Trump, Vance Desperate For New Racist, Dog Whistle Words
Like drowning swimmers who are frantically trying to keep their heads above water, Trump and his running-mate, Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, are frantically trying to winnow down the stickiest, blatantly racist, sexist and xenophobic slurs to use against their enemy, Vice President Kamala Harris.
The latest adjective used by the ever-infantile trump to describe Harris is “dumb as a rock.” He’s taken a decidedly, dumbed down low road in labeling her a “bum, a failed vice president.” He’s tried a return to his old series of schoolboy slurs with “Lyin’ Kamala Harris” while he intentionally stumbles over pronouncing “Kamala.” The nickname “Laffin’ Kamala Harris” also hasn’t really taken off.
Various GOP sycophants have called Harris a “female Black diversity hire.” Kellyanne Conway, another former trump bootlicker and adviser, said Harris “does not speak well. She does not work hard. She should not be the standard-bearer for the party.”
Vance, 39, who can’t seem to decide on his real name, had a scathing criticism in a 2021 interview that the nation is being run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”
Vance called himself J.D. Vance in his 2016 bestselling memoir, Hillbilly Elegy. He was born James Donald Bowman, his middle and last names the same as his biological father, Donald Bowman. His parents separated when Vance was 6 and his mother, Beverly, married for the third time. He was adopted by his new stepfather, Robert Hamel, and his mother renamed him James David Hamel.
Beverly kept the boy’s initials the same, since he now went universally by “J.D.” For more than two decades, he was James David “J.D.” Hamel. His mother and adoptive father divorced, and he changed his name again, to Vance , the last name of his beloved “Mamaw,” the grandmother who raised him. Vance had one more name change in him. He got into politics in July 2021, and removed the periods from “JD.”
Vance has tried to exhibit the kind of perverse charm that trump displays when he disparages the non-white world. But Vance is no trump, especially when he joked at an Ohio rally that they “say it’s racist to do anything. I had a Diet Mountain Dew yesterday, and one today. I’m sure they’re going to call that racist, too.”
The crowd responded with a silence like thunder as the unfunny joke went over like the proverbial lead balloon.
Never one to pass over a racist dog whistle, Vance has suggested that Harris is a deadbeat living off the government dole.
“I don’t know, Kamala. I served in the United States Marine Corps and I built a business. What the hell have you done other than to collect a government check for the past 20 years?” Vance said.
Rep. Harriet Hageman, R-Wyo., who has called trump “the greatest president of my lifetime,” joined in the cacophony of GOP assaults on Harris when she said the vice president is “intellectually, just really kind of bottom of the barrel.”
On Fox Business Network, host Larry Kudlow declared didn’t mince racist words when he intoned that Harris’s “whole history is DEI: diversity, uh, exclusion and, uh, equity, I mean, inclusion and equity.”
Name calling and race baiting, of course, is a key ingredient in the tasteless, trump cuisine, as he said during his 2016 presidential campaign run, “You have to brand people a certain way when they’re your opponents.” He set the table in a campaign rally in 2016 in Boca Raton, Fla., as he referred to two of his remaining Republican rivals for the GOP nomination, as “Lyin’ Ted” for Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and “Liddle, Liddle, Liddle Marco” for Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla.
To trump, the actor Rosie O’Donnell was “fat pig” before she turned into a trump supporter. Of course, Stormy Daniels, trump’s nemesis in the hush money trial, was “horse face.” Niki Haley, trump’s one-time challenger for the GOP presidential nod, was “Birdbrain Nikki Haley” and “Pocahontas” for Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., a candidate in the 2020 Democratic Party presidential primaries. And who can forget about “Sleepy Joe” Biden.
From trump on down, the racist slurs are painful reminders of a playbook that was partially written by two of the most notorious racists in American history and that is saying a whole lot. Those post-bellum heroes of the deep south and racists elsewhere include a once-powerful, Tennessee congressman, John Sharp Williams and the former governor of Mississippi, James K. Vardaman, whose name is curiously like Voldemort, “He who shall not be named” from the Harry Potter series.
Williams said notoriously in 1898, “You could shipwreck 10,000 illiterate white Americans on a desert island, and in three weeks they would have a fairly good government, conceived and administered upon fairly democratic lines. You could shipwreck 10,000 negroes, every one of whom was a graduate of Harvard University, and in less than three years, they would have retrograded governmentally; half of the men would have been killed, and the other half would have two wives apiece.”
Williams, who died in 1932 at the age of 78, was prominent in the Democratic Party from the 1890s through the 1920s, and was the Minority Leader in the House of Representatives from 1903 to 1908. He was elected to the Senate in 1911 after defeating another leading race baiter, Vardaman.
Williams was a big fan of President Woodrow Wilson, another infamous racist whose presidency was a low point in American race relations. Among other examples of racism, Wilson named segregationists in his Cabinet and defended segregation on “scientific” grounds in private while enjoying “to tell racist ‘darky’ jokes about black Americans.”
After retiring from the Senate in 1923, Williams returned to his family plantation.
Vardaman was the Governor of Mississippi from 1904 to 1908 and then represented Mississippi in the Senate from 1913 to 1919. A champion of white supremacy and populism, Vadraman was known as “The Great White Chief.” During his electoral campaign, he said, “If it is necessary every Negro in the state will be lynched; it will be done to maintain white supremacy.”
He appealed to the poorer whites, farmers, and factory workers and advocated segregating streetcars, ending educational opportunities for African-Americans, and defending lynching.
Vardaman was one of the state’s Democrats who gained control of the Legislature in 1890 and went on to enact laws to disenfranchise black voters, including a poll tax and literacy test.
He explained the 1890 Mississippi state constitution in stark words.
“There is no use to equivocate or lie about the matter…. Mississippi’s constitutional convention of 1890 was held for no other purpose than to eliminate the nigger from politics. Not the ‘ignorant and vicious’, as some of the apologists would have you believe, but the nigger…. Let the world know it just as it is…. In Mississippi we have in our constitution legislated against the racial peculiarities of the Negro…. When that device fails, we will resort to something else.”
In December 1906, Wahalak and Scooba, Miss., were the scenes of white rioting against African-Americans. In all, 12 African-Americans and two whites were killed by December 26. The county sheriff called in the state militia for assistance. Vardaman went with the National Guard troops to Scooba to ensure that control was established and that whites were not killed in retaliation. During his term as governor, he called out the National Guard eleven times to prevent lynchings.
The Dec. 20, 1904, edition of The Pensacola (Florida) Journal, noted that after Vardaman’s visit, “The situation in Scooba is now under full control.” Other headlines included “White man shot to death” and “A negro soldier assaults white woman.”
Vardaman advocated state-sponsored racism against blacks and support of lynching to maintain white supremacy. From 1877 to 1950, Mississippi had the highest number of lynchings in the nation.
The town of Vardaman, Miss., is named after the infamous racist. Vardaman Hall at the University of Mississippi has borne his name since it was built in 1929. In July 2017, the University of Mississippi announced that Vardaman’s name would be removed from the building, but it still has not been removed as of September 2023.