An Inconvenient Blog

By Ashkan

footnotes from Abigail

I’ve said this once and I’ll keep saying it: Donald Trump is not stupid.

I think he is one of the most ingenious political operators in modern American history. I’m sorry, but you can’t just luck your way from joke to President. Especially without institutional support, like in 2016.

That’s not to say that Trump has applied his aptitudes to the greater good — being smart and being honorable are two completely different concepts. He’s like a master manipulator boyfriend. Notice how it’s always the smart ones that know how to parasitically drill under their girlfriend’s skin and foment an unhealthy attachment? That’s Trump. Big fomenter. 

So, he did his thing during ‘the’ interview with the National Association of Black Journalists last week. It was objectively shocking and hard to watch. It provoked liberal ire reminiscent of the glory days of “they’re rapists, they’re criminals.” But was the NABJ interview really that damaging for Trump? Or was he playing his usual game of 4D chess that went over the gilded punditry’s heads? As an unpaid pundit notably lacking in gild, I’ll give my assessment.

The biggest headline-grabber was that Trump claimed Kamala just recently “turned Black.” Well, here it is in his own words: 

“So I’ve known her a long time indirectly, not directly very much, and she was always of Indian heritage, and she was only promoting Indian heritage. I didn’t know she was Black 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?”

Wait! Don’t fall into the trap and try to engage with his argument. We all know it’s stupid. You’re not winning a Pulitzer for obviously pointing out that biracial people exist (do bisexuals, though? Later discussion¹). But this comment is a winner for him because it falls squarely into a tried-and-true Donald Trump formula. Here’s how I see it:

1. It’s ambiguous and questioning. It could be plausibly defended by the educated “we-know-better” cohort of Trump supporters. 
2. It invokes race without being overtly racist.
3. It pushes all the right buttons to make the Left and the media obsess over it.

Let’s run through each of these.

(1) Ambiguity. Trump’s claim is so unspecific and poorly phrased that it could maybe be shaped into something more palatable. Here’s a good test: run a polemic Donald Trump comment through a hypothetical Pete Buttigieg filter. WWPD? Can Pete-esque eloquence and media training save him?

Imagine Trump instead said something along the lines of: “I take issue with the insincerity in which Kamala presents herself. Despite spending all of her formative years in California and Canada, in front of a Georgia audience last week she exaggerated a Southern accent that she has no claim to. When running for public office in a state with a significant Asian American population like California, she emphasized her Indian-American heritage because it was politically convenient but largely abandoned her appeals to those voters when ascending to a national stage. She tries to be everything to everyone.” 

Still kind of problematic? Yeah. But now we’re well within what’s reasonable for political debate instead of a shocking accusation that she “turned Black.” And it’s almost exactly how JD Vance responded when questioned on this.

Trump is always cryptically concise, leaving a lot of room for his educated surrogates to spin it: to others, for damage control, and to themselves, to continue justifying their own support.² Think of the Steve Schwarzman and Bill Ackman types of Trump supporters (extremely smart, moderate businessmen) and how they might explain his comments to their elite wine-and-cheese social circles.

(2) Race-baiting. Trump, without directly criticizing Indian nor Black people, made a critical comment about someone who is Indian and Black based on how she expresses her Indianness and Blackness. Trump conveyed that Kamala can’t be trusted — not exactly because of her race, but because of something adjacent to her race. And that’s all the red meat that his base needs to run with. 

It’s not quite a dog-whistle, it’s way more obvious, but Trump opened the door for Americans to be focused on her race, which he is betting will invigorate his base and tug at deep-seated prejudices held by swing voters. And from what I’ve seen on conservative Twitter, this has paid off for Trump. The racists finally have license to talk (shout) negatively about Kamala’s race. And they love Trump for it.³

(3) The Left’s outrage. Trump is used to being in the spotlight. That’s what fueled his political rise — media hysteria over his bigotry and off-color parlance. He is a master at playing the media to get what he wants. But since Joe dropped out, it has been the Kamala show, non-stop. She has single handedly dominated all coverage, as everyone is still marveling at her unprecedented political stunt and trying to figure out who she is. 

Trump felt left out.⁴ So he did what he knows best — get the attention back on him. He knows what he’s doing. The interview question really wasn’t phrased in a way that would have provoked this kind of response anyway; he inserted it. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was premeditated. And right on cue, there were more teary-eyed Washington Post and New York Times opinion pieces on this than I can count. 

Let’s stop being so shocked and surprised. Trump just pulled off a run-of-the-mill 1, 2, 3 on us. And I think he won: his comments are semi-defendable, base-motivating, and attention-whorish. This dynamic is bad for public discourse and spreads bad ideas — let’s continue to call that out — but it’s not novel nor a strategic faux pas for the Trump campaign.

I mean, this even happened perfectly in the same week when Trump told a crowd of Evangelicals that they “wouldn’t have to vote again” if he was elected. 1, 2, 3. (1) This can be spun as ‘his term will be so successful that Evangelical turnout wouldn’t be necessary for Republicans to keep winning’; (2) the pro-dictator contingency of his base loved it; (3) he got a full multi-day media cycle out of the collective Trump-induced meltdown. 

He’s a smart guy!⁵

Abigail’s response

1. Even on my own blog, I can’t escape the scourge that is biphobia. Forget the border and inflation and Israel-Palestine, what will Kamala and Trump do for all the loudly bisexual college-aged women who exclusively date men? Where is their stimulus package? When will we finally see a lesbian-until-graduation in the Oval Office? I’m tired of your microaggressions, Ashkan. ↩︎
2. “Cryptically concise” is the best way to put it. As much as I hate to ever admit it, I do think you’re onto something here. Trump has a good handle on the zeitgeist and he knows how to articulate controversial statements in such a brazen way that no one can ever successfully shame him. He’s good at talking to two audiences simultaneously: left-leaning political/media elites who will jump at literally any opportunity to self-righteously criticize his every word (yay, free publicity!) and normal people who are mildly irked by the whole “you can’t say anything these days” vibe we have going on and see him as refreshingly honest. I would bet a lot of money that plenty of liberals have expressed the exact same sentiment about Kamala’s presentation of her identity in private, just with way more throat-clearing. But people instinctively respect someone who doesn’t back down and Trump is undeniably the best in the game. When the inevitable waves of shock and horror roll in any time he opens his mouth, he just looks better. I’ve been saying it for years–everyone on the left, please, please stop rising to the bait. When you make all discourse about responding to Trump, you lose. Look at how bad SNL got once he stormed onto the political scene. ↩︎
3. The race-baiting is really interesting. I think Trump has really figured out the best way to utilize the very worst factions of his base while holding them at arms-length for PR reasons. He knows that some of his voters are genuinely and grossly racist and he knows exactly how to throw them a bone here and there so that they stay loyal while keeping his own head just above the water. Notice how much of a fuss he made about Kamala’s absence from the NABJ event–as if to say, “See, I respect Black journalists, but she clearly doesn’t.” ↩︎
4. Poor Trump, always forgotten. You know you live in an era of peak political discourse when Kamala brat memes are powerful enough to make the entire country forget about an assassination attempt. ↩︎
5. So smart he’s just taken two cognitive tests! What a nasty question. ↩︎