Trump’s Campaign Was Always Going to Be About Racism. Minnesota Just Became the Epicenter.

It’s only going to get worse.

President Donald Trump is greeted by a cheering crowd at the Target Center in Minneapolis on October 10, 2019.Glen Stubbe/Star Tribune/AP

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

When President Donald Trump first weighed in on Wednesday on the caught-on-camera killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, he was uncharacteristically subdued. Floyd’s death was “sad and tragic,” he tweeted. “Justice will be served!” By the early morning hours on Friday, this moment of compassion was at an end. Rioters in the city were “THUGS,” he wrote, and he proposed sending in the National Guard to “get the job done right.” In a tweet so depraved that Twitter appended a disclaimer, he quoted an infamous 1960s Miami cop: “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.”

Trump’s comments weren’t just those of a head of state addressing unrest in a major city. They were also the words of a candidate for reelection who believes that what happens in Minnesota could make or break his chances this fall. The president has made repeated campaign stops in the state over the last four years; in threatening violence against protesters, he was sticking to a longstanding strategy. Trump believes that by attacking the state’s largest city and casting its residents as radical refugees and “thugs”—by driving a huge racist wedge between the Twin Cities and all the rest—he can flip the state he lost by the smallest of margins in 2016.

This isn’t the first time Trump has weighed in on a law enforcement issue in Minneapolis. He previously positioned himself as the defender of the city’s police against overly PC libs—wrapping himself in the flag of “law and order” politics. Last fall, ahead of a Trump campaign rally in Minneapolis, Mayor Jacob Frey informed police officers they could not appear at the rally in uniform. In response, the city’s police union began selling special red “Cops for Trump” t-shirts, with an American flag overlaid on the outline of the state. Trump weighed in:

At the rally, Trump was joined on stage by Lt. Bob Kroll, head of the Minneapolis police union, who used his time on stage to attack former President Barack Obama for his “oppression” of law enforcement. Kroll wore the “Cops for Trump” t-shirt. Following Kroll, a procession of police officers, all wearing the “Cops of Trump” shirt, walked across the stage to shake the president’s hand. Trump even saluted one of them.

While Trump heralded the police as the most hallowed of institutions, he whipped the crowd into a frenzy against what he considered their antithesis—the city’s “America-hating” Democratic congresswoman, Ilhan Omar. 

Just a few months after telling Omar, a Somali refugee and one of the first two Muslim women to serve in the House, to go back to the country she came from, Trump devoted six minutes of his address to tearing into the congresswoman. Images of the hijab-wearing Omar flashed across the jumbotron as he spoke, just in case the crowd didn’t know what she looked like. She was an “America-hating socialist,” he said. 

Trump segued from an attack on Omar into an attack on the community she comes from and represents—the tens of thousands of Somalis living in the Twin Cities. Refugees from Somalia were a threat to the American way of life, he warned. (His son, Donald Trump Jr., has even claimed that Democrats want to “repopulate” Maine with Somali refugees.)

Trump has not just sought to rhetorically bludgeon people of color in Minnesota, though. He’s governed that way too. In the closing stretch of the 2016 campaign, he told Minnesota voters the state had “suffered” because of the “large numbers of Somali refugees coming into your state.” He promised to ban Muslims, and though he didn’t quite do that, he did effectively ban Somali refugees from coming to the United States. 

In targeting a specific minority community, Trump was tapping into a very real animosity among certain white voters in Minnesota. In a memorable 2019 New York Times story, one conservative activist put it bluntly: “These aren’t people coming from Norway.” When activists in St. Cloud tried to shut down the city’s resettlement program, they made red hats, modeled off the president’s. They said “Make St. Cloud Great Again.” MSCGA.

Trump’s campaign in Minnesota, now as ever, is rooted in white grievance and fear and what he calls “law and order,” by which he means targeting immigrants and people of color for abuse—by pinning all that’s gone wrong on blue cities and the people who live there. He wants to pit the people he thinks he can get votes from against the people he can’t, and now that he sits behind the Resolute Desk, he doesn’t really act as if he works for the latter group too. They serve no purpose for him, except as punching bags.

So it’s all going to be like this, from now until November. Trump is going with this again, because he thinks it works and also because he can’t help it. He craves power but not the responsibility that comes with it. It’s not clear, however, that it’s any sort of political masterstroke—that “what Trump wants” or what “plays into his hands” correlates at all to what is actually good for him. He would have lost the 2016 election but for an unprecedented series of events, and even as it was, his much-hyped attempts to reconstitute Richard Nixon’s winning coalition half a century later by relentlessly hammering immigrants and “lawless” cities netted him a smaller percentage of the popular vote than Mitt Romney. The president is a bully, after all, but he is also an idiot.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate