President Trump has taken the old culture war mantra, “God, guns and gays,” and transformed it into “immigration, identity and Islamophobia.”
Hi. Welcome to On Politics, your guide to the day in national politics. I’m Lisa Lerer, your host.
President Trump isn’t known for following the traditional political playbook. So, it was slightly surprising to see him spending Tax Day talking about… well … taxes.
But while Mr. Trump’s words may have stayed on message, his political sights were aimed elsewhere: Representative Ilhan Omar, one of the first Muslim women elected to Congress.
That Mr. Trump held his tax event less than 20 miles outside Ms. Omar’s district in Minnesota, a state that narrowly went for Hillary Clinton in 2016, was no accident. Nor were his recent attacks on Ms. Omar, a former state representative who has spent a little more than 27 months in any kind of elected office.
Mr. Trump’s appearance today in Minnesota, an early salvo in his re-election campaign, highlights a fundamental question he faces as we head into the 2020 race: Will his base be enough this time?
Rallying conservatives used to revolve around a three-word slogan — “God, guns and gays” — which served as a shorthand for the type of cultural issues that sent voters streaming to the polls.
Mr. Trump has taken that culture war mantra and supercharged it: “God, guns and gays” has become “immigration, identity and Islamophobia.”
Mr. Trump has a long history of incendiary comments against Muslims. (This 2017 timeline from The Washington Post details nearly a decade of his statements.) He opened his campaign calling Mexican immigrants “rapists” and, since then, has repeatedly cast immigrants as criminals and drug dealers. And from sexual harassment to N.F.L. protests, he has intensified hot-button issues of race and gender by throwing fiery comments into our national debates.
Some of these stances can be attributed to the president’s personal beliefs and temperament. But there’s also a calculated political strategy at play.
It’s worth taking a look at some numbers from the 2016 exit polls. When Pennsylvania voters were asked whether minorities are favored in the United States, 31 percent of the electorate — or around 1.
