On Donald Trump’s
Racism
Donald Trump, the Republican politician convicted of
multiple felonies by a court in his native New York City, is a racist. About
that there simply is no doubt. He, of course, denies that he is a racist. His
most rabid supporters deny that he is a racist. Yet his racism is there for all
to see, and it has been for a very long time. Many if not most of his supporters
are themselves racist, and they support Trump mostly because they know that he
is a racist too.
The evidence of Trump’s racism begins at least by the early
1970s. At time, Trump was managing his father’s real estate investments in New
York City. The US Department of Justice sued, accusing Trump and his
organization of systematically refusing to rent apartments to Black people. Trump
and his father eventually signed a consent decree saying they wouldn’t
discriminate against anyone, but words in a context like that are cheap. Donald
Trump certainly didn’t stop being a racist just because he said he wouldn’t
discriminate.
Next came the case of the so-called Central Park Five. In 1989,
the New York City police arrested five young men aged fourteen to sixteen, four
of whom were Black and one of whom was Hispanic. These youth were accused of
raping and beating a white woman in Central Park. Trump immediately went on the
attack. He bought a full page ad in the New York Times calling for reinstating
the death penalty, which New York had abolished, presumably so it could be
imposed on these five young men. The Central Park Five were eventually
exonerated, though only after they had spent years in prison for a crime they
didn’t commit. Trump refused to apologize. Instead, he asserted that these men
deserved the time they spent in prison because he said they were guilty of
something else, though he never said what that was supposed to be.[1]
Next came the presidential campaign of Barack Obama. Even
before Obama was a serious candidate for the presidency, Trump conducted a
vicious campaign against him. He said Obama was not a native born American but
had been born in Kenya. He insisted that Obama show his birth certificate. When
Obama did present that certificate, which showed that he had been born in
Hawaii not long after Hawaii became a state, Trump kept insisting that Obama
show his real birth certificate, never mind that Obama already had. There is no
doubt that Obama’s race was what motivated Trump to make these baseless claims
against him.
There’s more. Trump pardoned the overtly racist Arizona sheriff
Joe Arpaio, who had been harassing Arizona’s citizens of Hispanic origin,
making them prove that they were legal residents of the United States when no
one else had to prove the same thing. When a gang of white supremacists marched
in Charlottesville, Virginia, one of them struck a counter protestor with a car
and killed her. All Trump, who was president at the time, would say to the
racist thugs who carried out the racist demonstration was that they should “stand
back and stand by.” He said there were “fine people” on both sides of that
demonstration. For Trump, violent white supremacists can be “fine people.”
Trump is a racist, and many if not most of his supporters
support him because they know that he shares their own racism. Many of them
self-identify as evangelical Christians. In the book cited above, noted New
Testament scholar Hendricks makes a strong argument that what ignited America’s
current Christian nationalist movement, a movement Trump both explicitly and
implicitly supports, wasn’t abortion, it was racism. Hendricks ends Chapter 2
of his book this way:
Right-wing evangelicals’ complicity in Trump’s debasement of
American society shamefully paints the Christian Gospel of light, love, and
egalitarian justice as an ugly, loveless, exclusionary ideology of domination.
Jesus said that each of us will be known by the fruit of our acts and attitudes.
The rot of the unholy fruit of Trump’s evangelical supporters and apologists
has spread across the length and breath of our nation, portraying evil as good
and good as evil. That is their vile and blasphemous harvest. In the name of
God.[2]
Trump and his supporters portray white supremacy as good and
equal racial justice as evil. They portray governmental programs designed to
help people in need as evil and the government just letting them suffer as
good. There simply is no doubt that Donald Trump is a retrogressive racist.
Slightly over forty percent of Americans have a favorable
impression of Donald Trump.[3]
How is that possible? I can think of only one convincing explanation of that
seemingly inexplicable fact. American’s support of Trump comes from an anger
that arises from fear. America is changing. White Americans will probably no
longer be a majority in this country by 2045. White men have been the dominant
demographic in this country from its very beginning; but that is changing, and
it has been changing for several decades now. Large numbers of white American
men fear that they are losing the dominant position they had held in our
country for centuries.
Fear gives rise to anger. Anger makes people want someone
other than themselves to blame for the fear they feel deep inside. Donald Trump,
both explicitly and implicitly through “dog whistles,” give these men someone
to blame. He says immigrants cause their problems. He refuses to condemn people
who say Black Americans cause their problems. He refuses to condemn people who
say women cause their problems. Trump and his ilk make words like inclusion and
nondiscrimination into bad words when in truth they point to good and necessary
attitudes and actions. They make “woke” an expletive when in fact it points to
an awareness of our country’s failings in the past and a desire to make amends
for those failings, both of which are very good things. All of these Trumpian
actions are grounded in racism and play to the anger and fear of a large number
of Americans, most of them white men.
People say the arc of the universe bends slowly, but it
bends toward justice. Maybe it does, but it does not do so in a straight line. Donald
Trump and his MAGA followers represent a retrograde period in our country’s
march toward equal justice for all. They seek to take our country backward not
forward. They seek to reinstate the cultural and political dominance of white,
mostly Christian men. That effort will fail. It has to fail because it moves
against the arc of the universe bending toward justice. It has to fail because
it moves against God’s will for that justice.
How long it will take it to fail depends on the outcome of
the 2024 presidential and congressional elections. If Trump and his acolytes take
the White House and gain majorities in both houses of Congress, they will set
this country back decades at least. It will take a long time for us to recover,
longer I fear than I will still be present on this mortal coil. Democrats and
sensible Republicans, assuming there are any sensible Republicans left in
Congress after this year’s election, can at least make it harder for the
Trumpists to inflict the damage on this country that they are hellbent on
inflicting on it. It will take a lot of them to stop the Trumpists altogether.
We don’t yet know what November 5, 2024, will bring us. I
just pray that it is not a sweeping Trumpist victory. I don’t want this country
slipping backwards into more racism, more sexism, more xenophobia, and more
homophobia, but that is what we’ll get if the Trumpists ever gain full control
of our federal government. Trump is a racist. Most of his followers are
racists. May we make sure that they never get the chance to damage this country
the way they promise they will if they can.
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