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Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump smiles as he arrives to speak in New York City on May 3, 2016, following his victory in the GOP primary in Indiana.
JEWEL SAMAD/AFP/Getty Images
In this election, Donald Trump has used a grieving black father’s loss to try to pit black voters against Mexican immigrants. He employs black spokespeople to tell black voters that immigrants are taking their jobs. He tweets false crime statistics as a ploy to get black people to talk about “black-on-black” crime and distract from the hate crimes at his rallies.
He deploys female supporters to undermine other women on TV by criticizing—of all things—their breast size. When a reporter grilled him on his treatment of women, he rallied women to viciously attack that woman.
Then, when his campaign manager manhandled a reporter, Trump 1) sent women out as “grab-gate truthers” to insist it never happened, and 2) dispatched women to—predictably—blame the victim and insinuate that she deserved it.
Mr. “I’ll be the best thing that ever happened to women” (yes, he actually said that) is fond of employing rape metaphors in service of his xenophobia (re: China). All the while, he openly cavorts with actual, convicted rapists. So obsessed with rape as idiom, he’s unconcerned with rape as fact.
In this election, this career beauty pageant owner will facilitate women slut-shaming, fat-shaming and all-around body-shaming one another. That’s made easier in a year when “There are probably more ugly women in America than attractive women” comes from the mouth of even a Hillary Clinton surrogate.
The Queens, N.Y., native, who won the majority of his state’s Hispanic primary voters last month, will appeal to chasms among Hispanics: of income, citizenship status, national origin and exiles vs. immigrants (“Nothing against immigrants, but my parents were exiles. And the exile experience is different than the immigrant experience,” Marco Rubio has said). Trump will employ a strategy, as candidly described by one senator, “to divide and conquer the people … on assistance,” to get them “to look down at” each other.
This is how Trump—a man who wants to ban Muslims from the country—got the leader of the Nation of Islam to say about him, “I like what I’m looking at,” on the strength of Trump’s giving the most anti-Semitic speech of any presidential candidate since David Duke (who, not coincidentally, has endorsed Trump).
That’s the 2016 presumptive GOP presidential nominee’s path to victory: getting enough people like Louis Farrakhan to make common cause with people like David Duke. If that sounds preposterous, consider that the Nation of Islam and Nazis have famously played footsie together before.
Trump supporter Luisa Aranda speaks with members of the press during the California Republican Party Convention on April 29, 2016, in Burlingame, Calif.
Ramin Talaie/Getty Images
He also knows that history is replete with minority groups used as foils—Chinese and Mexican immigrants as strikebreakers on the railroads, and black workers as a “labor reserve” in the North, having fled the Jim Crow South, where black people served as the original cheap labor: free.
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