Donald Trump did not invent American racism. That would be giving him far too much credit, and he would immediately trademark it, slap gold letters on it, and announce a licensing deal with Fox News. Trump is not the source. He is the fish. The GOP is the pool.
And what a pool it is.
Trump swims effortlessly because the water temperature is just right—lukewarm bigotry, generously seasoned with grievance, nostalgia, and a firm belief that equality is something other people are unfairly demanding. He did not poison the water. He merely discovered it was already cloudy, warm, and stocked with voters.
Let us begin with the Willie Horton advert—often misremembered as an aberration from a “sane” GOP. This is incorrect. The Willie Horton ad was not madness. It was method. It was the Republican Party calmly discovering that racism, when laundered through fear, polls extremely well with suburban America.
The advert did not shout racial slurs. That would have been gauche. Instead, it whispered: crime, law and order, dangerous people, and most importantly, them. It was racism with a tie on. Respectable racism. Racism that went to business school.
And it worked.
The lesson the GOP learned was not “perhaps we went too far.” The lesson was “next time, let’s do this more often.”
From there, the evolution was steady. Dog whistles became megaphones. “States’ rights” became “border security.” “Welfare queens” became “urban crime.” Every decade, the same tune, just played louder, simpler, and with fewer euphemisms—because why waste syllables when outrage does the job?
By the time Trump arrived, the GOP had already drained the deep end. All he had to do was jump in and splash.
Trump did not introduce racism to the party. He simply removed the filter. What earlier Republicans said with raised eyebrows and plausible deniability, Trump said with a microphone and a smirk. He looked at decades of coded language and thought, Why bother with Morse code when you can just shout?
And the party loved it.
Here is the great misunderstanding of Trump: people assume he hijacked the GOP. He didn’t. He auditioned—and the GOP hired him on the spot. He was the logical conclusion of a long experiment in racial politics: if fear works a little, fear plus insult works better; and fear plus insult plus reality TV charisma works best of all.
Trump is the fish that grew large because the pool was never cleaned.
Republicans now pretend Trump is some alien presence, a meteor that struck a previously noble institution. This is revisionist history bordering on slapstick. Trump did not fall from the sky. He climbed out of decades of GOP strategy meetings, campaign ads, talk radio, and Fox News chyrons screaming about caravans that mysteriously vanish after elections.
The base didn’t radicalise overnight. It was marinated.
Every election cycle, the GOP added another chemical to the water: resentment about immigration, panic about demographic change, fury about civil rights, nostalgia for a past that suspiciously excludes everyone who isn’t white and male. Trump simply swam around shouting, “This water tastes great!” while the fish applauded with their fins.
And now the party is trapped. They cannot drain the pool without losing the fish. They cannot clean it without admitting it was filthy. So they pretend the water is crystal clear and accuse anyone pointing out the algae of being “woke.”
The tragedy—if one insists on calling it that—is that this was all optional. The GOP could have evolved. It could have broadened its appeal. It could have decided that America’s future includes people who don’t look like 1950s casting extras.
Instead, it chose the pool.
Trump, for all his vulgarity, is brutally honest about this arrangement. He knows where his oxygen comes from. He knows which instincts to poke. He knows the difference between racism as policy and racism as performance—and he delivers both with the enthusiasm of a man selling steaks from the back of a limousine.
When historians look back, they will not ask, “How did Trump happen?” They will ask, “Why did the GOP think this wouldn’t happen?”
You don’t spend decades fishing in poisoned waters and then act shocked when you catch something monstrous.
Trump swims because the GOP built the pool. And now, staring into the murky depths, the party is discovering a universal truth: if you refuse to clean your racism, eventually it grows gills, starts talking, and demands the nomination.
Centre for Nigeria Progress 