Thread: What Do People Mean When They Say Donald Trump Is Racist?

What Do People Mean When They Say Donald Trump Is Racist?

By Kelefa Sanneh , August 18, 2016

Many people call Donald Trump a racist, and he’s popular among some white nationalists. But he has actually had very little to say about African-Americans during the campaign.

If you visited the Drudge Report on Tuesday, you might have noticed that the top story was a countdown to a confrontation. The headline read, “TONIGHT: TRUMP TAKES ON THE RIOTERS! LIVE FROM MILWAUKEE.” Donald Trump is, after all, a “law and order” Presidential candidate—he used the phrase in one of the first sentences of his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention. And Milwaukee had been unsettled in the wake of the police killing, on Saturday afternoon, of an African-American man named Sylville K. Smith; protests and violence followed, some of it racially charged. A video journalist named Tim Pool reported hearing shouts of “**** white people,” and mentioned a “white kid” who had been shot in the neck; Pool said, “For those that are perceivably white, it is just not safe to be here.” Many Drudge readers might have expected that Trump—sworn enemy of political correctness, and frequent transgressor of political norms—would be ready for a fight.

During Trump’s tour of Wisconsin on Tuesday, one of his first engagements was an interview with John Roberts, of Fox News, who asked him, “Did the policeman do the right thing?” The city’s chief of police had defended the officer involved, saying that video footage (which has not been released) showed the victim turning toward the officer “with a firearm in his hand.” Trump’s response was strikingly tentative, almost equivocal. “Well, I guess, you know, if you believe a gun was pointed at his head, maybe ready to be fired, what is a person supposed to do?” he said. “That’s what the narrative is. Maybe it’s not true. If it is true, people shouldn’t be rioting.”

Later that night, he addressed the matter more thoroughly, during a speech in the city of West Bend, a suburb roughly forty miles north of Milwaukee, in Washington County, which is eighty-eight per cent white, and in which President Obama won just twenty-nine per cent of the 2012 vote. Trump was relatively subdued, though, reading dutifully from a teleprompter. And he strained to strike an inclusive note, addressing himself not to the people in the room but to the beleaguered African-American citizens of Milwaukee. “The main victims of these riots are law-abiding African-American citizens living in these neighborhoods,” he said. He suggested that Hillary Clinton was guilty of “bigotry,” saying that she had cynically exploited black communities for votes. And when, inevitably, he turned to the subject of international trade, he sought to position himself as a defender of African-American interests. “We opened our markets, they’ve taken our jobs, they give us our products that we don’t make anymore, and African-American neighborhoods—along with many other neighborhoods—have suffered greatly,” he said.

This was a “big” speech, with potentially lasting consequences—such, at any rate, was the judgment of Newt Gingrich, one of Trump’s most committed supporters among the political élite. Major Garrett, the chief White House correspondent for CBS, predicted that Trump’s words would “resonate,” tweeting that this was his “best drafted & best delivered” speech of the campaign. But the speech seemed unlikely to have much, if any, effect on Trump’s popularity with African-American voters, which is so low that it barely registers in polls: a recent Fox News poll showed Trump drawing four per cent of black voters; in a poll of Ohio, from July, Trump recorded a perfect zero with black voters. Even the vigorous efforts of Diamond and Silk, the African-American pro-Trump YouTube stars, seem not to have made a difference.

In many ways, this makes sense. Throughout the campaign, a number of observers on the left and the right have suggested that Trump practices a kind of white-identity politics that may be indistinguishable from racism. He was reluctant, earlier this year, to disavow the support of David Duke; he is popular among some white nationalists; and he has had to defend himself against accusations of anti-Semitism. Ben Smith, the editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed, sent a memo to his staff about Trump, assuring them that it is “entirely fair to call him a mendacious racist.” Even Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House, who endorses Trump, said that Trump’s criticism of a judge was “sort of like the textbook definition of a racist comment.”

But what’s surprising about Trump’s strategy of racial provocation is that African-Americans have played a relatively small role in it. In his campaign-announcement speech, fourteen long months ago, he set the tone for much of his campaign when he suggested that Mexico was sending its least desirable citizens across the border. (“They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”) And the judge he criticized was Gonzalo Curiel, who he suggested was biased against him because Curiel’s parents are from Mexico. (“This judge is of Mexican heritage—I’m building a wall,” he told CNN’s Jake Tapper, in reference to his plan to fortify the Mexican border.) When people call Trump racist, they are often thinking primarily of incidents like these, in which he has singled out Latino immigrants and their descendants.

They are often thinking, too, about Trump’s series of remarks about Muslims, including his call—which he seems to have modified—for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” Or, for that matter, his portrayal of China as a menacing threat; during a rally in Iowa last year, he adopted a clipped accent to impersonate negotiators from Japan and China; he imagined them saying, “We want deal!” In these cases, Trump is seeking to protect an American “we” from an invading “they”—the kind of language that would once have drawn accusations of nativism and xenophobia instead. But these days a wide range of prejudices are commonly subsumed within the expansive term “racism”; you might call a politician “racist” without meaning (at least not exclusively, or even primarily) that he is anti-black.

When it comes to African-Americans, Trump has a long and sometimes grim history. In the nineteen-seventies, he was sued by the Justice Department for discriminating against black tenants. In 1989, after five black and Latino boys were arrested for a horrific attack on a jogger in Central Park, Trump published a pro-death-penalty advertisement in the New York Daily News. (Trump also criticized the city’s forty-one-million-dollar settlement with the five, who were convicted and then, more than a decade later, exonerated.) And then there were his demands, in 2011, that Obama produce his birth certificate, to prove he was born in America. (Birtherism is often described as a species of anti-black racism, though of course it is inspired by the fantasy that our cosmopolitan President is not really African-American.) And, last year, Trump retweeted an image showing bogus crime statistics that suggested African-Americans kill many more whites than is actually the case.

In general, though, Trump has had relatively little to say about African-Americans during this campaign. In December, he criticized Justice Antonin Scalia, who had suggested, during a hearing, that affirmative action might harm some African-American students by steering them toward colleges that are “too fast for them” when they might be better off at “a less advanced school—a slower-track school.” Trump seemed genuinely offended. “I thought his remarks were very tough,” he said. “I don’t like what he said.” During his Convention speech, he mentioned the murder rate in Chicago, but then swiftly pivoted, singling out a group not typically blamed for the city’s violence. “Nearly one hundred and eighty thousand illegal immigrants with criminal records, ordered deported from our country, are tonight roaming free to threaten peaceful citizens,” he said.

Was Trump’s criticism of Scalia part of a grand plan to win over African-American voters? Perhaps not. One of Trump’s greatest political strengths is that very little of what he says sounds like the product of political calculation. (Of course, this, too, is one of his greatest political weaknesses.) Earlier this year, on Sean Hannity’s radio show, Ann Coulter, an early and energetic Trump supporter, suggested that Trump had a chance to win over African-Americans. “To the extent they attack Trump on his immigration stand, that just drives up his black vote,” she said. “Specifically black jobs are being taken by illegal immigrants.” In May, during the season finale of “The Carmichael Show,” Coulter’s vision came to life as the curmudgeonly father, played by David Alan Grier, came out as a Trump fan, complete with a red “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN” baseball cap. His wife, aghast, asked, “Do you really want an orange President, with little tiny baby hands?”

Grier’s character shot back, “What’s wrong with being orange?” And he added, mischievously, “Why you got to make this racial?”

In any event, few African-American voters seem to be convinced—Trump does markedly better even among Hispanic voters than he does among African-Americans. (A Pew poll in June found him attracting twenty-four per cent of Hispanic voters, which is comparable to the twenty-seven per cent who voted for Mitt Romney.) In a recent column for the Daily Beast, Keli Goff, who is African-American—and no fan of Trump—conceded that “when people think of groups Donald Trump has insulted we’re certainly not at the top of that list.” Her conclusion, which may have been counterintuitive to a fault, was that African-American voters recoiled from Trump precisely because of his “façade” of friendliness.

Perhaps the true explanation has more to do with ongoing political polarization and the influence of Obama, which have combined to tighten the relationship between African-American voters and the Democratic Party. And perhaps it has something to do, too, with that expansive notion of race: especially among liberals, Trump has acquired a reputation as a racist. Does it make a difference to black voters that this reputation has mainly to do with things he has said about Muslims and Mexicans? Or that he finds ways to talk of African-Americans as part of a threatened “we,” and not part of a threatening “them”? One of the best things about an election is that it provides answers—eventually—to questions such as these. And for Trump, so far, the answer seems to be no, it doesn’t make a difference.

http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-...rump-is-racist

The reason the Democratic Party and its Totally Biased and Corrupt Media call Trump a "racist" is because they're racists of the worst kind. They not only don't like blacks, they're supremacist racists, they think they're better than black Americans, which is why they think they should be treated differently and pandered to because of their race to get votes. That's why they think in order to reach the black vote you must go to them, because apparently they don't think black voters are capable of traveling a few miles to a Trump Rally in a suburb of Milwaukee. They don't think black voters can hear a speech on TV or YouTube and decide for themselves if candidate Trump offers them a better deal as President. They don't think black voters are capable of coming up with their own conclusion about the impact of illegal immigration on their job prospects, they must be told that if you vote for a candidate who opposes illegal immigration you're voting for a "racist".

Donald Trump doesn't have a racist bone in his body.

He's not a racist because he wants to build a wall and stop illegal immigration.

He's not a bigot because he wants to protect the US from Radical Islamic Terrorism.

He's not a misogynist because he calls Rosie O'Donnell a "fat pig" as part of a Rosie-inspired publicity stunt where she attacks Trump's hair to incite a response from him about her to increase her ratings on The View from the back and forth feud.

Donald on Larry King Talking about Rosie



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqZ5SUnA_FQ

So Donald Trump decides to give the Miss USA an opportunity to remain as Miss USA, enter Re-Hab, try to overcome an alcoholism addiction, and through that effort and/or achievement, do something bigger than even being Miss USA, in his words, Rosie attacks him over it, and of course Trump punches back, starting a feud that while it lasted boosted the ratings of The View, the whole purpose of Rosie's attack on him to begin with.

So Megyn Kelly wants to exploit that to falsely depict Trump as a "misogynist", when nothing could be further from the truth. Then Democrats exploit it to try to win an election and Hillary Clinton exploits it to try to become President.

Really? Is this how low our Democratic Majority country has become? You exploit a feud over Donald Trump giving a young woman dealing with an alcohol addiction a second chance 10 years ago as a reason not to vote for him? Good God, people, that's a reason TO VOTE for him. He says to Larry King there are a lot of people, young people, old people, lots of people dealing with addiction, alcohol addiction, drug addiction, and they need help. How many Presidential candidates have you heard THAT from?

Donald Trump is a really good person. More people just need to get to know him. But they'll have to dig for the facts, because they certainly won't get it from our STUPID, SICK, MENTALLY ILL CORRUPT MEDIA.