Next month will be the fourth anniversary of a Donald Trump boast that establishment Republicans were sure would sink his presidential hopes.
“I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters,” he famously bragged at a January 23, 2016, rally in Sioux Center, Iowa.
It was maybe the only time the Great Prevaricator told the truth on the campaign trail or in the White House.
The Democratic House of Representatives will likely impeach Trump. But hogs will fly and kids will stop shooting hoops in Kentucky before Mitch McConnell’s Senate turns him out of office.
It’s not just congressional Republicans — Wall Street, tea party, and neo-Confederate — who are standing by their man. Trump’s white and largely rural rank-and-file base seems as solid as ever. Three Kentucky historians doubt it will crack, much less crumble.
“He’s done a brilliant job of coalescing white resentment over the rise of people of color,” said Bill Mulligan, a Murray State University professor emeritus of history.
“Regardless of the facts, regardless of what people might testify to, he flips the narrative and appeals to the same racist base elements,” said Brian Clardy, a Murray State history professor.
Ever Trumpers refuse to listen to reason, said John Hennen, a professor emeritus of history at Morehead State University. “Try asking one of them. The most reasonable answer you’ll get is ‘Oh yes, he’s a prick – but the economy is doing so well!’”
Mulligan added that Trump has pandered to prejudice “in a way that his supporters can convince themselves that it’s not [racism] but something else.”
Clardy agreed. “He has basically created his own political reality, regardless of the facts, regardless of what other people might testify to. He’s going to…appeal to the George Wallace types.”
Wallace was Alabama’s segregationist governor who left office in 1967 and ran for president in 1968, pandering to racism. He carried a quintet of former Confederate states.
Some Trump detractors have compared his demagoguery to Wallace’s. Like Wallace, “he is ignorant, stupid, boorish, and ruthless – all of which makes his malignant genius of manipulation so dangerous,” Hennen said. “The racist monstrousness of Trump has always been part of the American character; it festered all throughout the Obama years, and now the Dear Leader has liberated it.”
Mulligan said few Republican House and Senate members have broken with Trump because most of them are “career politicians who are scared witless that he will say something bad about them in a tweet.” They, too, fear that if they cross Trump, he will egg on primary challengers.
Mulligan said Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake and a handful of other Republicans who weren’t all in for Trump have decamped. “Everyone who stood up to him is gone.”
Mulligan and Clardy recalled the GOP “Southern Strategy” of the 1960s and 1970s, which was calculated to win over erstwhile white supremacist Democrats who were angry over the party’s embrace of federal legislation to end years of Jim Crow segregation, discrimination, and voter suppression in the old Confederacy.
Trump, too, appeals to white resentment, adding to his core supporters “displaced working class voters. But instead of offering them ways to fix their situation, he just feeds their anger,” according to Mulligan. “Even if they found out that coal cured cancer, the coal jobs aren’t coming back because now you can mine so much coal with so few people. The large number of jobs that Trump promised aren’t coming back.”
The Southern Strategy turned most of the white South into Republican Red. “But I cannot fathom the fact that some Southern Republicans are going into territory bordering on fascism,” Clardy said.
Hennen has no problem empathizing “with angry whites who have been brutalized by global capitalism. But we should not try any more to reach anyone who is most happy when turning that anger against the ‘others’ that demagogues like Trump vilify: blacks, Hispanics, Asians, women, honest reporters, smart people, and now, all Democrats.
“After the invasion of Iraq in 2003. I remember telling an audience at Morehead State that the once principled conservatism of the Republican Party was being pushed out by cultists. That process is now complete.”
[click_to_tweet tweet=”I remember telling an audience at Morehead State that the once principled conservatism of the Republican Party was being pushed out by cultists. That process is now complete. – John Hennen” quote=”I remember telling an audience at Morehead State that the once principled conservatism of the Republican Party was being pushed out by cultists. That process is now complete. – John Hennen”]
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