Trump: Echoes of George Wallace?
Donald Trump, leader for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, has never said he's following the playbook of Alabama Gov. George Wallace, who achieved national stature on his promise of "segregation now, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever," then made four failed bids for the White House from 1964 to 1976.
[...] Trump invokes the anger of "the silent majority," a phrase he's resurrected from the era of Wallace and President Richard Nixon, who won in 1968 and 1972 in part by co-opting Wallace's racially charged populism.
Trump detractors hear more than a faint echo of Wallace in Trump's anti-establishment mix of economic protectionism and blunt nativism, and they note that the brash billionaire, like Wallace, has drawn similar results in the campaign: tense rallies that often involve violent clashes among protesters, police and the candidate's supporters.
"Trump is taking his campaign straight to the haters, and he's gotten the roots of that old Wallace crowd," says Joe Reed, a black Democratic Party broker in Alabama who came to know the four-term governor toward the end of his life, when he had abandoned his segregationist positions, long after a would-be assassin left him paralyzed.
Tom Turnipseed, who managed Wallace's 1968 campaign and became a civil rights activist, assigned the same motivation to Trump and Wallace.
In his book "The Politics of Rage," Carter identifies Wallace and his play for working-class white votes as the model for the "Southern strategy" that Nixon and Ronald Reagan would use in four winning elections.
Nixon protected his right flank by criticizing court-ordered busing of schoolchildren to accomplish integration, vowing to impose "law and order" and declaring the "War on Drugs," which an aide later described as a targeting of "hippies" and blacks.
"What are we looking for, OK, all of us?" Trump asked after declaring that families, jobs, homes and health care face existential threats.