Racism is boosting Donald Trump’s 2020 chances – but there is a way to turn his weapon of choice against him

Raging against his implicit definition of prejudice will not work. The path to beating him might be as simple as treating him like the confused old geezer he is

Only one question counts with Donald Trump, and it isn’t “is he racist?”

You could idle an hour by debating the point, as you could discussing the shape of the Earth, or whether Lionel Messi has an eye for goal.

But any list of things for which life’s too short must include contemplating questions to which the answer is known. The jury returned its verdict more than 40 years ago, when Trump openly discriminated against black tenants. Nothing since has given grounds for an appeal.

Needless to state, it wasn’t the bleedin’ obviousness of the answer that stopped Boris Johnson and Jeremy Hunt giving it on Monday night.

To the next leader of a country facing a future as a vassal state, the “r” word is the mirror image of the “n” word. You can think it, you can yearn to scream it, but you cannot possibly say it – least of all when the follow-up would be: “But Mr Johnson, you’ve done your share of race-baiting with letterboxes and bank robbers, that article about the entire Islamic world being medieval, and ‘piccaninnies’.”

Railing against British leaders genuflecting to presidents is as pointless as screeching “Trump is a r*****”. The HMS Eternal Obeisance sailed the Atlantic an age ago.

Since Eden withdrew from Suez after Eisenhower scolded him like a naughty schoolboy, the cases of resistance can be counted on the fingers of one hand, with three to spare. Harold Wilson refused to send combat troops to Vietnam, and Thatcher got cross with Reagan when he invaded Grenada. And that’s pretty much that.

So anyone expecting Johnson or Hunt to have a Love Actually moment, when the Brexicorn du jour is a lovely US trade deal agreed in 20 minutes, is deluded. The realpolitik is that a post-Brexit Britain would be a client state without voting rights. Puerto Rico, in other words, with the same chance of being rescued by daddy as the Caribbean island after the hurricane.

Puerto Rico, whatever Trump affects to believe, is not the birthplace of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, one of the four congresswomen of colour (“The Squad”) Trump invited to “go home” if they don’t like the America he has made great again.

Like two fellow squaddies, this daughter of Puerto Rican immigrants is a natural born citizen. One day she will doubtless reignite Birtherism by running for president herself.

Since she is more than five years younger than the qualifying 35, it falls to her Democratic elders to ponder the only question that matters: how to remove the terracotta kraken after four years rather than eight.

For all that he’s an ignorant dummy with a debatable claim to literacy, Trump is an instinctive political genius. He hasn’t calculated that picking a fight with AOC and the others is the smart route to re-election. He calculates nothing, least of all during the early hours his staffers call “the devil’s playground”, when, unsupervised, he tweets whatever he likes. On some primal level, he knows.

What the world now knows, if there was any doubt, is that the decisive battleground of the 2020 election will be race. While none of The Squad will be his opponent, another non-white woman, Kamala Harris, is favourite for the Democratic nomination.

If Trump can goad Democrats into engaging with him on the race issue, it will more than energise his evangelical base. It will define the Democrats as the angry party of colour, and scare off enough independents to keep him in power.

It is shocking enough that he is probably right, though less so than the blatancy of his appeal to the “very fine people” of white supremacism. “It doesn’t concern me,” he said when asked about the “r” word, “because many people agree with me.”

Not since “we love the poorly educated” has he spoken such an inarguable truth. Many tens of millions of Americans agree with him that no one with skin one shade darker than mushroom on the Dulux chart is a real American. The challenge for whoever takes him on will be tonal. Raging against his implicit definition of racism, which draws the borderline at lynching, will not work.

The path to beating him is to turn his weapon of choice against him, and goad him with ridicule by portraying him as a confused old geezer who simply cannot cope, bless him, with the world as it is.

We all know elderly folk whose grandchildren shush them whenever they ask a brown-skinned carer “And where are you from?”. They sense that demographic trends will soon end the white dominion. In second childhood, as in first, nothing’s more frightening than change.

Geriatric care homes are full of those whose learned behaviour has been unlearned by the ravages of dementia, and revert to the tropes and language that were the lingua franca of their youth.

The White House is an unusually lavish care home, and the post of president less suited to affirmative action than most. But those who believe the moon is “part of Mars”, and that the continental army “took the airports” in the fight against the British, deserve respect and patience too.

Thundering at Trump is as much to blunder onto his terrain as falling for his distractions. Every moment spent examining whether he is a Jim Crow throwback, while central American babies are held in cages, is a moment not spent exploring his connections to Jeffrey Epstein.

Every second wasted on a question to which the answer is a matter of recorded fact shortens the odds against getting the wrong answer to the only question that counts. Ending his presidency won’t be easy in the absence of a recession. Killing him softly, with mock kindness, might be the only way.