It never fails. Whenever Donald Trump is cornered by events that expose his disastrous mismanagement of the people’s business, he falls back on the Republican Party’s established, all-purpose defense mechanism: Racism. It’s a tactic that has been employed for decades by the GOP, but never with such knee-jerk consistency as by Trump.
Trump is currently juggling multiple crises, including a raging pandemic that has already taken the lives of more than 143,000 Americans, civil unrest across the nation, economic recession and historic unemployment, and the only problems that Trump actually care about, his disintegrating public image and the approaching presidential election.
So naturally Trump has made a typically tone-deaf, self-serving, executive decision to inflame more racial animus. On Thursday morning he tweeted that…
The Suburban Housewives of America must read this article. Biden will destroy your neighborhood and your American Dream. I will preserve it, and make it even better! https://t.co/1NzbR57Oe6
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 23, 2020
It’s notable that Trump’s tweet attempts to appeal to an archaic demographic of “Suburban Housewives,” a degrading label that died decades ago along with anachronisms like “the little woman.” But more importantly, Trump is brazenly trying to frighten suburban women and families with thinly veiled inferences to marauding hordes of dark people moving into their exclusive neighborhoods.
This is a purely political desperation ploy that Trump is taking in the wake of polling that shows him getting crushed by Joe Biden nationally, as well as in every crucial swing state. Specifically with regard to the suburbs, polls show Biden handily beating Trump by a 52-43% margin. A recent CNN poll found that Biden was leading Trump 63-34% among suburban women.
This isn’t the first time that Trump has tried to scare suburban women with nightmares of neighborhood diversity. But it may be the first time that he’s explicitly blamed Biden for it. However, Trump’s link to an article in Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post is hardly justification for this scare tactic.
The article is headlined “Joe Biden’s disastrous plans for America’s suburbs.” However, it describes a part of the Fair Housing Act that was signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson in 1968 – fifty-two years ago. The mangling of facts like that in this article shouldn’t surprise anyone considering that it was written by Betsy McCaughey, the woman who coined the deceitful term “death panels” when she lied about Obamacare a dozen years ago. More recently, she appeared on Fox News to falsely assert that “The number of deaths from the shutdown may exceed the number of deaths from the coronavirus” That was more than 100,000 deaths ago. In her article McCaughey claims that…
“Biden’s plan is to force suburban towns with single-family homes and minimum lot sizes to build high-density affordable housing smack in the middle of their leafy neighborhoods — local preferences and local control be damned.”
There is nothing remotely resembling any of that in the law. The specter of high rises in the suburbs is a fiction formed entirely in McCaughey’s mendacious mind. The truth is that the law seeks to advance the goal of “Diverse, inclusive communities with access to good jobs, schools, health care, [and] transportation.” Oh, the horror of it all.
So contrary to Trump’s alarmist warning about how this will “destroy…your American Dream,” the law actually guarantees it for more Americans. What Trump is hoping is that his fear mongering will reverse the trend of suburban women voting for Biden. But that isn’t going to be easy if he all he has are racist lies about good government and labels that disparage and belittle the very people to whom he’s trying to appeal.
How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.
