tuesday july 16 2019

MELANIE PHILLIPS
july 15 2019, 5:00pm, the times
Trump is playing the Democrats at their own race game
melanie phillips

President’s hostile tweets turned his opponents’ obsession with identity politics against them


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When I was a child, my mother and I were told in a supermarket to “go back where you came from”. This puzzled me greatly. My mother and I were born and bred in London. It was my first experience of anti-Jewish prejudice. The bigotry was unambiguous. Because our assailant perceived we were Jews, she was telling us we didn’t belong in Britain.

Now a storm has erupted in America over tweets by President Trump in which he apparently took aim at four young ethnic minority congresswomen: Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ayanna Pressley. They are known as The Squad because of the way they operate as a far-left minority caucus.

For months, American politics has been convulsed over Trump’s attempts to stop illegal immigration across the Mexican border. In his tweet, Trump called out unnamed “progressives”, who “originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe”, for “loudly and viciously” telling America how its government should be run. “Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime-infested places from which they came?”

This language was undeniably offensive, unacceptable and — if he was indeed referring to all four women — factually wrong. Only Ilhan Omar, who was born in Somalia, is not native to America. For the other three, who are variously of Palestinian, Puerto Rican and African-American heritage, America is where they were born.

Trump may have been thinking particularly of Omar but tweeted with his customary disregard for detail. Even so, by any normal standards this was dismaying behaviour by a president. But this is not a normal president. He uses offensive language to speak in a kind of code to his supporters, and to set a trap for his foes who fail to understand the code and promptly fall into the snare.


This is precisely what has happened. The Democratic house speaker, Nancy Pelosi, said Trump’s tweet showed he’d always planned on “making America white again”.

No he hadn’t; nor had he been making a point in his tweet about race or colour. For his critics have omitted to note that, after telling these congresswomen to go and sort out their presumed countries of origin, he said: “Then come back and tell us how to do it.”

In other words, his point was about their behaviour, specifically their opposition to his “racist” immigration policy. Clearly, he considers this akin to treachery from politicians who, between them, have taken positions that are anti-American, anti-white and anti-Jewish. What’s more, he knows that millions of Americans will be thinking exactly the same thing.

Thus he further tweeted: “So sad to see the Democrats sticking up for people who speak so badly of our Country . . . Whenever confronted, they call their adversaries, including Nancy Pelosi, ‘RACIST’. Their disgusting language and the many terrible things they say about the United States must not be allowed to go unchallenged.”

Subsequently he doubled down again, asking: “When will the Radical Left Congresswomen apologise to our country . . . for the foul language they have used, and the terrible things they have said.”

It became plain that he was twisting the knife into the writhing body of the Democratic Party. He was using The Squad to ram home that the Democrats have been taken over by extremists. Indeed, for offensiveness it’s hard to beat Ocasio-Cortez, who called the US border detention centres “concentration camps”.

For bigotry, look no further than Omar, who has accused American Jews of dual loyalties and buying political influence in the interests of Israel. For anti-Americanism and playing the race card, there’s the support by Pressley and Tlaib for an article accusing the Declaration of Independence of being “sexist, racist and prejudiced”, not to mention Pressley’s own racially divisive remark that there’s “no need for black faces that don’t want to be a black voice”.

Now racial identity politics is consuming its own. Ocasio-Cortez has accused Nancy Pelosi of “singling out newly elected women of colour” simply because Pelosi finally lost patience with The Squad after they failed to vote last month for her border aid package.

Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabarti, accused Democrats who backed this bill of “being hell-bent to do to black and brown people today what the old Southern Democrats did in the Forties”. Yet he in turn was attacked by the House Democratic caucus over his claim that congresswoman Sharice Davids had voted in ways that “enable a racist system”. Raged the caucus: “Why is he explicitly singling out a Native American woman of colour?”

The Democratic Party is now being boiled alive by the very racial politics it has encouraged.

This is the pot that Trump is now deftly stirring. Every time he is called racist, his poll numbers climb among the millions who decode such attacks on him as un-American treachery by those who want to destroy border controls and thus the very concept of citizenship. The insult is also being used so indiscriminately it has all but lost its meaning as a description of truly evil intent.

Trump is a man who plays the political game by completely different rules. Those who refuse to understand this will lose not just the people’s vote but the moral high ground, too.