Trumps Bigotry Was A Key Part Of His Campaign
Regardless of how one labels it, Trumps racism or bigotry was a big part of his campaign by giving a candidate to the many white Americans who harbor racial resentment.
One paper, published in January 2017 by political scientists Brian Schaffner, Matthew MacWilliams, and Tatishe Nteta, found that voters measures of sexism and racism correlated much more closely with support for Trump than economic dissatisfaction, after controlling for factors like partisanship and political ideology.
Another study, conducted by researchers Brenda Major, Alison Blodorn, and Gregory Major Blascovich shortly before the 2016 election, found that if people who strongly identified as white were told that nonwhite groups will outnumber white people in 2042, they became more likely to support Trump.
And a study, published in November 2017 by researchers Matthew Luttig, Christopher Federico, and Howard Lavine, found that Trump supporters were much more likely to change their views on housing policy based on race. In this study, respondents were randomly assigned a subtle image of either a black or a white man. Then they were asked about views on housing policy.
In contrast, favorability toward Hillary Clinton did not significantly change respondents views on any of these issues when primed with racial cues.
He Refused To Condemn The White Supremacists Who Are Campaigning For Him
Three times in a row on Feb. 28, Trump sidestepped opportunities to renounce white nationalist and former KKK leader David Duke, who told his radio audience last week that voting for any candidate other than Trump is really treason to your heritage.
When asked by CNNs Jake Tapper if he would condemn Duke and say he didnt want a vote from him or any other white supremacists, Trump claimed that he didnt know anything about white supremacists or about Duke himself. When Tapper pressed him twice more, Trump said he couldnt condemn a group he hadnt yet researched.
By Feb. 29, Trump was saying that in fact he does disavow Duke, and that the only reason he didnt do so on CNN was because of a lousy earpiece. Video of the exchange, however, shows Trump responding quickly to Tappers questions with no apparent difficulty in hearing.
Its preposterous to think that Trump doesnt know about white supremacist groups or their sometimes violent support of him. Reports of neo-Nazi groups rallying around Trump go back as far as August.
A leader of the Virginia KKK who is backing Trump told a local TV reporter earlier this month, The reason a lot of Klan members like Donald Trump is because a lot of what he believes, we believe in.
Native American Casino Industry
During the early 1990s, competition from an expanding Native American casino industry threatened his Atlantic City investments. During this period Trump stated that “nobody likes Indians as much as Donald Trump” but then claimed without evidence that the mob had infiltrated Native American casinos, that there was no way “Indians” or an “Indian chief” could stand up to the mob, implied that the casinos were not in fact owned by Native Americans based on the owners’ appearance, and depicted Native Americans as greedy.
In 2000, Trump and his associates were fined $250,000 and publicly apologized for failing to reveal that they had financed advertisements criticizing the proposal of building more Native American casinos in the Catskill Mountains, which alluded to Mohawk Indians doing cocaine and bringing violence, asking: “Are these the new neighbors we want?” The advertisements, claiming to be funded by “grass-roots, pro-family” donors, were actually designed by Roger Stone, while Trump approved and financed the million-dollar venture.
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Ignorance And Racism Alone Cant Account For 71 Million Votes
The period after Trumps election was characterised by soul searching. The media fixated on the figure of the coal miner as a symbol of a desperate voter whose way of life and livelihood were dying.For example, this piece in The Washington Post This figure had been tricked by Trump to vote for a charlatan who promised a return to the old way of doing things.
This calamity thesis is a common one when democratic outcomes do not align with expectations of what American values are. If US Americans vote for someone who is open in their prejudice and disdain for norms, the explanation can only be that some sort of affliction, some calamity has befallen the voting public. This crisis is usually an economic one, hence the left behind exculpatory voter category.
And for those who do not buy the view that anyone could vote for Donald Trump and not share his politics, the other explanation that is often given is similarly simple: racism. Trumps victory is a function of the vast unacknowledged racism that exists within US society, and which was given sanction by his race dog whistles.
Both these categories indeed account for some of Trumps base, the stable pulse of support he has had through the past four years regardless of his performance. But the sheer numbers mean that neither of these explanations give the full picture.
Ignorance and immorality simply cannot account for 71 million votes.
Racism In The Era Of Trump: An Oral History
A part of the story of Americas political journey from President Barack Obama to President Donald Trump was the rise of racial anger as seen in the crude, racist stereotypes of Obama that showed up on signs at Tea Party rallies, and in the mainstreaming of the conspiracy that the countrys first African American president was not born in the United States.
Trump, a real-estate developer and reality TV star, became the face of the so-called birther movement and in the process attracted a political base that would support his eventual run for the presidency.
This oral history drawn from interviews conducted for FRONTLINEs Americas Great Divide: From Obama to Trump traces how Trump used the birther conspiracy as his political launching pad, how his response to a violent white supremacist rally in Charlottesville drew rebuke even from members of his own party, and how he has continued to leverage anti-immigrant rhetoric as a political tool. It includes accounts from former Obama and Trump administration officials, Republican lawmakers, veteran journalists and political commentators.
Note: The following interviews have been edited for clarity and length and have been drawn from FRONTLINEs Transparency Project.
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Trump And Racism: What Do The Data Say
The Brookings Cafeteria podcast last week discussed the role President Trumps racist rhetoric has played in encouraging violence in America. Predictably, some podcast listeners responded skeptically on Twitter, doubting the association between Trump and hateful behavior. It would be naïve to think that data will change many individuals minds on this topic, but nonetheless, there is substantial evidence that Trump has encouraged racism and benefitted politically from it.
First, Donald Trumps support in the 2016 campaign was clearly driven by racism, sexism, and xenophobia. While some observers have explained Trumps success as a result of economic anxiety, the data demonstrate that anti-immigrant sentiment, racism, and sexism are much more strongly related to support for Trump. Trumps much-discussed vote advantage with non-college-educated whites is misleading when accounting for racism and sexism, the education gap among whites in the 2016 election returns to the typical levels of previous elections since 2000. Trump did not do especially well with non-college-educated whites, compared to other Republicans. He did especially well with white people who express sexist views about women and who deny racism exists.
When Mexico sends its people, theyre not sending their best. Theyre sending people that have lots of problems Theyre bringing drugs. Theyre bringing crime. Theyre rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.
Minorities As Uppity Ungrateful And Unintelligent
He frequently criticizes prominent African-Americans for being unpatriotic, ungrateful and disrespectful.
He called Puerto Ricans who criticized his administrations response to Hurricane Maria politically motivated ingrates.
He also has a pattern of criticizing African-Americans asunintelligent orracist.
In July 2019, Trump suggested that four minority Democratic congresswomen, all of whom are American citizens and three of whom were born in the United States, should go back to the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.
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Funding For The Community Relations Service
The Community Relations Service is part of the United States Department of Justice. The office is intended to act as a peacemaker for community conflicts and tensions arising from differences of race, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, disability, and religion. During Trumps term in office the CRS was targeted for elimination or severe staffing reductions. The president of one advocacy group, Asian Americans advancing Justice, spoke out saying the administration threatened to discontinue its entire budget, which had ranged between $15 million and $16 million.
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Republicans Keep Their Mouths Shut In Face Of Trump’s Hatefulness
Any serious response from so-called reasonable Republican elected leaders? Nope.GOP Sen. Rick Scott, asked several times about Trump’s words, told CNN he doesn’t “condone violence” and added the useless, mealy mouthed comment: “I hope no one is racist.”
How courageous. Republican leaders wont say a thing, even to defend themselves, even when its clear Trump and his MAGA minions have loyalty only to themselves.
For the sizable swath of voters and politicians who remain loyal to Trump despite his falling approval numbers, this is not the behavior of a political party. This is the behavior of a cult: fealty to one individual zero tolerance for any who stray from the core beliefs threats of violence toward any who step out of line characterizing those who disagree as existential threats.
MAGA followers think you are not a Democrat you are a member of a party now actively killing Republicans. You are not a mainstream conservative you are a person with a death wish.
The 45th President: One In A Series Looking Back At The Trump Presidency
In unguarded moments with senior aides, President Trump has maintained that Black Americans have mainly themselves to blame in their struggle for equality, hindered more by lack of initiative than societal impediments, according to current and former U.S. officials.
After phone calls with Jewish lawmakers, Trump has muttered that Jews are only in it for themselves and stick together in an ethnic allegiance that exceeds other loyalties, officials said.
Trumps private musings about Hispanics match the vitriol he has displayed in public, and his antipathy to Africa is so ingrained that when first lady Melania Trump planned a 2018 trip to that continent he railed that he could never understand why she would want to go there.
When challenged on these views by subordinates, Trump has invariably responded with indignation. He would say, No one loves Black people more than me, a former senior White House official said. The protests rang hollow because if the president were truly guided by such sentiments he wouldnt need to say it, the official said. You let your actions speak.
In Trumps case, there is now a substantial record of his actions as president that have compounded the perceptions of racism created by his words.
Over 3½ years in office, he has presided over a sweeping U.S. government retreat from the front lines of civil rights, endangering decades of progress against voter suppression, housing discrimination and police misconduct.
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The Rhetoric And Reality Of Donald Trumps Racism
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Next month, Jamestown will mark four hundred years since the first slaves set foot in North Americaa year before the Mayflowers Pilgrims landed in Plymouth Harbor. There were only twenty and odd, according to an early account from John Rolfe, Virginias first tobacco planter and the widower of Pocahontas. The slaves had been captured in Angola and herded, with hundreds of others, onto a slave ship bound for Veracruz, in todays Mexico. British pirates seized them in a raid on the high seas while searching for gold and silver. In Jamestown, the pirates exchanged their human loot for provisions. Jamestown became ground zero for slavery in the Americas. Among that first generation were Isabella and Antony, who worked in the household of Captain William Tucker. They were allowed to marry, according to historical accounts in Jamestown. In 1624, their son William was the first recorded birth of an African-American in what became the United States.
One elected African-American to attend Trumps speech was Democratic Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax, but he too took a swipe at the President. The two commemorations, he said in an essay posted on Medium, far supersede the petty and racist actions of the current occupant of the White House. He added, The bigoted words of the current President will thankfully soon be swept into the dustbin of history. Our democracy, born in Virginia, will live on.
The Moral Character Of His Presidency
Trumps presidency has corresponded with a surge in activity by white nationalist groups, as well as concern about the growing danger they pose.
Recent assessments by the Department of Homeland Security describe white supremacists as the countrys gravest domestic threat, exceeding that of the Islamic State and other terror groups, according to documents obtained by the Lawfare national security website and reported by Politico.
The FBI has expanded resources to tracking hate groups and crimes. FBI Director Christopher A. Wray testified Thursday that racially motivated violent extremism accounts for the bulk of the bureaus domestic terrorism cases, and that most of those are driven by white supremacist ideology.
Major rallies staged by white nationalist organizations, which were already on the upswing just before the 2016 election, increased in size and frequency after Trump took office, according to Brian Levin, an expert on hate groups at California State University at San Bernardino.
The largest, and most ominous, was the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville.
On Aug. 11, 2017, hundreds of white supremacists, neo-fascists and Confederate sympathizers descended on the city. Purportedly there to protest the planned removal of a Robert E. Lee statue, they carried torches and chanted slogans including blood and soil and you will not replace us laden with Klan and Nazi symbolism.
Kelly and Cohn declined to comment.
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Defenses Of Donald Trump
Trump has repeatedly denied claims that he is racist, often stating that he is “the least racist person”. Various friends, members of his administration and people who have known him, including some black Americans, have stated that Trump is not racist.Ben Carson explained his evidence for this belief, stating “When he bought Mar-a-Lago, he was the one who fought for Jews and blacks to be included in the clubs that were trying to exclude them. You know, people say he’s a racist, he is not a racist.” At the 2020 Republican National Convention, Herschel Walker, a close friend of Trump’s for 37 years, defended him from charges of racism, saying “Growing up in the Deep South I’ve seen racism up close. I know what it is, and it isn’t Donald Trump.”
Though perceived as anti-immigrant, Trump is himself the son of an immigrant mother and has twice married wives who were immigrants. He has often celebrated his immigrant heritage. During the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Trump defended himself against accusations that his immigration policies were racist, stating “I will never apologize for pledging to enforce and uphold every single law of the United States, and to make my immigration priority defending and protecting American citizens above every other single consideration.”
The Claim: Trump Said These 28 Racist Things
Throughout his presidency, Donald Trump has often been criticized for using or peddling racist language. A suggests those comments have piled up.
The post depicts a cartoon drawing of the president, whos saying, Im the least racist person in the room, a at the final presidential debate this month in Nashville. Hes surrounded by speech bubbles of racist statements he reportedly made.
Of the 28 listed comments, Trump said 12 of them as plainly stated. Two he said but lack context. Four comments are disputed, eight are paraphrased from similar statements and two he did not say.
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The person who drew and shared the post, Instagram user @heatherschiederillustrates_, said she sourced the comments from statements, tweets and interviews as they came through the news cycle. For her, Trump’s presidency made the election personal.
“As a half Egyptian woman who was a conservative Catholic until the 2016 election cycle, I am have been worn down by this administration and their racism, xenophobia, sexism and utter mockery of real Christian values,” she told USA TODAY. “…For our own humanity and survival as a Nation, we need to vote him out.”
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