Dan Rather Says Trump Turned Himself Over to ‘Zealots From the Fringes of the Party’

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Last updated on July 17th, 2023 at 09:04 pm

Early on in the election process, Lindsey Graham (remember waaaay back when he was still running?) complained that Donald Trump was stealing all the “angry white guy” votes. Almost exactly one year later, Graham is a distant memory and things are not looking good for Donald J. Trump.

The Republican nominee is trailing at the polls, and every time he opens his mouth he says something, for want of a better word, crazy. Like the fantasy that 95 percent of black voters will vote for a guy who has denied them housing in his own properties and doesn’t want to see them working on his casino floors. This is a guy who has his own African-American. Literally. Just one.

There is an explanation for this: as Dan Rather told Rachel Maddow Friday night on MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show, Trump has “turned himself over to a lot of zealots from the fringes of the party, and we’ll see how that goes.

Watch courtesy of Media Matters for America:

RACHEL MADDOW: Do you think, Dan, that we are going to continue to see — one of the things I’ve been highlighting is the way there’s these references, and there’s use of material from the very far right?

The reason I did that Center for Immigration Study segment at the top is because that ought to be a nuclear reference in presidential politics, at least in terms of racial extremism. And we’ve seen that a bunch of different times from the Trump campaign. If they really are trying to maximize the white vote, do you think we’ll get some of this fringe, sort of racialist stuff?

DAN RATHER: I think you may get a lot of it, rather subtly put, perhaps not as straightforward. But look, the campaign is being run, not entirely — is being run by Donald Trump, but he’s taking aboard candidate people, workers who are from the fringes.

There’s zealots from the fringes of the party, who are now helping him run the campaign. And they’re going to say the kinds of things that they previously were saying on right-wing radio, because they think if you say it often enough, they’re convinced that will get Donald Trump the white votes he needs, the big white turn-out that he needs. I think you’re going to see an awful lot of that.

[…]

RATHER: He’s turned himself over to a lot of zealots from the fringes of the party, and we’ll see how that goes.

What Rather says is not exactly a revelation, and as we’ve seen, Trump himself is saying the kinds of things previously only heard on right wing radio.

Trump made this pact with the devil right at the outset of his campaign by calling Mexicans rapists.

It’s been all downhill from there. Trump made the most important decision of his campaign at its start and despite opportunities to renounce the hate speech, has only doubled down instead.

As a result, Trump has alienated just about every demographic except Lindsey Graham’s Fox News demographic of angry old white guys. We are now seeing, in what Rather is describing in slow-to-clue-in mainstream media terms, the only possible outcome.

According to the Census Bureau, the United States as of 2015 is still 77 percent white, 17 percent Latino, and 13 percent black, with the next largest group being Asian Americans at just over 5 percent. Trump is going to have to draw most of his voters from the white demographic. But the problem is that not all white voters are angry old racists.

You can see why Trump is desperate. The key to victory for Donald Trump, as Dan Rather points out, is a big white turnout and that leads to ever increasing levels of appeals to racist fringe groups, who has a result, are becoming increasingly mainstreamed. Trump, early on in his campaign, talked himself into a corner, one from which he can no longer escape.

And Trump is about to find out, as Lindsey Graham warned four years ago, the GOP is “not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term,” and his deal with the devil is about to bite him in the ass.

The Zealots from the fringes “think if you say it often enough, they’re convinced that will get Donald Trump the white votes he needs.” Trump’s problem is that having alienated literally everybody else, there can never be enough white votes.

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Hrafnkell Haraldsson

Hrafnkell Haraldsson, a social liberal with leanings toward centrist politics has degrees in history and philosophy. His interests include, besides history and philosophy, human rights issues, freedom of choice, religion, and the precarious dichotomy of freedom of speech and intolerance. He brings a slightly different perspective to his writing, being that he is neither a follower of an Abrahamic faith nor an atheist but a polytheist, a modern-day Heathen who follows the customs and traditions of his Norse ancestors. He maintains his own blog, A Heathen's Day, which deals with Heathen and Pagan matters, and Mos Maiorum Foundation www.mosmaiorum.org, dedicated to ethnic religion. He has also contributed to NewsJunkiePost, GodsOwnParty and Pagan+Politics.

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