As President Trump has been going to the mattresses over monuments, statues, and military base names, even when they honor figures associated with the Confederacy, as well as attacking “cancel culture,” his campaign has continued to hit Democratic challenger Joe Biden on politically incorrect utterances throughout his nearly 50 years in public life.
So at the same time Trump is tweeting about whether Bubba Wallace has apologized for the NASCAR noose scandal, which the FBI concluded was not a hate crime directed at the black driver, his campaign is circulating memoranda to the press noting Biden’s work with segregationist Democrats in the Senate.
While Trump is questioning whether NASCAR hurt its ratings by banning the Confederate flag at races, his campaign is highlighting that Biden, in 1993, called a group that flew the flag “fine people.” They have hit Biden for eulogizing Robert Byrd, the longtime Democratic senator from West Virginia who was in the Ku Klux Klan in the 1940s, and also Strom Thurmond, the onetime segregationist senator from South Carolina who spent his final four decades in Congress as a Republican.
One day, the Trump team might blast Biden for not distancing himself sufficiently from the “defund the police” movement. “Biden’s call to defund the police is further evidence that there is zero daylight between Biden and his cabal of left-wing advisers like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,” said a Republican National Committee spokesman. On another, the campaign or the RNC might accuse Biden of distorting his record on legislation “that led to the mass incarceration of thousands of Black Americans, which hurt families, communities, and generational wealth.”
“Joe Biden’s racist comments were shocking,” read a Trump War Room message after the presumptive Democratic nominee’s controversial interview with Charlamagne tha God. “Biden — a 77-year-old white man — clearly got offended when a Black radio host said he wanted to ask him more questions about his record and policies.”
It’s part of a delicate needle Trump is trying to thread in his quest for a second term: turning out his base, which includes people who are opposed to toppling statues of Founding Fathers who once owned slaves or to renaming military installations named for Confederate generals, while making inroads with black and suburban white voters to help close the gap with Biden in swing states. Trump needs strong turnout from rural voters, some of whom might admire Robert E. Lee or fly the Confederate battle flag, while at the same time dampening minority enthusiasm for the former vice president.
This task has been made even more difficult by the nationwide protests that followed the death of George Floyd, an unarmed black man, in the custody of a white police officer. Trump wants to demonstrate that he is the candidate of law and order and a strong supporter of the police in the face of accusations of systemic racism while also contrasting his record signing criminal justice reform into law with Biden’s role in passing a 1994 crime bill many blame for worsening the mass incarceration of black people.
While difficult, the 2016 Trump campaign was largely able to hit that balance. Black turnout for Hillary Clinton lagged, despite her strong showing with African American voters in that year’s Democratic primaries, while rural and working-class white people came out for Trump in big numbers. They were also able to neutralize some Trump negatives by pointing to Clinton liabilities, whether Bill or Hillary’s, driving up her unfavorable ratings. All this helped turn the industrial Midwest red for the first time since the 1980s, delivering Trump the White House.
This has all proven more difficult with Biden, who started with higher favorability ratings than Clinton, and after the Floyd protests, which appear to have galvanized black voters while making it more difficult to triangulate on issues related to race. And whether to prioritize the rural Lee fan over the jittery suburban centrist has opened a strategic divide within the campaign. Trump’s numbers with minority voters have held steady in most polls while he’s taken his biggest hits with white voters, especially with college degrees.
But neither the Trump campaign nor the White House have stopped trying. Trump spoke Thursday in the Rose Garden to tout the White House Hispanic Prosperity Initiative. “We achieved the highest ever incomes for Hispanic Americans and many other American groups and communities,” he said. “We built the greatest economy in history, not only for our country but for the world. We were No. 1 by far.”
“It’s about Biden’s hypocrisy,” said a Republican strategist who is advising the Trump reelection campaign. “It’s complicated messaging, but it needs to be hit.”
