Trump’s Debate Message to White Voters Was to Fear People of Color, Scholar Says

Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump had their first and only scheduled debate Tuesday, providing a stark contrast between the two candidates with just eight weeks to go before the November 5 election. Harris repeatedly put Trump on the defensive as they debated abortion, immigration, Israel’s war on Gaza, race, January 6 and other issues. Trump repeated his false claim that he won the 2020 election and again questioned Harris’s race, painted diverse cities as inherently unsafe, repeated a debunked claim about Haitian immigrants eating pets and more. Carol Anderson, professor of African American studies at Emory University, says Trump’s basic pitch is that “white Americans need to be fearful” of people of color. “What he is basically saying is, ‘I’m your white savior.’”

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, “War, Peace and the Presidency.” I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González, as we continue our look at last night’s presidential debate between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris. Trump repeated his false claim he won the 2020 election, when he was questioned by ABC’s David Muir. This is an excerpt from the ABC News presidential debate.

DAVID MUIR: Mr. President, for three-and-a-half years after you lost the 2020 election, you repeatedly falsely claimed that you won, many times saying you won in a landslide. In the past couple of weeks leading up to this debate, you have said, quote, you “lost by a whisker,” that you, quote, “didn’t quite make it,” that you came up a little bit short. Are you —

DONALD TRUMP: I said that?

DAVID MUIR: Are you now acknowledging that you lost in 2020?

DONALD TRUMP: No, I don’t acknowledge it at all.

DAVID MUIR: But you did say that.

DONALD TRUMP: I said that sarcastically. You know that.

DAVID MUIR: But those —

DONALD TRUMP: It was said, “Oh, we lost by a whisker.” That was said sarcastically. Look, there’s so much proof. All you have to do is look at it. And they should have sent it back to the legislatures for approval. I got almost 75 million votes, the most votes any sitting president has ever gotten. I was told if I got 63, which was what I got in 2016, you can’t be beaten.

The election, people should never be thinking about an election as fraudulent. We need two things. We need walls. We need — and we have to have it. We have to have borders. And we have to have good elections. Our elections are bad. And a lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, they’re trying to get them to vote. They can’t even speak English. They don’t even know what country they’re in practically. And these people are trying to get them to vote. And that’s why they’re allowing them to come into our country.

VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: Donald Trump was fired by 81 million people. So, let’s be clear about that. And clearly, he is having a very difficult time processing that. But we cannot afford to have a president of the United States who attempts, as he did in the past, to upend the will of the voters in a free and fair election.

And I’m going to tell you that I have traveled the world as vice president of the United States. And world leaders are laughing at Donald Trump. I have talked with military leaders, some of whom worked with you. And they say you’re a disgrace. And when you then talk in this way in a presidential debate and deny what over and over again are court cases you have lost, because you did in fact lose that election, it leads one to believe that perhaps we do not have in the candidate to my right the temperament or the ability to not be confused about fact. That’s deeply troubling. And the American people deserve better.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump last night in the ABC News presidential debate.

We’re joined now by Carol Anderson, professor of African American studies at Emory University, author of a number of books, including One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy. Her other books, The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America and White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide.

Professor Anderson, if you can respond to what you’ve just listened to about President Trump not admitting still that he lost the 2020 election, and what this means for this election?

CAROL ANDERSON: That was a powerful moment, because underlying that was Trump’s racism. It was like when Newt Gingrich said they stole the election in Atlanta, they stole the election in Philadelphia, they stole the election in Milwaukee, they basically stole it in Detroit. So, what they are identifying are cities where there are sizable Black populations as the site of this theft of American democracy. And it is that telling of that theft over and over and over in all of those court cases and in the language that led to January 6th that you see this kind of racialized determination of who is an American citizen, who has the right to vote, who is worthy of the right to vote and who is worthy of being able to vote for me. That is what Donald Trump is saying. So, basically, what he is doing is eliminating millions of African Americans, millions of Latinos, millions of Asian Americans and millions of Indigenous people from the citizenship of voting rights and basically saying, “If you don’t count them, then I won.” And so, that, for him, is the fraud, that you have folk of color actually voting in the United States of America.

And then to try to say they were importing all of these immigrants, this is the new lie by the Republicans, that you have all of these noncitizens voting. Except it’s already a federal crime for noncitizens to vote in a federal election. So, again, it’s ginning up, stirring up racial hatred, stirring up that divide, stirring up the kind of sense that there is something untoward, something tainted about our elections, even though there have been a series of audits, a series of hand count — of hand recounts, there have been a series of going through and having secretaries of state look at what is happening in their elections and basically saying, “There’s no fraud here. There’s no fraud here. There’s nothing that would determine the election in terms of fraud.”

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go back to the ABC News presidential debate. This is debate moderator David Muir.

DAVID MUIR: I want to move on now to race and politics in this country. Mr. President, you recently said of Vice President Harris, quote, “I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago, when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black.” I want to ask a bigger-picture question here tonight. Why do you believe it’s appropriate to weigh in on the racial identity of your opponent?

DONALD TRUMP: I don’t. And I don’t care. I don’t care what she is. I don’t care. You make a big deal out of something. I couldn’t care less. Whatever she wants to be is OK with me.

DAVID MUIR: But those were your words. So, I’m asking —

DONALD TRUMP: I don’t know. I don’t know. I mean, all I can say is I read where she was not Black, that she put out. And I’ll say that. And then I read that she was Black. And that’s OK. Either one was OK with me. That’s up to her. That’s up to her.

DAVID MUIR: Vice President Harris, your thoughts on this?

VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: I think it’s — I mean, honestly, I think it’s a tragedy that we have someone who wants to be president who has consistently over the course of his career attempted to use race to divide the American people. You know, I do believe that the vast majority of us know that we have so much more in common than what separates us. And we don’t want this kind of approach that is just constantly trying to divide us, and especially by race.

And let’s remember how Donald Trump started. He was a land — he owned land. He owned buildings. And he was investigated because he refused to rent property to Black families. Let’s remember, this is the same individual who took out a full-page ad in The New York Times calling for the execution of five young Black and Latino boys who were innocent, the Central Park Five, took out a full-page ad calling for their execution. This is the same individual who spread birther lies about the first Black president of the United States. And I think the American people want better than that.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: That was the exchange last night between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. Professor Carol Anderson, your response to that exchange?

CAROL ANDERSON: I thought it just was so emblematic of where they are in terms of the vision of America. So, you heard Trump going, “Well, I don’t care what she is. But, you know, she did say that, you know, she wasn’t Black, and now all of a sudden she’s Black.” And so, what that is doubling down on is that kind of sense that using race, using Blackness as a means to get over, using Black identity as a means to gain something that you’re not worthy of having. So, that is the subtext of what Donald Trump is doing right there.

And then you have Kamala Harris coming back and giving us his really long history of racism. And so, there’s moment in that debate where Trump’s like, “Yeah, she had to go back years and years and years.” The reason she went back years and years was to show that this is who he is, from the denying of rental applications from African Americans to the Central Park Five, even though the Supreme Court has said that execution for the crime of rape is unconstitutional particularly because it has been so racially driven in the United States, where there were years where only African Americans were executed for rape.

Then to go to birtherism, which is where he basically — as I said, he threw a kilo of pure, uncut white supremacy on the table and said to his — the people that he wanted to vote for him, “Snort. Barack Obama is not a legitimate American.” So that is what that was. Birtherism was to deny the legitimacy of a Black man as U.S. president.

And then he did the “Mexicans are rapists and criminals.” Then he did “Muslims are terrorists.” That he did, during COVID, “kung flu” and “the China virus.” All of that was stoking the racism. And remember the anti-Asian violence that began to reap down on Asian American communities here in the United States because he gave the permission structure for that kind of racial violence.

And so, she’s laying it out. And that racial violence then carried through into January 6th. Remember, we had the Confederate flag being flown in the Capitol, something that even Robert E. Lee was not able to accomplish.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I wanted to ask you also about this dark vision of Trump’s in the campaign about how the country is spiraling out of control because of crime, when, again, crime in the United States is virtually at all-time lows for the last 30 years, and yet he continues to paint a picture of an increasing crime rate. And what is he signaling to his supporters with that?

CAROL ANDERSON: What he is signaling, again, is that crime is related to Blackness. Crime is related to immigrants who are not white. Crime is the thing — it is that dystopian vision that white Americans need to be fearful of all of these folks of color, that they cannot walk outside their doors without being attacked, without being mugged, without being shot, that the cities — you know, so, when he was talking about, you know, these cities have just burned down to the ground — except the people who live in those cities know that those cities have not burned down to the ground — again, it is this way of defining cities, these urban areas, and urban areas become synonymous with folk of color, that these urban areas are unsafe, and so white Americans are not safe in America as long as we have all of these folks of color. And then he links that in — he links that with immigrants coming in. And when he says “immigrants,” he means immigrants of color coming into the United States, again, linking that with crime, so, again, raising that sense of fear. Fear, fear, fear. And when he says, “I’m the only one who can solve this,” what he’s basically saying is, “I’m your white savior.” And so, that is what that dystopian vision is about.

So, although crime is going down, he’s saying, “You can’t trust the FBI’s statistics. You can’t trust your eyes. You can’t trust how you’re living. You can’t trust that you’re in the park and enjoying yourself. You can’t trust that you’re bicycling and having no problems. You can’t trust that you’re going to the grocery store, no problem. You can’t trust the way that you’re living your lives, because I’m telling you that you are not safe. You are not safe.” And that is the signal that he’s sending, a racialized fear of crime. So, think of like the Willie Horton ad, of the old George H.W. Bush piece running against Dukakis. That was about the fear of Black crime. And that is what Trump is playing on right there.

AMY GOODMAN: Carol Anderson, I want to thank you for being with us, professor of African American studies at Emory University. Among her books, One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy, as well White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide.

Coming up, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, former presidential candidate Ralph Nader on last night’s debate, and then we’ll talk about abortion. Stay with us.