Tuesday on MSNBC’s “Deadline,” network national affairs analyst John Heilemann said President Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign message was for “white nationalist grievance and resentment” voters.
While discussing the president retweeting a supporter saying “white power,” Heilemann said, “It’s not only depressing that we’re commenting on this tweet, but it’s actually boring. He’s a racist. He’s been a racist his whole life. He was a racist when he ran in 2016, has been a racist the whole time he’s been, president. He’s the candidate of white nationalist grievance and resentment. That is what he is. That is what he will always be. I don’t object to reporting it, but it is not news. There will be more of these kinds of direct appeals to white racial resentment and grievance and fear. We will see them all the way through November.”
He continued, “What they have decided, and it is a strategy based on desperation, is that he has lost the suburbs now. He has lost respectable, moderate Republicans. He obviously has no chance of getting any Democrat votes. He has no chance of expanding his coalition. He gets that. I think he sees it very clear. They have decided the only way to win is to run a base-only strategy and focus on white non-college voters who did not vote for Trump in 2016, who did not come out for whatever reason. They think there are millions of them in a handful of states that could put together a coalition that could lead to 260 electoral votes. But he has no effort, no intention to try to broaden his coalition. Does not care about widening that. He hasn’t for three years. He’s going to try to go deep into the base and find new voters to kind of unearth from the subterranean disgusting guts of the electorate, people who were just too —who were just too turned off of politics to vote for him three years ago, he’s going to try to drag them out with these same kinds of racist-based, resentment-based, grievance based appeals.”
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