Nixon was successful fanning white suburban fears. Many reasons Trump likely won’t be:

The suburbs are more diverse.
Cities are safer.
Threats to suburban exclusion are weaker.
Trump just doesn’t know how to be subtle about this stuff. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/30/upshot/trump-suburban-voters.html

Historian Matt Lassiter on Nixon et al: “They understood something about race that Trump doesn’t understand. Voters don’t want racial privilege challenged, but they don’t want to be explicitly reminded that racism is underneath their position.”

Trump tramples that line.

In the late ‘60s, early ‘70s, threats to suburban exclusion were real in a way they aren’t today. Busing across city lines was still a possibility. George Romney at HUD was trying to withhold federal funds from segregated suburbs in a way Democrats never have.

Today, the threats are “Joe Biden wants to defund the police” and AFFH.

But Joe Biden said he *doesn’t* want to defund the police. And your typical voter doesn’t understand what AFFH is. It was a technical, incremental rule. It doesn’t make for a great boogeyman.

Seems plausible that the main effect of Trump's fair-housing comments is that they will teach some liberal whites who oppose affordable housing nearby that they're on the same page as a president they believe is racist.

But a larger lesson of history is that it's just hard in 2020 to claim anyone is coming to "destroy the suburbs" because all the most radical ways of dislodging exclusion there came off the table 40 years ago.