The Racism Is A Feature Of The Con

Matthew Yglesias tells us "it’s impossible to understand why the Trump Show we see on stage works without appreciating what’s happening behind the scenes and who benefits from it."  In other words, follow the money:

On Monday, Brian Schwartz of CNBC reported that “Trump, Republican National Committee turn to titans of industry to help raise over $100 million in second quarter.”

That massive haul of financial cash comes in part from people who backed Trump in 2016. But it also features big bundles of cash from donors who supported other GOP candidates in the 2016 primary and then stayed aloof from Trump. It includes people like Stephen Rosenberg, CEO of the real estate investment partnership Greystone. Rosenberg backed Hillary Clinton in 2016, but wrote a $360,600 check to the Trump reelection campaign — and I’m guessing it’s not because he appreciates the way Trump drives liberal elites wild with his blunt talk.

Trump’s signature tax bill didn’t pay for itself as promised or lead to a massive surge in business investment, but it did boost bank profits to record levels. And it spurred a massive series of stock buybacks that benefitted rich people who own lots of stock and corporate executives with stock-linked compensation packages. He’s approving a Sprint/T-Mobile merger that will raise cellphone plan prices for consumers, repealed net neutrality regulations, and in one of his first acts decided to allow internet service providers to sell private user data to advertising companies.

Under Trump, decades of steady progress on non-climate air pollution have finally been reversed, and his administration is hard at work writing new rules that would increase water pollution levels as well. [snip]

This agenda, no less than Trump’s racism, is an absolute disaster for America’s immigrants and communities of color who are generally lower-income and more vulnerable to corporate abuses and pollution than more privileged people.

But critically, it is also an absolute disaster for the vast majority of white people. There are simply very few people who benefit from a combination of more pollution and less economic competition, and there’s no way for the tax cutting to balance that out unless you’re part of the tiny minority of the public that derives the majority of its income from stock ownership.

Trump’s politics of racial division are not particularly popular — his approval ratings are worse than those of any prior president at this point in his term except Jimmy Carter — but it’s still true that framing Trump as a symbol of white privilege is almost certainly more favorable to him than framing him as a person whose governance has concrete material implications for Americans of all ethnic backgrounds.

Neo- fascist con man Donald "Boneless Racist" Trump and his rotted- out Republican Party are focused on what they've always been focused on:  the plutocrat class.  That's certainly not news, as conservatives have been conning low- and- middle- income white people for over a century by fanning racial animosity while they steal more and more wealth from suckers like you see at Trump's Nuremberg rallies.  At this point in time, the conned are fully reveling in the racist con, since Trump hates the same people they've been taught to hate.  That's called "winning" in Trumpland.

The problem for Trump and his rotted out party may be that the con, which has historically been encouraged by dog whistles and winks, now is full- blown, public racism as seen in this week's Nuremberg rally in North Carolina.  A line many of us saw crossed early on in the Trump era (starting with the "Mexico is sending rapists," continuing through the Muslim travel ban, and into the Charlottesville, VA, episode) has now been boldly and irretrievably crossed in July 2019 in the minds of some in the mainstream media and a significant majority of Americans, who see this and don't like it.  While it makes some Republicans nervous that the game is up, it still may not be enough to drive the plutocrats and their millions away from Trump, as they've already shown what they value, and it certainly won't make a dent in Trump's hardcore, white nationalist, knuckle- dragging base.  But they're not a majority in this country.

Democrats can and should still make the moral and political case that Republican racism is part of the larger con to "comfort the comfortable, and afflict the afflicted," regardless of race or ethnicity.  To coin a phrase, the racism is a feature, not a bug of the Republican con.