Trump turns clock back 155 years with Confederacy-inspired election strategy

Washington (CNN) One-fifth of the way through the 21st century, Donald Trump is seemingly running to be the last President of the Confederacy. As Trump continues to ignore the deadly coronavirus, a massive national crisis that has killed more than 130,000 Americans and has no end in sight, his behavior in recent days has been marked by calls to preserve statues of Confederate generals who took up arms against the United States and defending their memory, even threatening to veto a must-pass defense spending bill to do so.

It’s all in character for a politician whose career began with a racist conspiracy against former President Barack Obama and who ran his 2016 campaign as a counter-cultural reaction to the country’s first Black president.

Trump has also retreated to racial equivocation when his turbulent presidency before ran into trouble.Were the rest of his term not such a riot of outrage and impropriety and had he not spent his life exploiting racial fault lines for personal gain, Trump’s solidifying reelection strategy — rooted in unhealed wounds of the Civil War that ended 155 years ago — would be more of a shock.And while it’s rooted in his character and ideological core, his campaign tone is also a Hail Mary.

Trump was stripped of the motoring economy on which he had planned to anchor his claims of a return to American greatness by a pandemic that could have showcased the “I Alone Can Fix It” leadership skills of which he boasted four years ago. Instead the crisis exposed his governing method based on chaos, building alternative political realities, ignoring science and lying repeatedly about easily provable facts.

By condemning efforts to pull down the Confederate flag, by portraying a nation locked in a dark feudal struggle against rampant crime, unrest and “far left fascism,” Trump is not just running the most demagogic, polarizing and race-baiting campaign in modern American history.

He is betting that the uncanny political insight that powered his 2016 campaign will triumph again over an industry of political consultants, antsy Republican lawmakers and media pundits who see his crushed approval ratings and polls showing him trailing in battleground states as the throes of a doomed campaign.If that damages the fabric of America, so be it.

Trump’s high-risk approach flies in the face of normally cautious institutions averse to racial reckonings that have made their own decision to change course after in some cases concluding continued resistance to chance is bad for business and their brands.

NASCAR, the racing circuit popular in the conservative South, has banned the Confederate flag and stood behind one of its few Black drivers — provoking a searing Trump Twitter attack on Monday. The Mississippi Legislature has passed a bill to cut the stars and bars from its state flag.

And the Washington Redskins, which have for years disputed that their famous emblem is racist, are brainstorming for a new name — a sign of the tsunami of change sent through the NFL after Colin Kaepernick took a knee to protest police brutality.But against this sudden and sharp cultural sea change, Trump, as he has so often in a gambler’s career in real estate and entertainment, is making the counter-intuitive wager.

He is pinning his hopes for another four years on the idea that his silent majority of voters in rural areas of swing states such as Michigan and Wisconsin, as well as suburban swing voters, will respond to his warnings. Trump claims that tumbling statues — not just of Confederate leaders — but of more mainstream historical figures with now discredited racial attitudes mean (White) American culture and history is under attack.

It is a strategy that exhumes some of the nation’s most sensitive political arguments, is sure to leave the last semblances of unity shattered for whoever is the next President and could reverberate through national politics for years to come.

-CNN Politics

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