“Divide, Divert, &amp; Conquer” Deconstructing the Presidential Framing of White Supremacy in the COVID-19 Era

Vivian Louie,Anahí Viladrich

doi:10.3390/socsci10080280

Abstract

Based on the analysis of President Donald J. Trump’s social media, along with excerpts from his speeches and press releases, this study sheds light on the framing of white supremacy during the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. Our findings reveal that the triad of divide, divert, and conquer was crucial to Trump’s communications strategy. We argue that racist nativism—or racialized national threats to American security—is key to comprehending the external divisiveness in this strategy. When Trump bitterly cast China as the cause of America’s pandemic fallout and Mexico as the source of other key American problems (i.e., crime and low-paid jobs for U.S.-born Americans), he sowed clear racialized divisions between the United States (U.S.). and these two nations. We further argue that nativist racism—or the framing of descendants from those nations as incapable of ever being American—is key to comprehending the internal divisiveness in the former President’s pandemic rhetoric. Trump’s framing of China and Mexico as enemies of America further found its culprits in Asian and Latino Americans who were portrayed as COVID-19 carriers. Trump’s narrative was ultimately geared to diverting attention from his administration’s mishandling of COVID-19, the dismal structural conditions faced by detained and undocumented Latinos, and the anti-Asian bias faced by some of his Asian American constituents. In the conclusions, this article makes a call for countering white supremacy by developing comparative approaches that pay more attention to how different racisms play out for different groups.

Highlights

This article shows how Trump’s three-fold strategy of divide, divert, and conquer was crucial to his communications campaign and can only be understood within the longstanding context of immigration and white supremacy in the U.S We argue that racist nativism—or racialized national threats to American security—is key to comprehending the external divisiveness in this strategy
To divert attention from his poor pandemic leadership, Trump deftly assumed the mantle of a wartime president and delved into his racist nativist playbook to divide the public by framing China and Mexico as enemies of the U.S His racist nativism, in turn, spilled over into the blaming of Asian and Latino Americans
With Asians, Trump minimized the scapegoating done by others, without noting the role of his racist nativism in fueling it, and, as in the case of Pelosi “dancing in the streets of Chinatown”, he ignored it altogether

Summary

Introduction

Trump successfully brought a conservative populist movement, rooted in white supremacy principles, to the highest office in the U.S As President from. 2017–2021, he spent most of his communications (e.g., rallies, tweets, briefings) trying to energize his political base rather than appeal to the broader population of Americans (Kumar 2020). We investigate Trump’s framing of two key policy planks that informed his agenda (Qiu 2016; Lewandowsky et al 2020; McCann and Jones-Correa 2020), namely “China” and “immigration”, as they played out in the COVID-19 era. We examined how the Trump administration used the coronavirus pandemic to advance its plans to build a wall in the U.S–Mexico border towards excluding

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Results

Conclusion