There’s a distinctive way that right wingers broach issues of race that is captured well in this scene from The Plot Against America. The point is not to get “the other” to vote for you. It’s to give permission to “decent” white people to vote for leaders they know are indecent.

To give the context. The premise of the show is that Charles Lindbergh, a Nazi sympathizer, runs against FDR in 1940 and wins. In that scene, John Turturo plays a rabbi who "koshers Lindbergh." That is, he gives "decent" white people permission to vote for an antisemite.

Just about any time you see a Republican these days talking about race, it's important to recognize that their audience is almost never people of color. That ship has long sailed...Trump's GOP is not getting those voters back.

Like this message from Ronna McDelecto, GOP messaging on race is aimed at white people who do not want to think of themselves as racists, but who really want to have a reason to vote for Donald Trump. https://twitter.com/SethCotlar/status/1226578902060912641?s=20

Here's a story from my FB world to illustrate this point. When the Pittsburgh Synagogue shooting happened, one of my Trump supporting FB acquaintances from HS shared this post from our county's official GOP page. A kind gesture of solidarity I thought. But....

I started looking back through previous posts by that GOP FB page and...yeah...it was filled with tons of antisemitic crap, the sort of crap that the shooter would have found quite compelling.

That FB friend of mine is not a virulent antisemite. She is, however, pretty concerned about "Hollywood elites" and their "cultural Marxism" that leads such "billionaire socialists" to destroy everything that people like her hold dear. But she'd never want to vote for a racist.

That FB friend of mine also shared many posts from a group called "Blacks for Trump" or something like that. I can't check because it's been removed from Facebook because it was part of a foreign government's efforts to ratf*ck the election.

That same FB friend who loved the posts by "Blacks for Trump," also was partial to Breitbart stories about "black on black crime" and salacious stories about MS-13. Trump's messaging on race seemed to resonate with her, but she very much did not want to vote for a racist.

Trump knows that the LGBTQ vote is a lost cause. He knows he's got zero chance of attracting more black voters or Latino voters or Muslim voters, because all of those people have eyes and ears and can see what Trump says and does.

But the people Trump absolutely can not lose are the white people who were a little uncertain about him in 2016, but voted for him anyway because taxes or judges. These are people invested in thinking of themselves as decent people, not deplorables.

Trump's got just enough people around him who are willing to "kosher" him like Turturo "koshered" Limburgh in that scene from Plot Against America.

Over the years I've blocked a ton of folks whose timelines oozed with white nationalist crap. Almost every single one of them had a post or two from Diamond & Silk or Candace 0wens, who they absolutely loooooved.

Returning to this thread on a morning when President Trump retweeted one of his followers yelling "White Power," I'm reminded of this moving passage from @BenjaminHett's book "The Death of Democracy."