Donald Trump appears to have decided to base his re-election campaign on getting to the right of NASCAR and fighting to preserve the memory of slavery.
He is criticizing NASCAR, a college football-rivaling modern Southern cultural rage, for daring to remove the Confederate flag from its events.
That sentence makes sense until you ... well, read it.
I mean, really. The American president in 2020 wants race-car events to fly the flag of treasonous Southern secession in 1861-65 that tried to preserve the right to keep people of dark skin pigmentation as slaves.
A Black race-car driver has said a rope tied as a noose was found in his garage. White drivers have risen to his defense. The American president in 2020 tweeted Monday his outrage that the Black race-car driver hadn't yet apologized for making up the allegation, though there exists no credible suggestion he made it up.
And this American president in 2020 recently re-tweeted a video in which a white creep riding a golf cart adorned in Trump signage was chanting "white power." And this American president in 2020 is saying we must fight against street thugs for our "heritage," a word that modern racists apply to the celebrating of Black bondage and the memorializing of white blood shed to save it.
And this American president in 2020 is saying he opposes taking the names of Confederate notables off our military installations, even as Republican senators marginally more sane advise him that, should he veto a bill removing those names, the veto could well be overridden.
But Trump is only about Trump, and he believes he must stoke cultural division to win.
He's doing it while Mississippi--Mississippi--is moving to come up with a new state flag that doesn't contain Confederate symbols.
Indeed, it's a strange time in America. We have liberals getting to the left of Scandinavia on health policy, and a president getting to the right of Mississippi on race.
Could this tactic actually work for Trump? I think it could, predicated on the fact that many white conservatives have settled on the rationalization that they must ignore the outrageous specifics of many of the things he says, but appreciate generally that he is standing against scary leftist madness.
I'm friendly with some of these aging and well-to-do Southern white men. I see some of their email threads because someone misguidedly copies me.
I see that they are aghast--against Democrats--that Seattle permitted a no-police zone, and that police departments in Democratic-run cities backed off and let so-called protesters perform sanctioned violence and destruction, and that so-called eminences in higher academia are letting miseducated youths imperil the extolling of great statesmen like J. William Fulbright, never mind that he was the kind of great statesman who voted against the Civil Rights Act in 1964.
They simply are scared that the comforts of white privilege--which they enjoy while denying--are in danger. They say they have nothing to apologize for, because they didn't create the system into which they were born.
I've seen these folks say they had thought they might vote for Joe Biden but that now it looks as if he suffers from dementia and will be run in his dotage by these mad leftists in the streets.
I've seen them say they might yet find their way to vote for Biden unless he picks Kamala Harris as his running mate, quite possibly to become president owing to Joe's age.
Harris is an accomplished former attorney general of our largest state and a reasonably distinguished U.S. senator. I'm fairly certain these same white conservatives thought Sarah Palin would be perfectly fine as a vice president, and that Dan Quayle was all right in the office.
I'm wondering: What might be the difference between Kamala Harris on the one hand and, on the other, Sarah Palin and Dan Quayle? Other than that Harris seems smarter, I mean. Any ideas? Anyone?
Through it all, we have the Trumpian dynamic. It's that he says things even his supporters find over the top, but overlook, because they hear him loud and clear as the chief advocate of their resentments and chief resister to change that scares them.
Then I hear regularly from people professing to be in the agnostic political center who ask why I bother writing about Trump, considering that his outrageousness is baked into the cake and chronicled ad nauseam by the national media. They insist the issue about which I ought to write is whether Democrats can be sane and pragmatic enough to present the nation a non-frightful alternative.
I simply believe a political commentator needs to take note at least every 15th column or so that we have a madman president, one who, most lately, is presenting to 21st century America a phony Manhattan representation of the baby Stonewall Jackson and George Wallace might have had.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.