I can’t find where I saw this reference, but evidently at one point before a rather sparse crowd which came to a political rally Saturday in Ohio, Trump went into his usual profanity-laden rant about all those ‘illegals invading the country over the Rio Grande,’ but this time he added a new twist.
The no-good criminals and welfare grubbers that Biden is trying to bring into the United States to screw things up even more than he’s screwed things up now includes immigrants from — ready? — Africa(!) although we don’t know exactly which particular country is the source of this new plague.
I knew it. I just knew it.
Sooner or later, Trump would turn his 2024 campaign into a full-fledged racist vehicle the like of which we haven’t seen since George Wallace got up on the steps of the State Capitol building in Montgomery, AL and yelled “segregation now, segregation forever” in a campaign speech in 1968.
What’s made Trump even more of a racist panderer this time around is two things: First, Joe has been behaving like he’s in a campaign for less than one week and already the polls are beginning to tighten up. At this point, the double-digit lead that Trump enjoyed in the GOP primaries has disappeared.
Second, and here is where things really start to get tough, is the fact that Trump’s campaign has basically run out of cash and Joe has a campaign war chest which is both wide and deep. According to yesterday’s article in The (failing) New York Times, Joe has somewhere around $155 million sitting around and Trump right now has less than $50 million to spend.
That’s not just a cash gap between the two campaigns — it’s a titanic hole which isn’t going to be filled up overnight, even with all those private fundraising events that Trump has been churning out at his Mar-a-Lago home.
The fact that Trump has managed to delay the start dates of several of his legal cases doesn’t really change the legal landscape one bit and certainly doesn’t drive Trump’s poll numbers in the four or five states which he needs to flip back into the red column after Joe flipped them blue in the 2020 race.
Sooner or later (I’m repeating myself) Trump has no choice but to pull out the racism which has been barely disguised for the last eight-plus years, because it’s the only way he can get the MAGA crowd to show up and vote. The moment he tries to inject any degree of coherent discussion of real issues into the campaign, such as what we should do (if anything) about entitlements, he flubs it and has no choice but to fall back on his profanity-laced appeals to whiteness and maleness again.
In fact, Trump is so far away from being able to make a convincing argument about anything having to do with substance, that in his spiel in Ohio he even accused Biden of cutting social security and Medicare, as if there’s absolutely no limit to any accusation that Trump will make.
The real problem with falling back on a racist narrative to shore up your votes, is that such messaging only has a working chance in Confederate states which aren’t in play no matter what either Presidential party says about anything at all.
Joe doesn’t need states like Alabama, Mississippi or even Texas. He needs states like Pennsylvania and Michigan where appeals to voting based on skin color just won’t fly.
So, this brings me to another question: If Trump can’t use the ‘stop the steal’ anthem to sing at rallies during the campaign, what’s going to be his excuse for losing yet another national election this year?
Don’t worry. He’ll come up with some crazy notion to keep MAGA in line.
Comments