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Now we know Donald Trump’s strategy for re-election: use pure, un-distilled racism to overcome Joe Biden’s multi-national coalition. It’s George Wallace on steroids.

“Your vote will decide whether we protect law-abiding Americans or whether we give free rein to violent anarchists and agitators and criminals who threaten our citizens,” Trump said in his final speech to the Republican National Convention. “And this election will decide whether we will defend the American way of life or allow a radical movement to completely dismantle and destroy it.”

It’s the suburbs versus the inner city, homeowners versus vandals, white versus black.

Early in the RNC convention, Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, a pro-Trump student organization, described Trump as “the bodyguard of Western Civilization.” This was the single most succinct distillation of the racist message of the convention – that Trump is the only thing standing between God-fearing, white, suburban Americans and the dark-skinned, anarchist, rapist plunderers who seek to overrun your peaceful neighborhoods, rape your daughters and burn your houses to the ground.

In the face of a pandemic that threatens the lives of every family, urban and suburban — an actual attack that Trump has utterly failed to defend against — Trump and the RNC are trying to get white voters to believe that the real threat comes from Black Lives Matters and the dark-skinned hordes who threaten your neighborhood, your family and your home.

Look away, as the Dixie anthem urges, from the 180,000+ deaths that I have allowed because of my incompetence, Trump argued. Focus, instead, on the “drug overdoses, depression, alcohol addiction, suicides, heart attacks, economic devastation, job loss” created by Biden and the “vandals, arsonists, anarchists, looters and rioters” he supports.

Be afraid. Be very afraid. Because Biden, Bernie and Black Lives Matters are coming to get you.

Trump has no interest in or ability to expand his vote beyond the coalition that in 2016 captured the traditional Republican states and barely squeaked out an electoral college victory by winning Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

This time, his goal is to maintain those states and keep Wisconsin. That would give him a two-vote victory in the electoral college. So, using Kenosha to scare voters in Milwaukee – and suppress the black vote there – is all that matters to him.