On Friday’s “PBS NewsHour,” New York Times columnist David Brooks argued that white identity politics has become an increasing theme in the Trump administration.
Brooks stated, “You know, the Trump campaign began really seriously with the Muslim ban. It continued with a series of racial things about the wall. It continued with Charlottesville and the reactions. And what’s happened is the racial winking and content, white identity politics has become a rising motif in the Trump administration, especially as everything else, including economic policy and economic populism has fallen away. And that’s meant the Republican Party, or at least some portion of it, and I don’t know how big, has become more of a white ethnic party, ethnic nationalist party.”
He added, “But this is a fight upon which parties break apart. Because you can’t be Republican — if the Republican Party becomes a party aligned with bigotry in some overt way, or in any way, you can’t be a Republican and try to be a decent person and be a part of it.”
Brooks later argued, “I just think the Trump administration is going to wander into these fields more and more in the months and years ahead, simply because they don’t have an economic agenda, a very small chance of tax reform, they don’t have populist things they can bring to people. And so, what they have is this ethnic nationalism.”
He continued, “And they’re frankly going to be helped sometimes by Democrats, or by radicals on the left, who are going to deface a Thomas Jefferson statue or do something like that. And then that’s catnip for Donald Trump. He can say they’re defacing Thomas Jefferson. And, so then the identity politics of the left and the identity politics [of the right] play off each other, and you get this war of people who think that white and black are the only two categories in life and that we should have some sort of political war over this and it begins to look like the Sunnis and the Shiites. And as I say, that’s a Republican Party that decent people don’t want to be a part of, frankly.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
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