No one thinks Diet Mountain Dew is racist, but Republicans say lots of other things are.
JD Vance went viral earlier this week over an attempted joke on the campaign trail. The GOP’s vice-presidential nominee mocked liberals’ accusations of racism against people of color by remarking, “Democrats say that it is racist to believe – well, they say it’s racist to do anything. I had a Diet Mountain Dew yesterday, and one today. I’m sure they’re probably gonna call that racist too.”
His attempt at humor was ironic. Perhaps no politician is quicker to levy accusations of racism against his opponents these days than Vance’s own running mate, Donald Trump.
Trump has racked up a long list
Among the many Trump has accused of racism: Barack Obama, Al Sharpton, Spike Lee, Bryant Gumble, Hollywood, “The Squad,” Elijah Cummings, Nancy Pelosi, African nations, Touré, Danny Zucker, Jussie Smollett, Anthony Weiner, ABC’s “Black-ish,” Tavis Smiley, Jon Stewart, and racial sensitivity training. In the past 10 months alone, Trump went to Truth Social on at least 24 separate occasions to accuse Alvin Bragg, Letitia James, Fannie Willis – Black prosecutors on three separate legal cases involving Trump – of racism for no apparent reason other than their skin color.
Trump is hardly the only one on the political right who frequently accuses others of being racist. Conservatives, of course, have spent much of the past three years accusing Critical Race Theory and diversity, equity, and inclusion programs of being racist against whites. These right-wing charges of anti-white discrimination are so common that Fox News has mentioned the terms racist(s) or racism more than twice as often as CNN (29,158 mentions vs. 12,874) and almost two times more frequently than MSNBC (16,850) since Joe Biden became president.
Drawing on Project GDELT’s data, the graph shows that there wasn’t much difference between how often these three cable news channels mentioned racism during Trump’s first presidential campaign and subsequent presidency.
But you can see that Fox News began to diverge sharply from CNN and MSNBC in 2021. That’s when the conservative network’s coverage of Critical Race Theory as racist against whites skyrocketed.
Why Republicans talk so much about racism
These frequent charges of anti-white racism almost certainly resonate with a Republican Party base that views discrimination against whites as a much more serious problem than discrimination against racial and ethnic minorities. Indeed, I noted back in 2021 how the frequent mischaracterizations of “critical race theory” as anti-white indoctrination reflected the growing potency of white racial grievances in Republican Party politics.
That’s surely a big reason why Trump and his supporters can’t stop talking about racism. It’s also probably why JD Vance tried to shoehorn a joke mocking Democrats’ accusations of racism into one of his first speeches as the Republican Party’s nominee for vice president.
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