In his first public speech addressing the police killing of George Floyd and the nationwide protests, President Trump’s words took an ominous turn. Calling himself the “president of law and order,” he denounced demonstrators as an “angry mob” threatening “peace-loving citizens,” demanded that state and local governments “dominate” the protesters, and threatened to deploy the U.S. military against citizens.
It’s likely that Trump hopes to follow President Nixon’s playbook. Trump already does so in the general sense of employing dog whistle language — phrases and imagery designed to trigger racist fears that nevertheless carry just enough ambiguity to allow plausible deniability. “I think what Nixon understood,” Trump explained in 2016, “is that when the world is falling apart, people want a strong leader whose highest priority is protecting America first.”
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