Netizen: India

Tuesday, October 22, 2024

22: India

The Very Real Scenario Where Trump Loses and Takes Power Anyway If Trump overturns the 2024 election, here’s how it could happen.
What China’s Leaders Grasp About Another Trump Term
Trump Has Turned It Up to 11 Donald Trump is so dependent on racial and ethnic antagonism that without it, he would be a marginal figure, relegated to the sidelines. ....... Trump’s constant demonization of Black people and immigrants has inured the public to the fact that he is the first — or certainly the most explicit — modern president and party nominee to transparently generate, not to mention exacerbate, fear and white animosity toward people of color......... In the closing days of the 2024 election, he continues to foment race hatred and to rely on it ever more intently. ............. “Trump was distinctive in how he tapped into white grievance,” they wrote. “Trump’s primary campaign became a vehicle for a different kind of identity politics” — one oriented toward capitalizing on the feeling of many white people that they were being “pushed aside in an increasingly diverse America.” ........... in late 2015 a P.R.R.I. survey found that 64 percent of Republicans claimed to believe “that ‘discrimination against whites has become as big of a problem as discrimination against Blacks and other minorities.’” .......... “There is a definite anti-white feeling in this country, and that can’t be allowed,” Trump told Time magazine in April. ........... after “talking to people in Kentucky’s Fifth Congressional District, the whitest and second-poorest congressional district in the country”: ......... The people I talk to do not believe they are racist and are insulted when they see themselves so described on CNN. They roundly rejected a 2017 white nationalist march through Pikeville, Ky., led by the neo-Nazi Matthew Heimbach. Many I talked to were proud to have the first integrated cemetery, and there are town markers commemorating an early-century Black female poet. ........... But they also sense themselves sinking and are threatened — by, in order of importance, immigrants, refugees, Blacks, women, highly educated “elites” — who are doing better than they are — and feel these categories are favored by the Democrats over them. They feel the Democrats are consumed by “identity politics” and have, because of it, wiped white men off the Democratic social map. ........ Most of Trump’s appeal is based, I argue in “Stolen Pride,” on his call to turn the shame of white, non-B.A. downward mobility into blame. Primary among the many targets of blame are immigrants, but secondary are Blacks and women — sort of “secondary immigrants” threatening to replace white males in the status hierarchy. ........... Since the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the Democratic Party has struggled in its efforts to deal with racial issues, while the Republican Party has repeatedly used crime, busing, urban decay and immigration to divide the Democratic coalition. .......... Trump is unique in that he has made explicit racial outreach a core part of his campaign. He did this in 2016, 2020 and now again in 2024. ........... Gary Jacobson, also a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego, sees Trump as an avatar of malice. “Extreme rhetoric fanning fear and hatred of nonwhite immigrants and urban minorities is central to Trump’s current campaign,” he wrote by email. “I assume he thinks it works for him.” .............. Trump could benefit from focusing on these problems and addressing them in terms that make him appear reasonable. This could even include a less hysterical approach to immigration. But it is not in his nature to do so. ............. some reporting indicates that Trump campaign officials have tried to steer the candidate toward those issues. His focus on racial hostility, in terms of policy rhetoric and how he talks about his opponent, appears to be somewhat of a personal choice. ............ Without tapping into and triggering citizens’ racial resentment and racial prejudice, Trump would not be competitive. He is incapable of articulating traditional conservative values. ............ We’re rapidly running out of superlatives to describe how extreme Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric has become. He’s clearly amped up his harsh and violent rhetoric. Even in 2020, his rhetoric largely focused on building a wall and keep out undocumented immigrants. But in 2024, his rhetoric has shifted almost exclusively to talking about immigrants as the deranged and violent enemy who has already invaded the country. ......... He talks about immigrants slitting the throats of housewives in their kitchens and raping young girls and promises mass arrests, militarized encampments and deportation. His rhetoric has now moved — there’s really no other way to say it — fully into Nazi territory. He has called immigrants “not human” and referred to them as “animals.” ............... Trump has taken his supporters with him on this extremist journey. In 2013, a majority (53 percent) of Republicans supported a path to citizenship for immigrants living in the country illegally; by 2019, that number had dropped to 39 percent. ............. Today, two-thirds of Republicans (64 percent) and a majority of white evangelical Protestants (54 percent) agree even with Trump’s dehumanizing assertion, echoing Hitler’s arguments in “Mein Kampf,” that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” We know these words are the bricks paving the road to political violence and even genocide. ......... If he loses, Trump will face an avalanche of criminal proceedings that could last the rest of his life. If he wins, they are likely to go away.