Democrats Keep Falling for Trump’s Identity Politics Trap

Donald Trump, the master of The Art of the Deal, is also pretty good political traps, according to former San Fransisco Mayor Willie Brown. By trapping Democrats in an identity politics campaign, he is making them less attractive to white voters and forcing them into an unwinnable narrative for non-blacks.

The legendary California Democrat–who amazingly has become even more interesting, candid, compelling, and outspoken than he already was in his must-read weekly San Francisco Chronicle column–noted that “every time President Trump gets in trouble he falls back on race identity politics, and the Democrats fall for it without fail.”

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Brown points out that Democrats like Pelosi took the bait when Trump asked whether statues of Thomas Jefferson and George Washington would come down next.

“Let’s be clear, those Confederate statues are coming down, no matter what Trump says. That’s been going on for a while now. It’s largely being done at the local level, and Democrats could just sit back and let the arc of history take its course,” Brown writes.

But Democrats, he says, “jumped.”

“In no time, my friend House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi called for the removal of all Confederate-related statues in the halls of Congress, saying they’re ‘reprehensible,’” he continued. “She’s got a point, but so what? It has nothing to do with the issues that affect people, such as jobs, education and health care. Taking Trump’s bait only reinforces the impression held by too many Americans — that Democrats are all about apologizing for the country’s past attitudes about race.”

Brown’s critique of identity politics is backed-up by data. In 2016, poor whites without college degrees backed Trump at a rate much higher than previous Republican candidates. In many ways, their voting habits resembled the habits of minority groups, who generally vote in racial blocs for one candidate.

By attacking the past history of white voters — and by calling current white voters racist —  Democrats made whites vote as a unified community for the first time in modern history — and the sheer size of the affected community was likely enough to push Trump over the 270 electoral votes necessary to win the election.

All of this happened because Trump baited Democrats into embracing identity politics. It may work on minorities — but it sent white voters fleeing to Trump. But Democrats keep falling for it — and Trump keeps reaping the rewards.

Source: Breitbart