I recently posted that Donald Trump revives Richard Nixon’s 1968 playbook. You saw this play out on the first night of the RNC Convention.
Trump’s campaign manager Paul Manafort expressly confirmed this strategy this week. Trump’s Campaign Manager Says He’ll Channel ‘Law And Order Richard Nixon:
As Donald Trump searched for a template for his acceptance speech, the model he chose was Richard Nixon’s infamous 1968 “law and order” speech on behalf of a silent and sullen middle class. [See Richard Nixon Address Accepting the Presidential Nomination (1968)]
At a somewhat similar time of stress and struggle in America and the world, Trump chose that speech as a starting point, his campaign chief told reporters at a Bloomberg breakfast Monday morning.
“We started on the speech a couple of weeks ago,” said Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort. “We looked at previous conventions speeches; the one he focused on, though, was Nixon in 1968.”
In that speech, given only months after the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy and amid rioting in many U.S. cities, Nixon cited the fears and resentments of “forgotten Americans” and vowed to return “order” to the streets and country.
The speech was aimed largely at white middle-class voters in border and Midwest states whom Alabama Gov. George Wallace was also appealing to in an openly racist way.
As a third-party candidate, Wallace was destined to win the Deep South in the fall, but the Nixon team devised a “law and order” theme ― a vow to restore order in the cities of the North ― that would appeal to the same voters and bring them into the Republican camp.
The aim was not to “unite” America, as Nixon claimed, but to target enough white middle-class support (as well as support from a smattering of other groups) to win.
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