Trump has “tapped the well of white supremacy” throughout career: HuffPost Reporter Ja'han Jones
HuffPost Reporter Ja'han Jones discusses President Trump and how racism has impacted the 2020 presidential campaign.
Video Transcript
JA'HAN JONES: I wrote that piece just to convey that this is in Trump, a person who has continually shown an eagerness to draw from the well of white supremacy throughout the entirety of his professional career, and certainly well into his political career. Early in his professional career you might be aware that he was accused of housing discrimination, not allowing black renters to stay in his spaces.
And then even more recently than that, when he took out the ad condemning what was then called the Central Park Five, he put out that ad during a time when he was experiencing effectively, financial calamity. And he resorted to that as a means to heighten his profile, up his credibility. And so the point of that piece was just to convey that he's deploying a similar strategy with his political campaign. Obviously at this time, the pandemic is ravaging the country, but he's continued to kind of tap of that well of white supremacy.
And the unfortunate thing for him, is that we're living at a time of actual scarcity. The pandemic has made that glaringly obvious. And scarcity doesn't really comply with the promises of white supremacy, which is that every white man can have access to the American dream. You can live a middle class life. You can acquire a refined education. All of those promises are becoming less and less realistic.
All the while, Trump is leaning more heavily into that kind of rhetoric. So I think that's where you see some of the suburban white people have kind of cleaved from his support, because not necessarily because of his rhetoric, but because some of the promises that might have been afforded to people through white supremacy and white nationalism in the past are just becoming less and less realistic as a result of this pandemic that he cannot corral.
