What would it take for Republicans and conservatives to call Donald Trump out either for being racist or intentionally appealing to racists? Honest question.
Donald Trump’s attempts at minority outreach have not been going so well, if increasing his appeal to minorities was the goal. Polls have shown Trump fourth—behind Gary Johnson and Jill Stein—among black voters.
A Suffolk University poll released on September 1 had Trump at 2 percent nationally among black voters. In four polls in August Trump was at either 1 percent or 2 percent. In some swing states, he doesn’t even get to 0.5 percent with black voters. Among Latinos, Trump only wins 19 percent of the vote.
His overbearing language when he ad-libs, as when he compared inner cities to “war zones,” certainly isn’t helping. The first weekend in September he opted for a safer approach, visiting a black church in Detroit and taking prewritten questions with prepared answers, where his notes suggested he was going to call for working towards a color-blind society: “If we are to Make America Great Again, we must reduce, rather than highlight, issues of race in this country.”
Unfortunately, that is exactly the opposite of what Trump has spent most of his campaign doing. His divisive message, based on stoking racial and demographic fears, has attracted very public support from white supremacists and alt-right-ers. When racists like Jared Taylor record robocalls for Trump, Trump is reluctant to push back. He even seems to be courting the alt-right online, having regularly tweeted and retweeted white nationalist messages, including a tweet that included fabricated murder stats about African-Americans, a tweet that used an image that originated in a racist forum and associated Jews with corruption, and multiple retweets of #WhiteGenocide users.
Trump’s racially charged messages aren’t just online, on a platform that is becoming a big part of presidential communications, but also in person, in his own speech. Most famously, he attacked Judge Gonzalo Curiel for two weeks as somehow being incapable of impartiality due to his Mexican ancestry—at times calling Curiel himself “Mexican.” He also said primary opponent Ted Cruz could not possibly be an evangelical because “not many evangelicals come out of Cuba,” and told the Republican Jewish Coalition they must be good at negotiating.
Why Do We Have a Special Standard for Trump? ...Read the rest of this op-ed from The Federalist HERE.
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