Election 2016: Trump flaw 1: Prejudice and courting the bigoted #NeverTrump

This is part of a series of posts on Election 2016.

I’ll give Trump this: He never tried to hide his bigoted statements.  (For purposes of this post, I’ll keep bigotry to races, religions, and ethnicities, as the next post takes up insults as a whole.) He began his campaign saying that Mexico was sending illegal immigrants who are thieves and rapists, and some might be good people.  (To be fair, he didn’t limit it to Mexicans, but from “all over. South and Latin America.” I’m not sure how the Mexican government arranged all that.)  He said that an American-born judge couldn’t fairly decide his case because the judge’s parents are Mexican.   Both of these statements are bigoted, and there is no reasonable argument otherwise. (I would even go so far as to say that, if you don’t see the bigotry here, you may want to do some self reflection on your own tendencies. Here’s a helpful link to see your level of racism or other bigotries.)

He has also consistently been anti-Muslim, saying that he would bar Muslims entering the country, and even anyone from a Muslim country. He said that thousands of New Jersey Muslims celebrated on TV when they saw the towers fall on 9/11. He said he would put surveillance on mosques and shut some down if bad things happened.  He said he wouldn’t rule out creating a list of Muslims or having them carrying identification cards to note their faith   (No obvious historic parallel there….)

Black people have reason to fear his election. His “birther” attacks on President Obama certainly had many racist underpinnings.   He has retweeted racist propaganda with false statistics on crime. But he did say he was likely the least racist person on Earth, so … that made “the blacks”  feel better.   He doesn’t appear to understand the incredibly incendiary effect of using a possessive term (an ownership term) to describe black people: “Look at my African-American over here. Look at him. Are you the greatest?” 

The scary part about most of this, beyond the idea of following the first black President with a man spouting racist rhetoric, is that it seems like a concerted plan to cozy up to racists. I want to acknowledge that this is an extraordinary claim and that it breaks a rule I have about imputing motivations, so I’ll try to give a bit more evidence to this one.

Donald Trump has known who David Duke was from at least the beginning of the 21^st century. When asked about him in an interview, he acted like he didn’t, though, and refused at first to disavow him.  The most troubling part of the interview was when Tapper said, “Ok, I’m just talking about David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan here,” and Trump still refused to disavow him.  He said he didn’t know anything about Duke, and that he couldn’t hear the question, but the day before he had disavowed Duke (so not knowing anything about him is a lie), and he said in the Tapper interview that he doesn’t “know David Duke,” so he heard the important part of the question. Maybe this was just a really troubling lapse caused by lack of sleep or something, but David Duke doesn’t think it was.  Duke noted that Trumps attacks on Muslims and illegal immigration have brought Duke’s (white supremacist) agenda into the mainstream; Duke says that he would be Trump’s biggest supporter.

There are troubling usages of Pepe the frog by Trump and his associates. Every time Trump and his surrogates uses rhetoric that hearkens to white supremacy and people google it, they have a decent chance of landing on a white supremacist website, and that has dramatically driven up web traffic to the big racists like Storm Front. A few times would be an inconvenient side effect, but the long-term continuation is troubling.  See a longer discussion of this here.

Underpinning much of his recent attack on the rigging of the systems is a very troubling echo of centuries of Antisemitism.  When you start talking about a secret group of “international bankers” that want to “plot the destruction” of a sovereign nation by meeting “in secret,” that should set off some warning flairs if you are familiar with history. And it did.  He has posted an image of Clinton over money that came from an anti-Semitic group, so this is by no means isolated to his “rigged election” junk. It was already a pattern even then.

I never thought that Romney was racist, and I thought Kanye’s outburst over W. Bush was silly. I think cries that most Republicans are racists are wrong (certainly wrong in the overt sense of the word). But Trump is either actively racist or is merely quite willing to court the vote of those who are racist. And this isn’t an innocuous racism, like sitting with people of the same race at a lunch table. This is the Klan, and Nazi rhetoric, that he is courting.

To me, this obviously makes him completely unacceptable as an American President, and it’s why -even the sub-standard 3^rd-party candidates are better.

Even scarier is that this is not the only fatal flaw to his candidacy, and others (like his similar courting of the Russians) are at least as scary.  More on those in future posts.