Recently, Hillary Clinton discarded political correctness and, in what she warned would be “grossly generalistic,” said that many of Trump’s supporters were “deplorable.” Trump’s campaign decided to pounce, claiming that her comments showed Clinton to be an elitist.
Clinton was right and Trump is wrong. Patriotic Americans, including many Republicans, have spoken out bravely that Trump’s campaign is about white racism. By calling out the racists for Trump, Clinton was standing up to bullies, defending the idea of America, and proving that she can bring our country back from the brink of the wreckage that Trump is making.
Even Republicans Agree Trump’s Campaign Is Focused On White Racism.
Avik Roy, a Forbes editor who worked for three Republican candidates for president, wrote recently that it is a mistake to describe Trump “as haphazard and spontaneous... Trump’s political philosophy, in fact, is surprisingly coherent, with a heritage that goes back more than a century.” Roy later clarified in an interview that he has come to realize that despite his hopes and efforts, “the gravitational center of the Republican Party is white nationalism.”
Roy is not alone. Bloomberg’s Megan McArdle reviewed letters from Republican stalwarts opposed to Trump, and found significant opposition to Trump’s racism. For instance, one man wrote:
I am a loyal party man, but I will not be taken hostage by a racist xenophobe. If it comes down to Trump vs. Clinton I will vote my conscience.
Another lifelong Republican wrote this:
He is also a racist that brings out the worst in people. David Duke the former grand wizard of the KKK has endorsed him and white supremacist supporters are making robo-calls that are extremely racist. … We need a leader that will unite us not one that brings out the worst elements of our society. The brave men and women of this country fought the Nazis during WW II to protect our rights and now there are those that are ready to back a man who is akin to Hitler himself.
Are these Republicans of conscience overreacting? Well, for those who’ve forgotten, recall these gems:
- Trump falsely accused blacks of killing 81% of white homicide victims in a tweet of neo-Nazi propaganda (the actual number is 15%).
- At his rallies, he has encouraged violence, including physical attacks on protesters of color.
- Trump wants a U.S. judge born in Indiana to be disqualified because of his race.
- Trump said that certain religions should not be allowed into the country and has been open to a national religious registry.
- In 2011, Trump embraced and promoted the “birther” movement that smeared Barack Obama as Kenyan rather than American.
- In 2015, Trump launched his campaign by saying Mexican immigrants are rapists and criminals.
Apologists claim that these vitriolic statements are mere politics, and Trump does not really believe them. (Newspapers said the same thing about Adolf Hitler in 1922.) Unfortunately, evidence suggests that Trump has been a racist his entire life. As Nicholas Kristof wrote this summer:
Here we have a man who for more than four decades has been repeatedly associated with racial discrimination or bigoted comments about minorities, some of them made on television for all to see. While any one episode may be ambiguous, what emerges over more than four decades is a narrative arc, a consistent pattern — and I don’t see what else to call it but racism.
So, if both Republicans and independents and the facts themselves indicate that Trump has been running a white racist campaign, what does that mean about his supporters?
Trump’s White Racist Campaign Has Attracted and Mobilized Violently Racist Whites.
Well, it turns out that if you run a campaign on white racism, you attract and mobilize white racists. Hillary Clinton put the number of deplorable people among Trump’s supporters at about half, but she was being polite. The staid Economist conducts a regular poll that tests voters for racial resentment, and reports in the current issue:
At first glance, Mrs Clinton’s 50% estimate looks impressively accurate: 58% of respondents who said they backed Mr Trump resided in the poll’s highest quartile for combined racial-resentment scores. And at a lower threshold of offensiveness—merely distasteful rather than outright deplorable, say—91% of Mr Trump’s voters scored above the national average.
Less staid reporters were more blunt. Prolific author Jonathan Chait wrote that “Yes, Most Donald Trump Supporters Are Deplorable and Irredeemable” in a column that cited numerous facts and quoted many Republican luminaries. In The Atlantic, MacArthur award-winner Ta-Nehisi Coates provided further context and evidence that Clinton’s basic statement was correct.
The racism at the core of Trump’s campaign is not merely ugly, it is virulent. History shows us that violent rhetoric tends to provide cover that encourages violence at the ground level. Trump’s campaign is already increasing overt acts of racism throughout the country. Trump is re-energizing a white nationalist movement that had previously been on the brink of oblivion. The New York Times captured unfiltered video of Trump rallies that should chill the spines of any patriotic Americans:
So, Yes, American Patriots Should Deplore Trump’s Racists
Despite all this, Trump is outraged that Clinton has not appeased his racist supporters. How dare Hillary Clinton make the factually accurate statement that about half of Trump’s supporters are open bigots, and that this is deplorable?
The hypocrisy of this attack from the campaign of Donald Trump is staggering. Trump is running one of the most divisive campaigns in modern memory. As an example, Trump has dismissed as “losers” 170 million Americans facing economic hardship. As a Republican loyalist wrote:
I’ve been involved in politics for almost as long as I can remember.… Throughout the years, I had the opportunity to meet and campaign for a number of candidates…. I’m the first to admit that they all had flaws, and some were less conservative than I, but I never met or worked for one who wasn’t a patriot. Yes, we disagreed, but never did I feel that these disagreements were personal or that they conveyed a lack of respect for our fellow Americans. Far from it. That changed with Donald Trump.
The idea that Clinton’s comments somehow make her unfit to be President is absurd in this context. We have one candidate, Trump, who is helping to mobilize a mass movement of white nationalists that seeks to divide up the country by race, and another, Clinton, who points out that those people are deplorable. White nationalism is not an American value; it is the kind of raw tribalism that motivated genocidal behaviors for all of history, and it is a part of what America was constructed to escape. Appeasing such people is not American, and condemning them is patriotic. Those voices should not shape our national policy. America will be better and more true to its core values if white nationalism returns to the rocks from under which it crawled.
On the contrary, this entire discussion resolves one of the biggest concern that I and others had about Hillary Clinton. The major lever of power for a United States President is their use of the “bully pulpit” to shape America. Teddy Roosevelt pioneered this term, and he was a terrific scold, pushing America to be better. The worry was that Clinton, lacking the natural communication skills of Obama or of her husband, might fail to use the pulpit properly. In this case, she proved her ability to stand up to bullies and provide leadership.
Reaching Out To The Other Half of Trump’s Supporters
What about the other half of Trump’s supporters? As Hillary Clinton said, the other half of Trump’s supporters “feel that the government has let them down” and are “desperate for change.” In her words, “those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.” Is there a risk that by labeling the racists, that she is offending and thus losing her ability to speak for those voters?
Perhaps. Time and politics will tell. My bet is that by calling out the racists, Clinton has made a smart political bet, and that Trump is a fool to double down on it. The media has shown repeatedly that it will respond to Trump’s bullying and cover topics in the way that he and his surrogates want. Trump has now invited the media to look more deeply into the question of whether America’s bigots have all lined up, and swelled their ranks, around his ugly campaign.
If the media and the voters take Trump’s invitation, Hillary Clinton will win. Every example of Trump’s racism cited above is easily findable on the Internet. As the media covers the “basket of deplorables” meme, more and more of these decent Americans who’ve tentatively backed Trump will realize that they’ve gone to the wrong party. And they will leave.
And those who remain in the Trump camp, who claim that they are not racists but still believe in the leadership of this economically ignorant carnival barker who has repeatedly failed in business and marriage? At that point, we have to question whether their ignorance about Trump’s actual racism is deliberate. This video summarized that group of voters perfectly: