The statement was better than I expected but much less than what should be expected from an American President. There was nothing to address the pain of the Muslim community who are being targeted and hunted by white nationalists.
After this statement, he then goes off on ‘invasions’ across the border from brown folks running away from desperate situations and calls them criminals. So Trump continues to perpetuate the same themes that give rise to white nationalism. He later dismisses the white nationalist threat.
Trump stokes white nationalism, but I think it’s important to note he pushes the buttons that are already there. We’ve got a lot of folks in this country who fear demographic change and essentially believe the ‘replacement ideology’ that Josh writes about in his editorial about the killer’s manifesto. Trump brings more polish to what people like Steve King, Paul LePage and Tucker Carlson say daily. But we need to look at white nationalism as a grassroots view of GOP voters, not something that emanates or was imposed from top-down. The reason Trump continues to self-immolate over the wall and this national emergency declaration is because he needs to keep up the myth that he has a sense of urgency over demographic change, and he uses brown skinned immigrants crossing the border as the metaphor for keeping that going. That’s what the caravan trope was about. In reality, he makes more money off of foreigners than he does from Americans. You can see it in all the grift related money he generates from Russians, Saudis, Emiratis, Chinese, Indians, Malays and Israelis. If he fails to connect with those voters on the urgency they feel over demographic change, he loses that base because the rest of what he has to offer is not very appealing.
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