SUMMARY: The blog post provides a detailed analysis of Trump’s recent controversial and racially charged remarks made at the National Association of Black Journalists convention. It covers specific moments in the event, dissecting Trump’s motives and the potential impact of his words. The post concludes with a call to action, urging readers to respond to Trump’s rhetoric and discusses ways to counter it. The analysis is accompanied by image attributions and links to related content, enhancing the comprehensive nature of the post. Overall, the blog provides a thorough examination of the event and encourages engagement with the topic.
KEY WORDS: National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ), Kamala Harris, Donald Trump, Rachel Scott, Identity Politics, Racism, Election 2024, DEI
COMMENT: Why do you think Trump did it? Why did he make such ugly provocative statements about Harris’ ethnic identity?
- The Freak Out Over Trump’s Open Naked Racism
- Video Clip of Trump’s Indian or Black Comments
- Analyzing Trump’s Motives for His Outrageously Racist Remarks
- Understanding Trump’s Racist Agenda and Goal
- How Should We Respond?
- Bonus: The Whole Damn Interview
- Image Attribution
The Freak Out Over Trump’s Open Naked Racism
Everybody is FREAKING THE FUCK OUT over Trump’s virulently racist and demeaning attack on Harris at the National Association of Black Journalists!
“OMG!!” people on my social media feeds are saying, “How can he hope to attract Black voters saying such things? How can be so repulsive and hope to win?” Please, let me know your responses in the comments. I’d love to discuss them with you.
Video Clip of Trump’s Indian or Black Comments
Watch it for yourself in case you missed the clip. I know, buffering, but it’s there if you want it. The entire performance — that’s all it was, too — is at the end of the post.
Analyzing Trump’s Motives for His Outrageously Racist Remarks
Respectfully, you miss the point. Let’s walk through it because word count and reading time matters, amirite? A thousand to fifteen hundred words is the Goldilocks Zone, anything longer, TL;DR, anything shorter and it can’t be important.
He’s following a tried and true familiar playbook.
Attack the Reporter When Asked a Difficult Question
He starts out combative, “Define DEI for me.” That’s the asshole’s move right there. He’s trying to get either the gotcha, “She couldn’t even define it! See, they don’t know what they’re talking about. They’re so stupid.” And by they, he means Black people.
The other option is to try and define the phrase. He was hoping she would say something about racial quotas, so he can use the straw dog argument of merit. (a) There is no merit hiring and promotion in America. It just doesn’t exist. And (b) there are lots of well-merited people who belong to racial, ethnic, cultural, language, and other communities. That’s the point. We need to break the strangle hold that white men have had on their dicks, er, hiring practices so other people can have a chance.
To Rachel Scott’s credit, she didn’t take the bait. She pressed on.
The More Outrageous the Lie or Claim, the Stronger the Reaction, the Better the Sound Bites
With Trump, you’re always pretty sure he’s riffing. The more insane and outrageous the comments, the more likely he’s just pulling whatever is coming out of his ass at that moment. He’s free-associating. He doesn’t have the executive functioning to (a) study any prepared material for an event where he’s expected to speak extemporaneously; and (b) he doesn’t have the executive functioning to use it when it is required. He’ll just miss his cues. Undoubtedly, though, someone, Jamoke Dumbass Vance, maybe? had thought of this clever line of attack and slipped it into his wet slippery couch hole.
Trump goes on to say that she had always identified as Indian. Scott pointed out that she went to Howard University, an HBCU. Trump just blows right past that. Probably better that she didn’t pick her fight with him there. Probably better that she just kept feeding him rope to shoot himself in the genitals with.
Then he says, “Until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black. So, I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black.” Then, he talks over Scott’s point that she went to an HBCU, so she was identifying as Black. This is a curious line of attack. It really goes to the heart of the identity politics. It echoes the attacks on gender identity.
“I respect either one,” he claims, “but she obviously doesn’t because she was Indian all the way, and, then, all of a sudden, she made a turn, she went, she became a Black person. I think, I think, somebody should look into that, too.” This line of attack builds on the using minority affirmative action status to take away opportunities from well-deserving white people who have earned them and giving them to undeserving lazy takers who haven’t earned them.
Understanding Trump’s Racist Agenda and Goal
Rightfully, the only response to that is What the Actual Fuck. But, we’re five hours after that moment according to the Youtube time stamp, so time to move on.
Clearly between the Black Jobs jab and this moment in infamy, he’s pursuing a racist agenda. The question is what agenda is it?
As I pointed out to a hapless person on my social media who was baffled by Trump’s “outreach” to Black people with this argument, when you’re baffled by someone’s attempt to achieve a goal, it buggars the question, maybe your assumption is wrong.
Appealing to White Nationalists and the Openly Racist
Trump is singing loudly and clearly to the white nationalists. His campaign knows that to win this election they need to have more votes in certain swing state areas to overcome Harris’ votes in other certain swing state areas. They need the white nationalist vote to turn out.
He needs the white nationalists to see how far the lazy underserving takers have gotten in taking their country from them. He needs them to look at Harris’ candidacy with an existential fear that she’s not only coming for their guns and Bibles, but also that the lowest white person will no longer be better than best Black person.
Reaching for the Racist Adjacent and Racist Curious White Folks
Trump also needs to embolden, outrage, and energize the inner racist of the seldom white voter. He needs those people to become as energized and active as the people driving voter registration spikes in swing states and the people now donating and volunteering for Harris’ campaign.
DEI is the new CRT, the trans people in women’s bathrooms, furries and kitter litter boxes in schools, and migrant caravans coming to cut the heads off of all of our daughters as they infect us with diseases, rape our fathers, and take our mothers’ jobs. It appeals to the inner Allan Bakkes of the racist curious white folks.
If the Trump campaign is going to expand his vote, those are the people who are going to do it. He ain’t going to try to poach Harris voters. He’s got to go for those who are scared of Black people but can’t get off their asses long enough to run the gauntlet that Republicans have set up to register, make sure you’re still registered, and actually vote.
How Should We Respond?
I’ve seen some video and read some responses to Trump’s latest racist outrage. We have to respond. Karine Jean-Pierre made a very thoughtful and cogent response at the White House briefing room. Others have, too. Expressing outrage, anger, and injury, gets a sympathetic and empathetic response in others. It will help expand the White Women for Harris and White Dudes for Harris crowds to expand. Explaining how just wrong Trump and the Racists are is a good way to do that.
As much as Trump is trying to activate the racist adjacent and curious, we need to activate the shut-the-fuck-up-with-your-overt-racist-crap-it-makes-me-uncomfortable crowd of white people. And, as we like to say, there are more of us than there are of them. There are more white people who are afraid of seeming racist than there are white people who want to be seen as racist. Those are my white people. That’s my tribe.
Our response, as it always should be to Trump and the Racists, is to shun them. That kind of belief and talk has no place in the land of All People Are Created Equal and A More Perfect Union. We should make fun of them, dismiss it as Antebellum racism, and use it as motivation to GoTV.
That’s the deal. Let me know what you think in the comments.
Bonus: The Whole Damn Interview
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Image Attribution
This screenshot was taken from The New York Post‘s video clip of the Indian or Black response at the NABJ Convention YouTube Channel
The Psy of Life 
I am so sick and tired of the Cheeto……….he is one of the most despicable people I have ever known about, and he just keeps getting worse. Too bad we no longer have mandatory institutionalization for people like him..
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He should be shunned as in refused entry to any private business and no one socializes with him. It is the only treatment that his behavior deserves.
Jack
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At this point in time, he’s long had the ‘racist-adjacent’ and ‘racist-curious’ folks in his camp, because those aren’t actually categories.
Like the old joke:
He’s not growing his base; those ‘racist-adjacent’ and ‘racist-curious’ people are already part of it…they’re the same old ‘basket of deplorables’ Hillary tried to warn us about, and it’s why, save for the gigantic Black Swan event of 2016, he has lost every election since, either when he was running, or was merely trying to get his side to win.
2018, 2020, the ‘Red ripple’ of 2022 were all undeniably bad years for Trump and Trumpism, and all he is offering is more of the same only louder, weirder and more racist and misogynist than before. He caused enough damage to this country in his 4 years that it may take a generation or more to fully purge it, but it doesn’t mean he’s getting more popular, no matter how hard the degenerate gamblers of the political press try to make it a horse race.
I think that history will come to judge Biden’s dropping out as the greatest rope-a-dope maneuver in American politics.
After Trump’s coronation at the RNC, picking the incel-techbro favorite Vance as his running mate without, it appears, any vetting at all, he cemented the ticket as the ‘creepy weirdo’ ticket, all ready to beat the stuffing outta ‘Senile Old Joe’, then BAM! their opponent is no longer ‘SOJ’ but a young, smart and woman who tickles all their basest prejudices and they just cannot help themselves and start blurting out all the stuff that makes them sound like that angry obnoxious drunk asshole at the end of the bar.
Trump’s given them all permission to be their worst selves and shout all the vile things they’ve been saying in quiet among each other for so long now that they’re just fully out in the open about it, and people are noticing, and not surprisingly it’s turning them off.
They started dancing and spiking the ball 30 yards from the goal line, and it will cost them dearly.
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Howdy Bruce!
He’s trying to motivate people to vote who don’t usually vote. He did bring the seldom-sometimes voter to the polls in 2016. They stayed home in 2020. It’s the only way he can compete with Kamalamentum.
Dog whistles work because they allow white people to preserve their inner racist without ever consciously acknowledging it. In that sense, racist-adjacent and racist-curious are categories because Trump has made it okay to be openly racist again. People with barely concealed racism then are stimulated and inclined to respond positively to the dog whistling racist. “It’s not Blacks I’m against, it is crime!”
Trump is a narcissist, so he cannot learn. Literally. When he won in 2016, it was because he was the greatest candidate ever and everybody loved him. When he lost in 2020, it was because it was stolen from him. That’s the narcissist view. He thinks if he does more of the same, it will work because he cannot evaluate, reflect, and revise, since everything he does is the absolute best there can be. Literally.
However, the GOP has been dog whistling their way to victory since Nixon. Trump has brought the racists out from under the fridge even when the lights are on. It’s okay to be openly racist in America, again (that’s what MAGA actually means). So, he’s out there following that logic. The more openly racist you are, the more racists will vote for you.
Trump has never won anything fairly in his life. I don’t know why anyone thinks he started in 2016. They’ll try the same things they did in 2016 and 2020 to get him elected, only more of it. They’re going to put into action all of those voter suppression laws that they passed. They’ll have “poll” watchers intimidating and challenging every voter they can. They’ll have vote count observers making every objection they can. They’ll have vote certifiers refusing to certify votes at every level. They’ll take everything to court and appeal all rulings against them. Count on that being part of the plan.
Huzzah!
Jack
I agree, Biden pulled a coup. Greatest political move in a century.
As AOC it is the incel party.
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I don’t know that there are many “people to vote who don’t usually vote. He did bring the seldom-sometimes voter to the polls in 2016.” left who are not, by now, not going to vote for him.
Even if you are these ‘sometime voters’ they can see what’s in front of their faces and will be realizing that he didn’t turn out to be the ‘guy who’ll shake things up’ but the guy who fucked things up.
The ones who do think he was the guy who was gonna shake things up…are members of his cult now.
There was a poll a while ago what looked at voters how often they voted, and who they would vote for this year if they voted that found your support for trump wen up as the frequency of voting went down, so fully 54% (IIRC) of people who had not voted in 2016, 2018, 2020 or 2022 preferred Trump.
Sounds scary until you realize if they couldn’t be arsed to vote at all in the last eight years, on what planet are they suddenly going to arise and vote en masse this year? Non-voters tend to not vote.
Coupled with a serious enthusiasm for Harris and the kind of money she’s pulling in (to fund Democratic GOTV operations) means he’s going to get fewer votes than he did in 2020.
His cult and he are making a LOT more noise this time around but I don’t believe it’s actually translating into more votes, because he is not adding to his base. All the noise is driving people away from these weird creepy guys.
He’s acting as if they’ll get him over the finish line when they have failed to do so every year since 2016 (which they didn’t really do even then, because his electoral college win was down to about 30K votes in just a few states. He has never received a majority of the popular vote.
He’s planning on countering that with more 2020-style election denial moves, which will have to be beaten back, and with a MAGA majority on SCOTUS might just work, which will precipitate a real constitutional crisis that I don’t believe the MAGA 6 on the Court are fully prepared to deal with, because they will piss off a hell of a lot more people than Trumps J6 mob, by orders of magnitude.
(and in very recent news, it certainly looks like his foreign patron Putin…doesn’t think he can win, either. He just concluded a huge multinationals prisoner swap, that includes the three Americans Trump’s been claiming he get set free immediately if he’s elected.
If Putin thought Trump was going to win, all he had to do was to hold off another 6 months. That he didn’t indicates Putin is cutting losses and trying to weasel back onto the world stage as ‘reasonable’ This is huge news.)
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I think you’re right on all accounts, but the one thing that might get people to vote in 2024 that didn’t in 2016 and 2020, is having a Black woman running for president. Look at the backlash to having a Black man as president.
Don’t discount the racist motivation to vote. It’s literally the only card he has left. If you thought the NABJ was an ugly performance, buckle up, we’re in free fall.
Huzzah!
Jack
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Trump is a one trick pony, that trick now being always some version of his Rally Rant. He expected an audience at least skeptical, but more likely, hostile. He was not there to persuade them or make friends. He was there to perform for his base, just as he does at rallies and did in the “debate”.
As usual, any question from a woman that is not a pre-planned softball is “nasty”.
The point of the “Is she Black?” is to appeal to people who find multi-racial and multi-ethnic identities confusing and suspicious, if not downright deceitful.
So, what was on display was his usual mix of lies, delusions, fantasies, ignorance, racism, misogyny, thin skinned combativeness, and ability to step on his own message. But the base eats it up.
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And you know he went there to appear strong to his racist base. His malignant narcissism drove him to be racist to the face of real Black people in a Black setting just to demean them and let them know how little they mattered. It was straight up performative. He was flexing for the base and hoping to generate some racist excitement among those open to it and steal back the news cycle from Kamala.
In fact, he probably can’t distinguish between Kamala and the reporters on the stage. Kamala’s success and attention is a narcissistic wound to him. He went there to destroy her by destroying her proxies with his ridiculousness. Instead, he had his Joe McCarthy’s televised Senate hearing or Richard Nixon’s televised debate moment. America saw him for the absurd caricature of a human being that he is. He probably drew more voters to Kamala than to himself.
Huzzah!
Jack
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He managed to both expose his complete ignorance about complex identities, and insult the majority of such people in the country, letting them see him as both a racist and an idiot. He could have taken it one step farther by suggestion that she is now a Jew because she married one. Maybe he draws the line at that because he has a daughter who did that, but more likely, he just didn’t think of it.
Speaking of idiocy, here is a real gem: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/7/31/2259649/-He-really-said-it?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=trending&pm_medium=web
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Howdy Bob!
The dead give away, the scientistS. No one says that because that’s not how science works. That’s not even how the language works.
I am hoping that the 70% of America who doesn’t support Trump, sees that and completely rejects him, and then is motivated to vote in the election. And, if the NABJ performative racism didn’t do the trick, he’s only going to get worse from here.
Huzzah!
Jack
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He will, indeed , get worse in any case. Between whatever cognitive issues are going on, and any signs he might actually lose, worse is the only direction he knows how to go. And, when he really gets worried, he will turn on those closest to him.
And today, Biden took the spotlight again with the prisoner swap.
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I hate writing about Trump’s narcissism again, but probably will because what you saw on the stage at the NABJ is his reaction to the narcissistic wound that the Biden switch to Harris laid on him. He HAD to go into the BLACK convention and be just as racist and nasty as he could be. He treats all Blacks as a monolith. What he does to one, he does to them all. And what one does to him, they all did.
Anywho, I guess we’re back to the Trump malignant narcissism beat for one more post… at least.
Huzzah!
Jack
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Alas, it is nearly impossible to write or speak sensibly about that man, or to make sense of his behavior without reference to his narcissism. That trait is so dominant in him that even his sociopathy must serve it and protect it. Added to that , is that he is a stranger to subtlety and nuance, and cannot fathom complexity. That is so much so that it appears he cannot comprehend that a person can carry more than one identity definition at a time, that for a person of mixed race or ethnicity need not ever be either this or that. The real tragedy is that he has found an audience which mirrors all that limitation, or is at least most comfortable.
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Howdy Bob!
It is that audience, the equivalent to motivated reasoning, that is the most disturbing and damaging aspect of Trump. He couldn’t do it without them. That there are people who lean toward totalitarian leaders and rigid state run hierarchies and oligarchies among us is acceptable. There will always be a percentage who prefer those social systems. Trump simply has given them a vehicle for expressing and enforcing their preferences. In that circumstance, they have their chance to taxadermy democracy with fascism. It is a symbiotic relationship.
Huzzah!
Jack
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Symbiotic is a good description, but “feedback loop” works too. Either way, permission is given in both directions to indulge the worst self and the darker angels of their natures.
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I don’t care if she’s made of green cheese & she’s from the Moon. I’ll vote for her over trump & be singing as I do it.
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The only proper response to Trump’s performative racism at the NABJ was to laugh uproariously at him. If the entire auditorium had laughed and laughed and laughed when he claimed she had identified as Indian and then suddenly became Black, he would never have recovered from it. The man deserves to be shunned and never welcomed into anyone’s company again.
Jack
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