The Trump Campaign Wants Everyone Talking About Race

Earlier this month, the self-identified “white nationalist” Donald Trump adviser Laura Loomer said that if Vice President Kamala Harris wins, “the White House will smell like curry & White House speeches will be facilitated via a call center.”

Asked what he thought of Loomer’s remarks, the GOP vice-presidential candidate, J. D. Vance, said he didn’t “like” them, but then continued, “Whether you’re eating curry at your dinner table or fried chicken, things have gotten more expensive thanks to [Harris’s] policies.” The line about inflation would have worked without the mention of fried chicken and curry, but then it would not have included a belittling reminder that Harris is of Black and Indian descent.

Now, the notable thing is not the void where Vance’s sense of humor should be—that’s an old story. What’s going on here is emblematic of the Trump campaign’s strategy, which is to try to make race the big issue of the campaign, via incessant trolling, lying, and baiting of both the press and the Harris camp. The racism rope-a-dope is one of Trump advisers’ favorite moves—say something to provoke accusations of racism, then ride the wave of outrage over your critics’ perceived oversensitivity.

The theory is that by supercharging the salience of race—a reliable winner with huge swaths of the electorate—they can compensate for the unpopularity of the Trump campaign’s actual policy agenda: its plans to ban abortion, repeal protections for preexisting conditions in the Affordable Care Act, deregulate Big Business, and cut taxes on the wealthy while raising them on everyone else. The campaign wants people—white people in particular—thinking about race, and hopes that these kinds of appeals will activate the necessary number of voters in the key swing states where the electorate is more conservative than the country as a whole. As Molly Ball reported in 2017, based on polling from the former Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway, another former Trump stalwart, Steve Bannon, developed a plan to galvanize white voters with race-baiting on immigration.

[From the January/February 2024 issue: A plan to outlaw abortion everywhere]

The belief that demagoguery on immigration is politically potent is why conservative media erupt with saturation coverage of the perennial migrant caravans every election season. The right sees as its most effective message the argument that immigrants, particularly nonwhite immigrants, are going to come to America and take or be given that which belongs to you. Encounters at the southern border have dropped precipitously in recent months, however, owing to a crackdown by Mexican authorities, and in the absence of that reliable scapegoat, the Trump campaign found a new one, spreading lies about hardworking Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio.

“What it is is: Imagine if this explosion of migrants or illegals happened on your block, in your neighborhood? You don’t have a clearer real-world example of the consequences of these Biden-Harris immigration policies, and most voters do not want that to happen where they live and send their kids to school,” a Trump adviser told Rolling Stone’s Asawin Suebsaeng. He added that the Trump campaign believes “this is a surefire political winner for them.”

As soon as Harris became the nominee, Republicans began goading her. Republican elected officials immediately attacked Harris as a “DEI hire,” accusing the former district attorney, attorney general, and senator, who has spent more time in elected office than either member of the GOP ticket, as unqualified. Trump went to the National Association of Black Journalists convention and falsely accused Harris of recently “becoming” Black. The Trump campaign has charged Harris with wanting to “import the third world,” a framing that implicitly suggests that Americans of non-European descent don’t belong here. In August, Trump shared an image of dark-skinned people with the caption, “If you’re a woman you can either vote for Trump or wait until one of these monsters goes after you or your daughter.” Trump’s dehumanizing rhetoric about immigrants “poisoning the blood of the nation” predates Harris’s entrance into the contest, but the Trump campaign’s focus shifted once the child of Jamaican and Indian immigrants took center stage.

“They’re coming from the Congo. They’re coming from Africa. They’re coming from the Middle East. They’re coming from all over the world—Asia,” Trump told supporters last week. “What’s happening to our country is we’re just destroying the fabric of life in our country … We’re not going to take it any longer. You got to get rid of these people. Give me a shot.” Trump makes no distinction between illegal and legal immigration here, and Vance has already announced that the distinction doesn’t matter to him. What matters is that people who are not white do not belong here, unless they happen to be married or related to Vance; then he’s willing to make an exception.

This is a racist politics straight out of the 19th century. Even as it foments racist fears about nonwhite people, the Trump campaign draws accusations of racism—which makes race more salient to white people who will feel defensive and rally around the campaign.

In her book, White Identity Politics, Ashley Jardina distinguishes between a politics of racism and white identity—one that is useful for understanding what the Trump campaign is doing. Some white voters who are not ideologically opposed to stronger social-welfare policies in general can be manipulated by appeals to the sense that white people as a group are threatened.

“White identity is sometimes latent, but it is also reactive—made salient by threats to the dominance of whites as a group,” Jardina writes. Politicians seeking to activate that sentiment “can make racial appeals that not only take advantage of the hostilities whites feel toward racial and ethnic minorities, but also ones that appeal to whites’ desire to protect and preserve their group’s power.”

The Trump campaign’s more overtly racist rhetoric is meant to capture the support of the former group, while its race-baiting is intended to provoke attacks that will activate a sense of white solidarity. “I want them to talk about racism every day,” Bannon told The American Prospect in 2017. Vance was so desperate to bait Democrats into such accusations that, in July, he awkwardly suggested to a confused audience of supporters that liberals would accuse him of racism for drinking Diet Mountain Dew. Sadly for him, they waited until Vance went all in on repeating baseless lies about Black immigrants.

“For Trump, this kind of explicit race baiting has been effective,” Jardina, a professor of politics at the University of Virginia, told me. But, she added, “I think that it’s still somewhat of a risky strategy for Trump. It activates his core group of real MAGA conservatives, who have rallied around white identity. But I think there’s a segment of the white population who finds this at least distasteful, if not appalling.”

Harris’s campaign, by contrast, is avoiding talk of race, especially when it comes to the candidate herself. To look at the Harris campaign is to observe a Democratic Party chastened by backlash. Barack Obama warned Americans not to support his candidacy as a means of “racial reconciliation on the cheap,” but his candidacy was nonetheless seen as a fulfillment of the civil-rights movement’s aspirations. His success led to the rise of Trump, who defeated Hillary Clinton, whose campaign aspired to break “the highest, hardest glass ceiling.”

It also has none of the soaring rhetoric of the Obama campaign or the overt feminist appeals of the Clinton campaign. The Harris camp's stated policy goals are relatively modest, with none of the revolutionary tone of the Bernie Sanders campaign or the wonky radicalism of Elizabeth Warren. It is a campaign for an era of backlash.

Harris is running, as best she can, as a generic Democrat—the kind who polled so well against Trump in the past. There is scant use of the more radical language used to discuss systemic racial or gender inequalities, and relatively little about the ongoing scourge of discrimination. Her campaign’s Issues page does not mention racial inequality directly. Harris has moved to the right on crime and immigration, matching a public that has also shifted in Trump’s direction. The Harris campaign is behaving as though it understands exactly what Trump is trying to do, and is attempting to neutralize that despite having a Black woman at the top of the ticket.

[Read: What Trump’s Kamala Harris smear reveals]

You can see the campaign’s approach in how Harris responds to the Trump campaign’s overt, incessant, and often personal race-baiting. After Trump’s remarks about her at the NABJ convention, Harris merely dismissed the comments as “the same old show: the divisiveness and the disrespect. And let me just say, the American people deserve better.” At the debate, Harris responded with similar framing—as though Americans were the target of Trump’s racist remarks, and not her. “Honestly, I think it’s a tragedy that we have someone who wants to be president, who has consistently, over the course of his career, attempted to use race to divide the American people,” Harris said. In this way, she can condemn Trump’s remarks without making it seem like she is, in right-wing parlance, “playing the race card.” Whether consciously or not, Harris’s recent remarks about gun ownership—she told Oprah that anyone breaking into her home is “getting shot”—tell conservative-leaning white people that she shares their fears about crime, another point of emphasis for Trump that involves lurid descriptions and exaggerations.

It is not a coincidence that Harris’s harshest condemnations of Trump have come in response to remarks he’s made about other people—namely the falsehoods he has spread about the Haitian immigrants in Springfield. But even then, although Harris criticized Trump for “spewing lies that are grounded in tropes that are age-old,” her focus was on Trump’s dishonesty, not his racism, insisting that Trump “cannot be entrusted with standing behind the seal of the president of the United States of America.”

Harris’s delicate responses to Trump’s overtly racist remarks and race-baiting are indicative of the tightrope the Harris campaign has to walk, and explain the unrelenting racist bombast of the Trump campaign. Trump needs to turn Harris into a threatening figure, and Harris has to defuse those appeals with all the caution of a bomb squad trying to disarm an explosive.