By Jason Renard Walker 

Dog whistle politics played a significant role in Donald Trump’s second run for president and his failed effort to push an agenda in the first. The phrase signifies something said in a speech, that only its intended audience understands. Like how only dogs can hear a dog whistle. 

The art focuses on speaking plain English to a large crowd of people, while you’re actually saying something else to a secondary audience that shares the same racist values as laid out in the agenda wired into the speech. In most cases it’s a nefarious plot to economically repress, undermine and eradicate minority groups, like colored people and the LGBTQ+ community, by basing a big part of the campaign on policies and laws that don’t seem to target minorities, but in practice, do just that.

Lee Atwater, who was a chair in the RNC and served as George Bush’s campaign manager during his 1988 presidential run, was a champion of and master at dog whistle politicking. While Atwater himself did not create this political slick talk, he clearly is the progenitor who took the art to another level. He engineered the language code that was used to help Bush reach voters that naturally wouldn’t vote for a candidate whose policies weren’t supportive of minorities, or themselves.

The objective was to find a way to exploit racial resentment and racism in a way that didn’t provoke voters who saw themselves as anti-racist, while attempting to push policies that would dismantle the few tokens and progressions Blacks earned through the civil rights and voting rights acts of the 1960’s. 

In an undated 1981 audio recording Atwater gives a preview of dog whistling: “You start out in 1964 by saying nigger, nigger, nigger. By 1968 you can’t say nigger, that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, States’ rights and all that stuff and you’re getting so abstract. Now you’re talking about cutting taxes and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things. And a byproduct of them is, Blacks get hurt worse than white.” 

Like Atwater, Trump had a reputation for not really caring about what he had to do, as long as it helped him win. Like Atwater, Trump focused on the negatives of his opponent and used this as campaign fodder to mask his own plot. Like Atwater, Trump understood that the resurgence of white supremacy during civil rights progressions could still be advanced, if the epithet was replaced with innocuous phrases like tax cuts, and States rights – ultimately producing the same effect by simultaneously speaking two languages.

In analyzing and resisting Trump’s anti-democratic regime: understanding who Atwater was and his contributions to the Republican party is fundamental to building community, solidarity and resistance to Trump’s dog whistle politics. 

Atwater was only in his 30’s when he helped Bush campaign and died when he was 40. But the innovations he brought to the unseen promotion of racial resentment have carried the torch to generations far beyond what he could imagine. He is a forefather for a lot of what happens after him and for the approach to politics cons like him have taken since then. 

Whether people want to admit it or not, Trump’s political views are based on racism, sexism, imperialism and repression of the non-elite. He is a perfect mold from Atwater’s cast. A neo-liberal perhaps. If we are unwilling to challenge him on all of his obvious anti-democratic beliefs, then we aren’t willing to rise above the social media spit boxing matches he’s successfully conned some naysayers into challenging him at. 

Racism didn’t merely cease to exist based on benchmark defeats of supremacy in the 1960’s. It can still function whether we are conscious of it or not. Just because one doesn’t want to “live in the past” has no bearing.

Historically the U.S. was able to prosper, in large part, due to its growth and development of racism in a society, economic system and judiciary that egregiously enforced its laws, racist values and hardcore beliefs onto the everyday lives of its people. 

During the lynch mob era, just after the first world war, photos were made into post cards: depicting unmasked women, men and children cheerfully posing next to a tree that a Black person hung from. Some men who suffered this fate can be seen naked, with their castrated bodies burned. 

Not only did this send a message to Black people (and sympathetic whites) that Blacks had no fundamental right to live in the U.S., or be free of cruel and unusual punishment. The audacity for someone to torture and hang a human in front of a crowd, shows how culturally acceptable public executions were – and what little interest the courts and police force had in holding the executioners responsible for murders they committed in front of entire communities, in broad daylight. But why would they? Most of the victims were handed over to the mobs by the police so that they could be lynched. 

The post – World War II exposure of crimes the Nazis committed against Jewish people and the rise in liberation movements in the U.S. and abroad, forced the U.S. and some elites in other countries to disavow racist attitudes and overt acts of race-based violence. Yet in order to keep the masses from posing a threat to the power structure, a prejudicial and racial divide had to remain. A boogeyman, coupled with cultural phobias had to exist, something that would redirect the masses’ attention away from the primary cause of their struggles (the power structure) and towards each other. 

Attempts to uproot white supremacy will never go unchallenged. The system and ideas find new ways to adapt. It takes on another identity, seeks new markets to tap into, finds ways of being marketed, levels up on the slick talking, and puts Black faces into high places as sheepskin on the now sly and toothless wolf’s back.

Racism is a tool that was deliberately created to socially control and manipulate those who used it and those abused by it. Throughout U.S. history, each time a repressed class has struggled against the ruling class, the rulers used their institutions of social influence (mainstream media, politicians, etc.) to promote racial division where little if any previously existed. As stated above, this technique shifted blame and focus away from the power structure that has failed us and placed it onto other racialized and oppressed groups, like migrants, Blacks and those openly identifying as LGBTQ+ 

Trump did it in his first campaign run when he used Muslims as the focus of terrorism in the U.S. In his second he accused Haitian migrants of eating people’s pets, Mexican migrants as the reason for rises in fentanyl overdoses, crime, and stealing ‘Black jobs’ and transgender people as being invasive in contemporary U.S. culture and politics. His message was that America would never be great again as long as these issues existed. The fact that he was elected to serve another term in office, amidst the scandals and criminal convictions, proves his message was well received. 

What the ordinary, anti-racist working-class citizen that voted for Trump didn’t pick up on in his ‘Black jobs’ statement was what he really meant, so in a second I’ll break it down from its dog whistle origin into what he was really saying. 

Agricultural work such as planting and picking fruit, vegetables, and cotton are forms of low-wage labor that migrants from Mexico tend to go to after entering the U.S. as non-citizens. It has more to do with the need to avoid deportation, than a lack of job skills. It requires no real proof of citizenship and often pays out in cash at the end of each work day. Despite this, the U.S. produce trade would eventually feel the effect if there were no more migrants available to engage in agricultural labor that has no employee benefits, and which the average citizen spurns.

It is well documented that the agricultural work migrants are readying to do now, is the same labor that slaves were forced into without pay and under the most brutal work conditions known to man. So relatively speaking, when trump warned Blacks that migrants were a threat to taking ‘Black jobs’, what he seemed to suggest was the possibility that he would do a mass deportation and send the Blacks back to the fields to do what they were brought here to do in the first place. 

On its face this sounds like a wild assertion, but in practice and with his effort to eliminate every DEI program that benefits women and minorities, it’s more than a coincidence. This is not to say that Trump actually believes he can pull this off. The purpose is more symbolic and geared towards abusing power, simply because he believes he’s above the law.

To further stress this point Trump countered public scrutiny in his court-challenged effort to bypass congress in reshaping the government, by posting on social media: “He who saves his country violates no law.” Which is a quote from the emperor Napoleon Bonaparte. Another concession that gave Trump this dictator type of swag is the Supreme Court’s recent ruling that sitting presidents are immune from being prosecuted for crimes they commit while in office. 

Another thing we have to go back to and analyze is how Trump has successfully molded the Republican party and their sympathetic media into a buffer that justifies and conceals his racist rants and dog whistle sermons — instead of him having to go out and publicly answer questions for the more immoral things he routinely says, such as what are Black jobs. His cult of verbal henchmen rally around everything he does without questioning it, flood the airwaves, then blame such question-asking on wokeism and the Democrats’ attempt to racially divide the country. Leaving every question, citizens want answered, outstanding. 

But if we go back and look at Trump using “States rights” to overturn Roe v. Wade, which now gives each state jurisdiction to dictate the legalities of abortion, this overture, in itself, caused political and social divide among the working class in the country. Well-to-do women can afford to care for several kids; poor women rely on abortions because they aren’t stable enough to raise a healthy child, and some of them learn there’s a high probability that they will die if they don’t abort soon enough. Overturning Roe v. Wade is but one of the vast cultural phobias and boogeymen Trump created. 

The supposed reason that Trump pulled this stunt was because he falsely said it was what everybody wanted. Yet he openly admits that he put particular Supreme Court justices in place to favor the overturn. When Roe v. Wade was binding law, it gave each woman in America the right to abort pregnancy for her own personal reasons. The women that need to abort as a life-sustaining measure should have been the subject blocking supreme court intervention, and the overturning of a longstanding Supreme Court ruling.

When Trump was reelected as president, he credited inflation and securing the border to stop crime and the flow of fentanyl, as the reason he won. His 25% tariffs threat against Canada and Mexico was specifically worded as stopping immigration and fentanyl. What voters may not realize is that drugs such as cocaine, methamphetamines, heroin, and marijuana are at a higher demand in the U.S. and are smuggled over more abundantly than fentanyl. Plus, more often than not, a lot of the smugglers are U.S. citizens and U.S. military personnel sneaking guns and ammo into Mexico and bringing cocaine, heroin and methamphetamines into the U.S. Migrants are just caught up in the mix. 

Like drug smuggling, migrant smuggling is big business as well and some shipments are a mixture of drugs and migrants, who pose as the perfect scapegoat when a shipment gets confiscated after entering U.S. territory. Within Trump’s dog whistle, the message he sent was that any drugs in the country that affect masses of whites will not be tolerated. 

The question is not why Trump isn’t cracking down on every drug that crosses the border. His dog whistle explains that. The focus should be on how every drug the U.S. and media consider an epidemic and national crisis are drugs that primarily lead to abuse and mass overdosing in the well-to-do white communities. They are hardly ever portrayed as drug addicts, but victims who weren’t aware they were taking more than unprescribed medication for their pain and depression. The late actor Matthew Perry is one example. Entertainers such as Prince are the byproduct of Blacks enjoying the same deference. 

When Blacks were overdosing on high grade heroin in Harlem, during the Vietnam war, it was viewed as a Black problem that they drew onto themselves for being addicts. In the late 1990’s white teens in Plano Texas and other suburbs of Dallas started popping up dead throughout their community, or suffering serious injury. It was later determined that they’d all overdosed on a drug called “cheese” (heroin mixed with Tylenol PM) that colored people had been overdosing on in the ghettos throughout the U.S. for decades. It wasn’t until the wealthy white communities in Texas felt the wrath that the media and state officials began deeming the mixture dangerous and a public concern, clad with the boogeyman responsible for it reaching Plano — Hispanics who were eventually sent to federal prison.

In response to heroin taking this community by storm, in 1997 Plano formed a new branch of policing called the Plano Heroin Task Force. Unlike cities like West Dallas, the state of Texas would not let heroin do to this community what it has done to the black communities since the Vietnam war. 

Heroin is still being abused throughout the U.S. but since addicts in the rich white communities have shifted their addiction to the more potent fentanyl, it is the new dangerous drug crisis in America, putting cheese back in its place. Crack cocaine and PCP victims will have to keep overdosing until those that matter make it their primary drug of choice, then maybe snake oil politicians like Trump will sound the alarm. 

So, when Trump is on stage railing against drug cartels and China for conspiring to introduce fentanyl into the U.S., I hope this essay explains why politicians like him tend to target certain issues to campaign on and ignore others that have been problematic far longer. It’s in their how-to-blow-a-dog-whistle playbook. And it’s always related to repressing women and minorities while strengthening the political reach of white men who play the hero and their multicultural stool pigeons, who unknowingly exist to make things look non-racist. 

Had international drug smuggling been an actual concern for Trump, him giving Ross William Ulbricht a pardon from serving his two life sentences in federal prison and swapping Khan Mohammed out in a prisoner exchange doesn’t show it. 

For those unfamiliar, Ulbricht was the owner of an online black market drug hub from 2011-2013 called “silk road.” His charges included: Drug trafficking, continuing criminal enterprise (CCE), conspiracy to commit, aid and abet computer hacking and various ID fraud and money laundering charges. The courts also proved he paid over half a million to have several rivals murdered, but the acts were never lived out. 

Khan Mohammed was also serving life sentences in federal prison for narcoterrorism charges related to him conspiring to have opium and heroin shipped to the U.S. from Afghanistan, to support their terrorist network. Opium is the main ingredient in heroin and many other drugs sold in the U.S. 

Running on issues like lowering inflation, oil drilling, healthcare and ridding America of criminal migrants was the slickest way Trump could get the right votes. Of course, poor people are always down with paying less; roughnecks that make a living off of drilling for oil want steady employment; people victimized by random Hispanics see mass deportation beneficial and adequate health care is mandatory for all. 

A month into his presidency, Trump has shown the issues he ran on weren’t really the issues he was running for. After he gave a pardon to every participant in the January 6 insurrection without as much as background checking them, several were exposed for having convictions or pending cases for pedophilia, one was killed in a traffic stop, and a few others have returned to jail. Trump’s response to why he didn’t probe before the pardons was that it was too laborious and he would look into it. Didn’t he say, beforehand, that each pardon would be done on a case-by-case basis?

It is obvious that Trump is attempting to reshape America by strategically erasing the history, accomplishments, progress, and holidays commemorating colored people, the LGBTQ+ community and any culture that isn’t conforming to his white nationalism escapade. He just might do the same to any reference books and literature that document the holidays and achievements of minorities to assist with his cultural revolution. 

This is a big reason why he wants to ban critical race theory courses as an education curriculum, end citizenship birth rights for migrants born in the U.S., defund any federal program that supports nonwhites and shrink the government under the banner of government efficiency. The fewer agencies available to conduct checks and balances and resist white supremacy, the more authoritarian rule he can impose. He has already shown no respect for the checks and balances of the courts and congress. This is because he didn’t run to be president, he ran to be king. 

It only took the Nazis less than two months to dismantle a constitutional republic, so don’t think for one minute he can’t cause enough havoc that might collapse the nation into political barbarism. 

When voters elected Trump to office, they were aware that plans were made to trim some fat from federal domestic spending, but how this would be done and who would be collateral damage was never detailed. What Trump was sure to do was make it seem as if his voters wouldn’t feel the sting. RFK’s role as Secretary of Health and Human services was still rooted in Trump’s concept of a plan, Musk and several others that would be slipped in as unelected copartners of Trump, merely posed as donors endorsing candidates and Pete Hegseth wasn’t even on the bingo card.  As soon as Trump was reelected — boom: Medusa reared its head full of snakes and blindsided those that didn’t hear the dog whistle, with what those who heard it knew was coming.

Would voters have voted for Trump had they known he would go scorched earth and attack holidays significant to women and minorities, give Elon Musk unchecked power to eliminate entire federal agencies, focus on seizing the Gaza strip and turn it into a Trump resort, or side with Russia and pimp the president of Ukraine like a political prostitute? Though Trump did talk a lot in his campaign about eliminating entire agencies and dismantling the DEI program.  Of course many people voted for him in solidarity with a government shakedown and in spite of the Democrats continuation of supposedly restoring democracy. What he didn’t talk about was how even those voters embracing his scorch earth rhetoric weren’t exempt from being a part of the entities that would lose their jobs in exchange for their vote. Or that Musk and his geek squad would be the ones slashing agencies that would cost a lot of them their jobs, while going back on his word and taking a stab at Social Security based on completely invented grounds. Democrats did try to warn voters about these very issues that were outlined in the Heritage Foundations Project 2025 plan that JD Vance wrote the forward to, but Trump quickly denied ever reading it, denounced its plans and convinced his supporters that he would never read it. This gave Trump wiggle room to gain the vote of citizens that may have voted elsewhere, or not at all, based on Project 2025’s anti-democratic applications. Plus his denouncement may have pulled his supporters away from actually reading it to even decide if they wanted a president with this kind of plan up his sleeve. Trump’s entire campaign was built around this Republicans versus Joe Biden and the Democrats thing, which fooled his voters into believing that they wouldn’t be the ones effected by the consequences of Trump’s agenda, since it was the Democrats politics that were supposed to have been the problem. And Trump was the elixir to making America great again. Not only do polls show that less than 50% of polled Trump voters disapprove of the way he’s firing workers. One man who voted for Trump and was fired after an efficiency overhaul of his job told the media that Trump tricked him. Another man who was an Air Force veteran and let go of his job because of false “poor performance” accusations told PBS News Hour in a March 5, 2025 episode that ” I was treated like a criminal. Like I had done something wrong. You’re destroying people’s lives to get to these numbers that you are requesting. If you don’t realize that, I’m trying to let you know now we should wake up.”

The things Trump does that seem reactionary or comical, are quite calculated and designed to keep his foes and the media chasing him down rabbit holes and tied up in the courts challenging things that are unconstitutional on its face. As long as they are scrambling every which way to address every silly statement or threat he makes, his stranglehold on the agenda he’s obsessed with pushing will get tighter and tighter. To hell with pressing him on lowering inflation and the price of groceries, that promise was just a ploy. A very acute effort needs to be placed on collectively banishing him for who he is and get him out of office. At the rate he and his cronies are going, that will be the only viable option outside of watching his unhinged self run amok. 

Trump’s actions don’t only affect the U.S.; they affect humans throughout the world. 

I honestly believe that he has taken the Republican party to the point of no return. They haven’t shown any resistance to his lies, blackmailing the Associated Press, and obvious abandonment of the citizens he vowed to protect. Trumpism has brought us to a crossroads and citizens have a constitutional right to resist any government that runs afoul of its duties. 

That time to resist is now. 

Jason Renard Walker 1532092 

Powledge Unit 

PO Box 660440 

Dallas, TX 75266