Trump Disavowing Birtherism Shows that Hillary’s “Deplorables” Strategy Is Working
After years of pushing the birther conspiracy theory, Donald Trump admitted that Barack Obama was born in the United States.
This is probably a response to Hillary Clinton’s comment that “you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.”
Though the media treated it like a gaffe, she said it in prepared remarks. It didn’t leak out of a private fundraiser, like Romney’s “47%,” or Obama’s “cling to guns and religion.” And it wasn’t the first time she said it in public. That means it’s on purpose.
Competing Media Strategies
Clinton wants voters to focus on the bigoted elements of Trump’s campaign. And in the aftermath of the deplorables hullabaloo, the media ran stories showing that:
- 59% of Trump supporters think Obama wasn’t born in the United States
- 65% believe Obama is a Muslim
(they don’t ask the obvious follow up: so what?) - 48% say blacks are more violent than whites
- 40% say blacks are more lazy than whites
- 32% say blacks are less intelligent than whites
And all of those figures are considerably higher than for supporters of any other candidate from either primary.
In recent weeks, Trump made a pitch to black voters. He won’t win many of them, but by reaching out, he could court suburban and more educated whites who are embarrassed to vote for someone widely seen as racist.
To counter this strategy, Clinton’s drawing attention to racist Trump supporters.
The Trump campaign knows these supporters make him look bad to everyone else, so they’re trying to shift the focus elsewhere.
Abandoning birtherism grabbed headlines, but Trump will probably still face questions about why he kept pushing the conspiracy theory in the face of all evidence, and why he didn’t abandon it sooner. And the more that is in the news, the more the Clinton campaign benefits.
