hispanic jobs,” which is inaccurate, according to labor statistics. He told Latino voters in Las Vegas that illegal immigrants were “totally destroying our Hispanic population.” He promised women in Pennsylvania he would “be their protector” and that they would no longer be “abandoned, lonely or scared” -- a vow based on the hyperbolic premise that criminals who also happen to be immigrants are lurking around every corner.
For all the frequent laments about how left-leaning politicians divide the country through “identity politics,” it appears to be Mr. Trump in this race who is making the most explicit identity-based arguments for voters to support his policies.
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Many of Mr. Trump’s blunt and dire entreaties have been greeted with condemnation, even mockery, for their clumsy invocation of race, gender and religion. Yet, in this final, frenetic stretch of the contest, they also represent a striking effort to expand the tent of economic, racial and cultural grievances that propelled him to the White House eight years ago.
In other words, Trump is reaching out to minority voters, and the Times is attacking him for it, especially trying to neutralize Trump's most potent issue, immigration:
Mr. Trump is seeking to win over Black and Latino voters by pitting them against undocumented immigrants, whom he has long blamed for a litany of economic, public safety, national security and social problems. He’s blaming an influx of undocumented immigrants -- he says they were allowed into the country by the Biden administration -- for voters’ economic frustrations.
Appeals to subsets of the American electorate have been part of presidential races for decades, often entwined with shifting racial and gender politics. In 1960, John F. Kennedy campaigned in Harlem, promising to advance civil rights. Nearly a half-century later, George W. Bush sprinkled some Texas-twanged Spanish in campaign speeches from Iowa to California.
And Kamala Harris changes her accent based on the ethnic group she’s speaking to.
What the Times calls “discordant” is what all politicians do, targeting their appeals to the audience in front of them.
In his efforts to win Jewish voters from Democrats, he has insisted that Israel will cease to exist if he is not elected. And even as he tries to win Jews, a group of about 700,000 voters across the battleground states, he has said they “would have a lot to do” with a loss, pre-emptively blaming them.
Meanwhile, former President Barack Obama can accuse black men of sexism for not getting on board the Harris train, to hosannahs from the Times.
This is what Trump’s outreach gets him:
Those who have watched Mr. Trump for decades say such overtures are rooted in an effort to pit various groups against one another.
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The Harris campaign says it has conducted far more extensive and prolonged outreach in those communities through a field operation that began nearly a year ago. On Wednesday, it began “Hombres con Harris,” an initiative targeted at Latino men in battleground states.
They dismiss Mr. Trump’s overtures as divisive, even hateful..
