Oklahoma’s governor, Mary Fallin, said Donald Trump was “trying to campaign as a racial healer”, as the presumptive Republican nominee tried to paint himself as a unifying force in a country feeling fractured over race, violence and policing.
“I think that has been part of his message, if you watched what he said this week,” Fallin told CNN on Sunday, alluding to police shootings of two black men in Louisiana and Minnesota, and the murder of five officers in Dallas, Texas.
“He talked about how devastating this was for Dallas, how we have to respect our law enforcement and we need to pray for those who were killed and injured.”
Fallin is widely considered one of Trump’s possible picks for vice-president, but she said she was not currently being vetted to be his running mate – “though it’s certainly an honor to be mentioned”.
Trump’s response to a week of horror has varied between unusual moderation and attacks on his political rivals. “We must restore law and order,” he said in a statement after the Dallas attacks. “Our nation has become too divided. Too many Americans feel like they’ve lost hope.
“This is a time, perhaps more than ever, for strong leadership, love and compassion,” he added. “We will pull through these tragedies.”
But on Twitter, Trump has continued to barrage opponents, real and perceived, with steady criticism. “Look what is happening to our country under the weak leadership of [Barack] Obama and people like Crooked Hillary Clinton,” the businessman tweeted on Sunday.
“President Obama thinks the nation is not as divided as people think,” he added. “He is living in a world of the make believe!”
On Friday, Trump was forced to disavow comments made by a top campaign official who blamed Clinton for the attack in Dallas.
The presumptive Democratic nominee has also tried to strike a unifying tone in a fraught moment for the US. In an interview with CNN on Friday she called “for white people, like myself, to put ourselves in the shoes of those African American families, who fear every time their children go somewhere”.
“I think we are the ones who have to start listening to the legitimate cries that are coming from our African American fellow citizens, and we have so much more to be done, and we have got to get about the business of doing it,” she said. “We can’t be engaging in hateful rhetoric or incitement of violence. We need to bring people together.”
Speaking from Spain, the president sought to find balance while assuring Americans that, despite the difficult week, the nation still remains united.
“First of all, any violence directed at police officers is a reprehensible crime and needs to be prosecuted,” he said. “But even rhetorically, if we paint police in broad brush without recognizing that the vast majority of police officers are doing a really good job,” he continued, “then we’re going to lose allies in the reform cause.”
Obama said he hoped protesters “maintain a respectful and thoughtful tone” because “there are legitimate issues that have been raised. And there is data and evidence to back up the concerns that are being expressed.
“I’d like all sides to listen to each other,” he concluded.
Trump’s attempt at moderation contrasts with a campaign that has for months been defined, either by the candidate or his supporters, by inflammatory and offensive rhetoric about women, Hispanic people, Muslims and others. Clinton has made her campaign slogan “stronger together” and frequently accused Trump, whose campaign first rallied around the idea of a wall on the Mexican border, of dividing people.
Fallin’s characterization of Trump as a compassionate conservative reflects a larger attempt to reconcile the businessman with wary voters, Republicans included.
“We all need to work toward unity as a nation and understand that people are scared,” she said. “They want safe homes. They want safe streets. They want safe communities. They want – they don’t want to be profiled. They don’t want to be discriminated against. Everyone wants to be treated equal with equal justice for all.”
That sentiment was echoed last week by Newt Gingrich, another possible choice for a Trump running mate, when he acknowledged it was “more dangerous to be black in America” than white.
“It is more dangerous, in that they are substantially more likely to end up in a situation where the police don’t respect you and where you could easily get killed,” he said. “And sometimes for whites it’s difficult to appreciate how real that is and how it’s an everyday danger.”
Gingrich said it had taken him years to get a sense of this disparity. “If you are a normal, white American, the truth is you don’t understand being black in America,” he said, “and you instinctively underestimate the level of discrimination and the level of additional risk.”
Polls reveal a marked increase in the perception of racial polarisation.
A hundred days after Obama took office, 59% of black Americans said US race relations were “generally good”. Six months before the end of his term, that number has fallen to 34%, with 45% of whites saying race relations are generally bad against 35% at the start of Obama’s term.
The Pew research poll published last month also found that black Americans were four times as likely to say they had been treated suspiciously or as unintelligent as a result of their ethnicity. Few Americans thought the Black Lives Matter movement would help blacks achieve equality. A Gallup poll from last month also found that Trump is hugely disliked by minorities, and that only 11% of black people and 14% of Hispanics had a favorable opinion of the candidate.
