When Trump goes all racist and white nationalist, he can’t make it go down easy. He can’t say it with a joke or a smile. He just rants, and can’t use coded language or dog whistles. He is a racist bullhorn.
Trump is closing out his campaign by attacking Senator Kamala Harris for her ethnicity, complexion, sex and name. Grandfather Reagan would never do this. He was so much more smooth.
Remember 1980, when Reagan opened his presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, a town where 3 civil rights workers had been murdered by klansmen in 1964? He insisted it was merely a coincidence, and not an obvious appeal to the white racist vote in the south. After all, the incumbent president, Jimmy Carter, was from Georgia, and Reagan was counting on the southern states to get him elected. This was the same "Dutch" Reagan who incessantly spoke of a ‘welfare queen’ who drove a pink Cadillac and spent her food stamps on booze, (which is impossible because food stamps can't be used to buy alcohol). Who spoke of young, unemployed black men as "strapping young bucks" and who told Richard Nixon that African diplomats in the U.N. hadn't yet learned "how to wear shoes.”
The party of Lincoln long ago abandoned any pretense of concern for African Americans, as it pursued power by following a race based " southern strategy " Trump is just the latest, and worst, iteration of the corruption and cynicism of the Grand Old Party.
So of course this past spring, Trump chose another atrocity site to launch his campaign for reelection. It's as predictable as the sunrise. He only changed the date when enough outraged people pointed it out that his planned rally was on Juneteenth. So imagine that - a campaign launch on Juneteenth and in Tulsa. A double dose of deliberate insults and salt in our wounds that will never heal.