At Trump’s bully pulpit, it’s ‘us’ vs. ‘them,’ with race often used as a device to polarize

The following article by Cathleen Decker was posted on the Los Angeles Times website September 23, 2017:

Supporters of President Trump applaud Friday at a campaign rally in Huntsville, Ala. (Evan Vucci / Associated Press)

For much of his time as president, Donald Trump has been the bully at the bully pulpit, castigating targets foreign and domestic. Much of Trump’s bluster attempts to divide people into us-against-them, and it often has a single polarizing agent: race.

On Friday night, as he has many times before, Trump inflamed an almost exclusively white Southern audience against opponents who he said were trying to steal their heritage and attack their values. In that Alabama speech and on Saturday, he criticized African American athletes who had exercised free speech by declining to stand during the national anthem. Continue reading “At Trump’s bully pulpit, it’s ‘us’ vs. ‘them,’ with race often used as a device to polarize”