Trump's dog whistles and prosecutions echo Nixon's racist strategy

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Trump’s dog whistles and prosecutions echo Nixon’s racist strategy
No longer bothering to hide its agenda, the administration is making blatant appeals to the Old South

By Heather Digby Parton
Columnist
Published May 6, 2026 9:00AM (EDT)


(Salon) Anyone who’s observed the Supreme Court over the past few years knew it was pretty much assured that the conservative majority would gut the Voting Rights Act the first chance they got. But the anticipation made the Court’s 6-3 decision in Louisiana v. Callais no less shocking and appalling for having been anticipated.

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After the Voting Rights Act was passed by Congress and signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965, Republicans set out to maintain and solidify control of the South. The operation went into full force in 1968 when historian and political scientist Kevin Phillips took note of Alabama Gov. George Wallace’s success in embedding racist-coded “law and order” messages in his campaign for the Democratic nomination for president, and he persuaded GOP candidate Richard Nixon to follow suit. The GOP’s “Southern Strategy” was born.

As the historian Rick Perlstein laid out in “Nixonland,” his epic history of the period, Phillips and Nixon understood something about the American cultural upheaval that most of the people in the media and elite institutions did not. White working-class and precarious middle-class voters were alarmed not only at the upending of the racial caste system but also at what they saw as an unraveling of society in general. The Vietnam War was raging, there were protests in the streets and their own kids were repudiating many of their values. The changes felt chaotic and overwhelming, so when Nixon promised “law and order,” they embraced it. In this sense, the Southern Strategy was about much more than just the Southern states — and remains so today.

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But in another important way Trump’s Southern Strategy is even more nefarious and blatant than Nixon’s, and it’s far older than the one Phillips imagined in the 1960s. The president is reaching back to the really bad old days of the late 19th and early 20th centuries for inspiration. As the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Will Bunch observed on May 3, the Justice Department, which has had a tough time prosecuting revenge cases against the president’s perceived enemies, has apparently realized that it would have more success bringing them in the solid Southern GOP states. ...................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2026/05/06/trumps-dog-whistles-and-prosecutions-echo-nixons-racist-strategy/