Stephen Collinson: “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.”