Former President Donald Trump is pulling out all the stops in his attempts to regain the White House come November, including taking a page from an old GOP playbook of using racially charged ads to court voters.
On Tuesday (August 13), his campaign’s Trump War Room X account shared a post that showed two side-by-side images — one which depicts an idyllic neighborhood, and the other a photo of what appears to be Black immigrants tightly huddled together. Under the images is the caption “Import the third world. Become the third world.”
Civil Rights attorney Ben Crump replied to the gross meme by stating that Trump’ team is using “divisive rhetoric” to “stoke fear and hate.” Political commentator Keith Olbermann called Trump and his team “Racist motherf**king weirdos.” Another X user merely posted a photo showing a run down house covered in MAGA regalia with the caption: “Your actual neighborhood under Trump.”
He’s not the first Republican president to leverage white fear to gain political power and influence through political ads. Former President George Bush did it with an 1988 ad against Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis, using Black convict Willie Horton to paint all Black men as violent predators to denounce prison furloughs.
In a 1990 commercial, Jesse Helms showed a white man’s hands to degrade his Black opponent, Harvey Gantt, for his alleged support for “quotas.” In the ad, the hands of a white man are put on full display as he crumples up a rejection from a job he applied to.
A voiceover can be heard saying “You needed that job, and you were the best qualified. But they had to give it to a minority because of a racial quota. Is that really fair?” (The Democratic Party has had its instances as well. In 1996, Bill Clinton’s crime bill led to a drastic increase in the amount of Black men being incarcerated — a population that Hillary Clinton described as “super-predators.”)
Trump has used offensive tropes and stereotypes to court followers ever since he entered the political realm: he has labeled Mexicans as “rapists,” called African and Haitian nations “shithole countries,” and insisted that white supremacist protestors were “very fine people.”
In addition to incendiary social media posts, Trump has also launched racist attacks against Vice President Kamala Harris as she challenges him in the upcoming presidential election. Trump has questioned her Blackness, reportedly called her a “b*tch” in private conversations, and has constantly insulted her intelligence.
“Don’t just take our word for it. [Republicans] are showing all of us just how racist they are,” stated NAACP’s X account. “This is what’s on the ballot this November.”