Is It Coincidence That Trump Holds His Rallies In Sundown Towns?

Donald Trump has been out on the campaign trail lately as one would expect two months before the big day on November 5. What one wouldn’t expect is that there’s now a discernable pattern in where he’s holding his rallies. Everybody from people on the street to political pundits like Joyce Vance have picked up on the pattern. Trump has been holding rallies in “sundown towns” meaning towns where sundown laws used to be enforced. A sundown law stated that Black people (or Chinese Americans, Jews, Mexican Americans, Native Americans, even Mormons) could not be within the city limits of a sundown town past dark — or else risk arrest or worse.

If y'all saw HBO's series Lovecraft Country, there was a horrifying episode featuring a racist sheriff eager to enforce the county's sundown law.

— Bill Madden (@maddenifico) September 1, 2024

1/Interesting notice recently that Trump is holding his rallies in sundown towns. This caught my interest when he chose Cullman, Alabama, my Mother in Law's hometown, as one of his 2021 stops for this campaign. What is a sunset town? https://t.co/PbWLn5BlJQ pic.twitter.com/7nogfZsbHc

— Joyce Alene (@JoyceWhiteVance) September 1, 2024

3/Could it be coincidence that is bringing Trump to these places? Anything is possible, but Cullman, for instance, is out-of-the-way. Any number of places in Alabama would've been more suitable. Sometimes the dog whistle is actually works, loudly spoken. pic.twitter.com/LnTXBH8w63

— Joyce Alene (@JoyceWhiteVance) September 1, 2024

Trump is actually going out of his way to go to these places. Here’s a Sundown Towns Database. Just for the heck of it I clicked on my home state of Colorado and Colorado Springs is on the list of towns that were sundown towns. So is Cherry Hills Village, which is the wealthiest suburb of Denver and one of the wealthiest places in the state, and the entire country. If you click on Indiana, practically every single city in the state was a sundown town. Wow. That goes a long ways towards explaining a lot of things.

Pastor Jon Pavlovitz has insight into the Trump phenomenon and racism.

Now, I had seen the cracks in their [white Evangelical] facades begin to show when Barack Obama was elected; their carefully coded hate speech beginning to surface, their ever more incendiary social media posts from fringe news sources; their incessant, desperate search for something to be outraged about, their inability to give him any credit or acknowledge his goodness. They grew more entrenched in their positions, more tribal in their tone.

But even then, they kept their prejudice close to the vest, never really fully tipping their hands, always dancing around the words without really saying them. The mask was splitting and sliding off, but they would not fully show themselves because it was socially unacceptable (they would call it “politically correct.”)

Then he arrived: someone who gave them what they needed for so long: permission to be horrible; someone who erased any semblance of decorum, any expectation of decency, any level of accountability. After nearly a decade of pretending, they finally received white Presidential consent to be outwardly racist—and the dam of their suppressed bigotry burst and they let the toxic hatred flow freely: along with their festering hatred of LGBTQ human beings, their long-simmering misogyny, their hostility toward immigrants, their fierce white supremacy. Donald Trump normalized all of it.

White pastors now lob these prejudices through incendiary sermons into their congregations, white politicians plaster it upon campaign billboards, white police officers send it out in group emails, white teachers wave it in front of their students, white civilians spit it out in viral videos at coffeeshops and public parks, white terrorists parade it unmasked through city streets.

And my white friends and family members and neighbors are rejoicing in this Renaissance of open ugliness—and I never saw it coming.

And this has been the most disorienting, stomach-turning, sickening part of this terrible season here: the realization that I have lived and ministered around people who claimed to believe in Jesus while harboring such corrosive hearts—and that I was oblivious to it all. I am both angry at them and disappointed in myself.

2024 offers us a chance to get back to some kind of equilibrium and purge Trump from our politics — unless he is in a Faustian bargain with the GOP until death do them part and that could be the case. The Republicans may seriously be that deranged and self destructive. I well remember George W. Bush taking a stance that racists “had no place in our tent.” That was pre-Trump. Now we find out all too well just exactly who and what has been in the tent the entire time. Trump turned on the floodlight and showed us.

He got elected in part by trickery, yes, by pretending he was something that he was not, a rarified version of himself that he played on TV. But he also got elected because there are enough racists in America to have decided on him rather than God forbid, another Democrat who happened to be an unpopular woman. So here we are 64 days before Election Day, wondering whether America has come to her senses or if we need to destroy all that we hold dear in the name of White Supremacy and fear of The Other? It is that basic.

Support the site with a subscription today and see no more ads!

Go Ad-free Now!