Trump’s Juneteenth Rally in Tulsa is Just an Escalation of Racist Republican Ronald Reagan’s Playbook

Ronald Reagan Presidential Library

Donald Trump’s plan to hold a rally on Juneteenth in Tulsa, Oklahoma is creating justifiable outrage, but it’s worth remembering that he’s taking a page — and arguably enlarging it — from former President and overt racist Ronald Reagan.

Trump is being rightly lambasted for scheduling a rally on June 19 — a day that commemorates the end of slavery in the United States — in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the site of the racist 1921 massacre. While it’s easy to believe Trump is ignorant of both of these black history facts, this is not a coincidence. Somebody did some googling to arrive at that fraught date and location, and his name probably rhymes with Schmephen Schmiller.

But as I’ve observed many times before, Trump is just a more witless and less subtle version of Reagan, who pulled a similar stunt to kick off his 1980 general election campaign. On August 3, 1980 Reagan delivered a speech on “states’ rights” in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where civil rights activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were murdered in 1964. “States rights” is the codeword Republicans have long used to lightly dust their opposition to civil rights with something resembling principle.

This event was a textbook example of the playbook Republicans would use for decades to exploit racism: poorly-coded racist words and actions, occasionally combined with lip service. In order for the technique to work, the coding had to be sufficiently transparent as to be unmistakable to the intended audience, but just coded enough to provide deniability. No need for it to even be plausible.

The playbook worked out pretty well for Reagan, who got reelected and went on to be worshipped by Republicans, and even fondly quoted by Democrats eager to make him seem moderate compared to current Republicans. But nobody was fooled, not even Reagan’s own campaign, as The Washington Post reported at the time:

But some in the campaign objected to the symbolism of Reagan going to a community where three civil rights workers were slain with the complicity of local police officials in 1964.

“It would have been like we were coming to Mississippi and winking at the folks here, saying we didn’t really mean to be talking to them Urban League folk,” said one Reagan source. “It would have been the wrong signal.”

The whole thing sort of fell apart when Reagan was revealed to be an overt racist who called Africans “monkeys” when he didn’t think he was being recorded, but it wasn’t much of a revelation for people who’d been paying attention all along. It’s just that there was a time when it was okay to oppose the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday and then smear him at a press conference after Congress forced you to sign it anyway, or to veto sanctions against a racist government while claiming to oppose it.

Trump has turned that formula on its head, mixing plenty of overt racism in with the artlessly coded kind, along with absurd and inept lip service — sometimes all at the same time. As his fans love to remind people, Trump paid lip service to denouncing white supremacy in the same breath as he was saying there were “very fine people” among the neo-Nazis who chanted “Jews will not replace us!”

In the case of Trump’s Tulsa rally, he is compounding Reagan’s stunt by combining an even more horrific tragedy with a date that is inextricably connected to the resentment that fueled it. In the olden days, those facts alone would have been enough to send the intended message, but more and less are expected of Trump.

You can expect Trump to mark the occasion with plenty of trolling about how he’s done more for black Americans than any president in history, maybe a riff on how George Floyd must be looking down from Heaven waiting to hear him recite The Snake, and the obligatory pointing out of “my African American,” if any show up.

And if we’re lucky, we’ll all be spared a butchering of the history Trump is exploiting with this rally on this date, in this place.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.

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