Trump’s message of fear dominates RNC
The Republican National Convention is over, and Donald Trump has been elected their nominee. Yet, for all those who watched, it still feels so surreal.
The idea of making “America Great Again” is a scary thought for black America. Is that a slogan that implies America was a great place when it had colored-only signs which if disobeyed could get a African-American lynched, or America was great when plantations dotted the South and held blacks as slaves?
—How Donald Trump’s convention speech claims measure up to the facts
As Trump took the stage and screamed a speech that many have called one of the darkest acceptance speeches in the history of the Republican convention, the America he spoke to felt like a scary place. A particularly scary place for Latinos, blacks and the poor. The New York Times stated this about last night, “Donald John Trump accepted the Republican presidential nomination on Thursday night with an unusually vehement appeal to Americans who feel that their country is spiraling out of control and yearn for a leader who will take aggressive, even extreme, actions to protect them.”
The looming question is whom Trump will protect the country from, and from what attack. Trump failed to state it explicitly, but from his words, one can imply the attackers of America’s values are people of color and the poor. The exact people Trump will need to win a general election. Donald Trump cannot win this election without blacks, Latinos and young people. His speech last night did little to help that cause. As Trump laid out the facts of America’s failure, it read like a fear-mongering list of reasons to ramp up the War on Drugs.
These are the facts: Decades of progress made in bringing down crime are now being reversed by this administration’s rollback of criminal enforcement. Homicides last year increased by 17% in America’s fifty largest cities. That’s the largest increase in 25 years. In our nation’s capital, killings have risen by 50 percent. They are up nearly 60 percent in nearby Baltimore. In the president’s hometown of Chicago, more than 2,000 have been the victims of shootings this year alone. And almost 4,000 have been killed in the Chicago area since he took office. The number of police officers killed in the line of duty has risen by almost 50 percent compared to this point last year. Nearly 180,000 illegal immigrants with criminal records, ordered deported from our country, are tonight roaming free to threaten peaceful citizens. The number of new illegal immigrant families who have crossed the border so far this year already exceeds the entire total of 2015. They are being released by the tens of thousands into our communities with no regard for the impact on public safety or resources.
—Melania Trump’s Speech: The Guy Who Scooped Everybody
In stating, “First, my plan will begin with safety at home, which means safe neighborhoods, secure borders, and protection from terrorism. There can be no prosperity without law and order,” Donald Trump seemed to stand at the apex of America’s right wing, and scream to white America: “I will protect you from the others. From the scary people of color that prowl your neighborhoods, from the sneaky illegals that steal your jobs, and most of all from the insane Muslim terrorist that plot to destroy your daily lives.”
—Cleveland Police asks for suspension of ‘open carry’ during RNC
Yet the problem is that so much of this is overstated and misdiagnosed. Whether Trump and his followers want to acknowledge it or not, the world is shrinking, and the rhetoric of division he uses is no longer a path to the White House. It’s a relic of a message, dated before it rolls off his tongue. Trump’s creation of a reality where America can put up walls to separate, despite there being cell phones and the Internet to connect, is ignorant. We live together globally in this new reality, and as a country we need to address how that togetherness will function, whether Donald Trump likes it or not.
Antonio Moore, an attorney based in Los Angeles, is one of the producers of the Emmy nominated documentary Freeway: Crack in the System. He has contributed pieces to the Grio, Huffington Post, and Inequality.org on the topics of race, mass incarceration and economics. Follow on YouTube Channel Tonetalks.
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