Bigotry As Campaign Strategy Seems to Be Working

Great piece from Josh Marshall this morning on the latest round of birther garbage coming from the Trump campaign,  Money quote:

"Birtherism is a racist smear and a lie. And yet Trump has been repeating it for literally years. As recently as last night. If someone says for years that blacks have smaller brains and are only fit for menial labor or that Jews are parasites and greedy by nature and then finally says "Okay, maybe not, I'm not gonna say that anymore", who cares? If such racist agitation is ever to be forgiven it's only with a true recantation and apology and an explanation of why that person said and did such terrible things for so long. If you're now apologizing, well, why did you say such a thing? You must have known it was wrong, right? Have you really had a change of heart?" 


But of course, Trump is not addressing the real issue (his own behavior), even if he now admits Obama was born here.  And what even the incisive Josh Marshall leaves out of this analysis is that Trump did far more than merely been "repeat" birtherism for years:  in 2011 he became its most active and virulent promulgator, demanding the birth certificate, elevating the racist birther lie to greater prominence, and claiming he had sent a "team of investigators" to Hawaii  and that "Well I have people that actually have been studying it and they cannot believe what they're finding.".

What were the results of this so-called investigation?  Who was on this "team"?  What "unbelievable finds" did they make? Why have we never heard from them?  When was the press conference announcing the team's results?  Never, because it never happened -- either because Trump lied when he said he had assembled such a team (presumably paid) or because the "investigation" yielded nothing.  Either way, there was nothing, because Obama is an American citizen.  But Trump never admitted it, never backed down, never recanted, never apologized.   Instead, he kept repeating it, even as he promised new "bombshell" information that never materialized, in an active attempt to capitalize on Republican voters' racist doubts and engineer Obama's defeat in 2012.   And he continued to raise the issue over the years.

Reporters, meanwhile, do not seem focused on the fact that Trump's claim that he sent investigators to Hawaii and had found something is a bald-faced lie. CNN did note in 2011 that the only evidence of such a team was Trump's own statement, and in July of this year, New York Times reporters observed  that it appears that Trump never sent such a team.  But the issue is not highlighted.  And it matters, for three reasons:  

1. Trump repeatedly said he had a team, they could not believe what they were finding, and that the team went to Hawaii.  If there was no team and no one went to Hawaii and there were no findings, these are all lies.   
2. If Trump did send a team, then Trump also lied, because if those investigators or team had ever found anything to support the birther lie, you can be sure we would have heard about it. We never heard about it, because there was nothing.  
3. The pattern of lying in 2011 is the same pattern he has deployed throughout the campaign, and it is a deeply defamatory, McCarthy-esque smear tactic that is reprehensible in a ordinary person, but deeply dangerous coming from a potential (or God forbid, actual) president.  This is exactly what he did with the so-called security briefings. It is what he does all the time:  makes a claim, state he has secret information that will reveal some bombshell about the target (Obama, Clinton, whoever); and cause unending negative speculation about the target.  The fact that the bombshell never materializes is beside the point, because he is sowing doubt, which then allows the speculation itself to become the story -- and even when the truth comes (as it did for the birther lie) , the speculation and doubt remain.  (Look at the insane health garbage about Clinton. Trump tapped into the rightwing fever swamp where planted and ludicrous rumors were swirling about Clinton's health, from claims that she had brain damage to epilepsy to palsy, and brought them mainstream.  Those rumors play on longstanding gendered beliefs that women are weaker than men.  There was no basis for the rumors about Clinton's health, but now that she had a mild illness the Trump base questions her health, says the speculation is confirmed, and rumors take on the sheen of truth.)  This is how Trump deploys gender bias coupled with innuendo  to attempt to undermine and delegitimize Clinton just as he has deployed racial bias and innuendo to attempt to undermine and delegitimize Obama. He knows full well that whites don't examine their conscious or unconscious biases toward African-Americans and that men and women won't examine their attitudes toward women.  So this 2011 birther conspiracy is a template for how Trump channels McCarthy, racism and sexism on a near daily-basis in this campaign. 

And Trump's lies and smears also matter because now Trump's campaign has put out an utterly putrid piece of Orwellian filth, falsely claiming (i) that he did America a service by "forcing" Obama to release his long-firm birth certificate and (ii) that Clinton had something to do with this right-wing  fever swamp vileness that subsumed the 2008 election on the right and continues to this day, as polls show that a huge percentages of Trump supporters do not believe that the President is an American citizen and further believe he is a Muslim (the latter of which should not matter anyway).   So now it's a "service" to the country when a racist celebrity crackpot seizes on a debunked rightwing conspiracy theory that was used to undermine and delegitimize Obama in 2008, and which worked so well that huge swaths of Republican citizens actually believed it, and re-stokes the racist lie for his own benefit to water-test a 2012 presidential bid?  It is a "service" now that even more Republican voters believe Obama is not a citizen than did in 2008 and 2011, thanks largely to Trump?   In fact, more Republicans believe Obama was not born here now than did in 2008 and 2011. 

Make no mistake, Trump's game here is several-fold:

1.  Dominate the news cycle by pretending to not be racist while doubling-down on and repeating the racism for the benefit of his racist supporters, all the while further pretending that he cares about people.   He gets to try to "pivot" and ignore the birther issue while fanning the flames, suggesting that it is the press who is concerned with irrelevant old stories and not focused on "real issues," unlike himself.

2.  Simultaneously attack Clinton in a consummate act of combined mendacity and projection, in order to tar Clinton with his own racism, and to play into narratives of her as venal and calculating.  This in turn allows him to deflect his own conduct, and absolve himself and his racist supporters by blaming it all on her.  It has the added benefit to Trump of perhaps sowing doubt in the minds of those already disinclined to support Clinton. Will those people go to factcheck.org or politifact.com and see what a scurrilous lie this is?  Don't hold your breath.  Will the news media call Trump out for the liar that he is on this issue? Again, don't hold your breath. Meanwhile, the lie gets airtime, like all the other lies about Clinton, and after awhile the truth becomes irrelevant, a subjective toy to be played with depending on where you political proclivities lie, another reprehensible meme that takes longer to refute than to repeat, and whose refutation will not be believed by those who do not want to believe it. 

3.  Stop the media discussion and inquiries about the monumental and insurmountable conflicts of interest that are detailed in Kurt Eichenwald's Nesweek story, which ought to be front-page news and dominating the news cycle.  His willingness to get in bed with dictators -- not just fawning on Putin from afar, but his seeking to actually do business with Qaddaffi in New York, despite his being a known terrorist murderer -- ought to give rise to questions across the country, but we get nothing from the press.   He is fine with continuing in the narrative of the "bigot" because he has seen from the polls and the conduct of his own party that bigotry, while unappetizing for many, is apparently not a true impediment to his election.  The bigot narrative is better for him because it allows the press to continue in the false dichotomy that it has developed to describe the two candidates:  he's the bigot, she's the liar. 

This narrative is itself a huge lie, but perpetuating it lets Trump avoid the narratives that ought to be following him like the plague:   he is the most dishonest, secretive, untrustworthy, selfish, fraudulent lying liar in the history of modern politics, a person who cannot be trusted to tell the truth about a single thing, or even to put his country before himself and his own greed.  Donald Trump does not want news reporters and interviewers focusing on his conflicts of interest, refusal to release the tax returns, illegal housing discrimination, failed companies, Trump University scam, bankruptcies, conflicts of interest, or hypocrisy surrounding the questionable circumstances of his third wife's immigration, among other things.  

The bigot narrative energizes his base, and allows him and the media to paint Clinton as the liar.  Even the people who hate Trump and won't vote for him have believe that Clinton is dishonest and untrustworthy, and that they face an impossible choice between a lying hater (Trump) and someone then have been led to falsely believe is an even worse liar (Clinton).  For a politician, Clinton is honest, as has been repeatedly shown.  


So Trump today says finally that Obama was born in the U.S.?  Who cares, as Josh says in his article?   His bitherism is and was always a tool, a racist campaign strategy founded on lies. And so the real story should not be that he has finally backed off this racist claim; it should be his lies and all the other issues I mentioned above.  Like I said before, don't hold your breath.