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Time was when a presidential candidate who played footsie with segregationists and white supremacists would have been banished to the fringes of the American political scene. But Republican presidential nominee Donald J. Trump has changed all that.
Oh sure, there have been plenty of codes telegraphed to the anti-black base of the GOP's southern flank: Ronald Reagan's choice of Philadelphia, Mississippi, as the place to make a "states' rights" speech in his 1980 presidential campaign; Richard Nixon's southern strategy and "Silent Majority" framing. But after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, expressions of outright racism were frowned upon in presidential politics. And articulations of misogyny were generally doled out in the form of withering condescension.
I don't need to recount for you Trump's friendliness with the alt-right, the white nationalist movement that was given a platform at Breitbart News by Stephen K. Bannon, the man Trump hired as his campaign CEO. You don't need to take my word for it; Bannon has boasted of this fact. And you surely know of Trump's numerous retweets of posts and memes from white supremacist websites. And who can forget all of the lovely things he's said about women, calling them fat pigs and demeaning them for having menstrual periods?
Just yesterday, Trump's running mate, Indiana Governor Mike Pence, declined for a second time to say that former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke was "deplorable," stating that he isn't "in the name-calling business." Isn't it enough, Pence asked, that he and Trump have disavowed Duke's endorsement?
Trump yesterday won the endorsement of Operation Rescue President Troy Newman, an anti-choice extremist who co-authored a 2003 book, according to People for the American Way, that "argued that the government has a responsibility to execute abortion providers." In 1988, Newman's co-author, Cheryl Sullenberger, was sentenced to three years in federal prison for conspiring to bomb an abortion clinic.
On Friday, Donald Trump appeared before evangelical Christians assembled at the Values Voter Summit, an annual confab convened by FRC Action, the political arm of the Family Research Council. The conference exhibit hall featured the booths of such co-sponsors as Tradition, Family and Property, a paleo-Catholic cult whose founder described the Spanish Inquisition as the church's most glorious moment, and the conspiracy-theorist and segregationist John Birch Society, which William F. Buckley thought he had managed to purge from the conservative movement in 1962. This was the first time the JBS appeared in the Values Voter hall of sponsors. It could be said that the Trump candidacy helped pave the way, what with his embrace of the conspiracy theorist radio host Alex Jones, and his numerous winks to white nationalist extremists.
The following day, FRC President Tony Perkins, who has endorsed Trump, defended the alt-right when I asked him about the movement at a press conference. Its existence, he seemed to say, was the fault of President Barack Obama and Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, for having "snuffed out" the voices of people who disagree with the administration's policies.
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To lay all of this at Trump's feet would be to give him too much credit.
As I've argued before, the misogynist, racist, nativist, anti-LGBT right wing that took over the GOP in 1980-of which Perkins himself is evidence-has much to answer for, not least of all, the rise of Donald Trump as the party's standard-bearer. Trump may not have been the first choice of right-wing leaders, but they created the conditions that cleared his path to the nomination, and most have lined up behind him since he won it.
But mainstream media are also complicit in this normalization of hatred, allowing it to masquerade in the guise of political positions. For decades, when reporting on the Christian right, for example, media have treated it as a religious movement, barely mentioning-if at all-the roots of movement positions in the segregationist backlash of the South. Instead, media executives allowed themselves to be cowed by the right wing's outrage machine, every time it cranked up its conveyor belt of allegations of the anti-religion bent of reporters.
Today, the same tendency is evident in the false-equivalence reporting prevalent in the degrees to which media cover different stories. Questions about Clinton's emails demand teams of reporters toiling for months; scandals involving Trump are too often written as one-off reports-so fearful are mainstream editors of fielding an accusation of liberal bias.
In the meantime, a monster has been allowed to grow in our midst. Bannon takes an obscure fringe of the right and elevates it to a platform that garners tens of millions of pageviews per month. Trump hires Bannon. Media say, "Hey, that's interesting," do one story, and say, "Next?"
Covering the Values Voter Summit this September 9 and 10 was downright depressing. Trump addressed the conference on Friday, and Pence on Saturday-meaning that the conference attendees represent a legitimized constituency of the GOP, as they have for 30 years. The founders of the religious right are passing on their just rewards. Organizers Paul Weyrich and Howard Phillips died in 2008 and 2013, respectively; Phyllis Schlafly died on September 5 (but not before she took the opportunity to endorse Trump). The movement they founded, however, continues to wreak the havoc of hate on the American political landscape, and the media dare not call it by its name.
