By now, one would be only slightly surprised to hear the president simply use the N-word.
Trump is now doing something different. By attacking the black and brown women of the squad, he is not just pitting citizen against immigrant, but citizen against citizen. This is a significant shift. Politicians from Richard Nixon to Bill Clinton have seen the utility of coded racial appeals to white voters, but over time they have also calculated that these appeals must be coded or else the political cost will outweigh the benefit. The late Republican strategist Lee Atwater captured the dynamic in an infamous 1981 quote:
You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites … “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”
Trump is going in the opposite direction. By now, one would be only slightly surprised to hear the president simply use the N-word. Perhaps he’s saving that until the general election.
The open embrace of racism as a political strategy is, however, a natural progression from the 2016 campaign. While the president’s bigotry in the first campaign was instinctive, a reflection of his long-held and -lived convictions, it also served a political purpose. He and his advisers understood the appeal it would have. After the violent white-supremacist march in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017, Trump praised “very fine people on both sides,” causing a firestorm.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/racism-campaign-strategy/593962/
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