Trump advisers made this same boast in 2018
What’s strange about this argument is that it pretends the last major national election never happened. Indeed, it’s worth recalling that Trump allies made an almost identical boast in the runup to the 2018 elections.
“I want them to talk about racism every day,” former Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon
said in August 2017. “If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.”
“The Democratic Party is at grave risk of completely marginalizing itself,” Trump adviser Stephen Miller
said in the summer of 2018, scoffing at the party’s alleged embrace of “absolutist anti-enforcement positions,” and of “vile” MS-13 members.
In August 2017, the racial battle was over Confederate statues. In 2018, it was over caravans of asylum seekers. Now it’s over young, nonwhite lawmakers who are criticizing America,
for which they are being told by the president of the United States that they should “go back” to the countries of their ancestry, even though three of them were born in the United States.
But in all these three cases, the argument is basically the same: The Democratic Party is defined by a race-obsessed fringe, which means it can’t win a national majority. In the Bannon-Miller mythology, a silent majority agrees with Trump on immigration and is repelled by Democratic race-baiting, and a nationalism that fuses this cultural message with Trump’s economic agenda will durably hold that majority.
But, as the ad featuring the worried suburban woman showed, even some of Trump’s own advisers didn’t believe this. They needed to decouple the economy from Trump and his nationalism and nativism, to win back independents and suburban women.
But it was too late.
David Drucker reported that even Republicans privately admitted Trump’s immigration focus — his hate and nativism — helped cost the GOP the House by alienating those constituencies.
Given this history, why would anyone credulously accept Trump’s spin that similar race-baiting will be a huge winner this time around?