Richard Nixon was known to be dark character but, nonetheless, the tapes shocked people when they heard his blatant racism expressed in such crude terms. I don’t think there’s anyone who would say the same about Trump:
In unguarded moments with senior aides, President Trump has maintained that Black Americans have mainly themselves to blame in their struggle for equality, hindered more by lack of initiative than societal impediments, according to current and former U.S. officials.
After phone calls with Jewish lawmakers, Trump has muttered that Jews “are only in it for themselves” and “stick together” in an ethnic allegiance that exceeds other loyalties, officials said.
Trump’s private musings about Hispanics match the vitriol he has displayed in public, and his antipathy to Africa is so ingrained that when first lady Melania Trump planned a 2018 trip to that continent he railed that he “could never understand why she would want to go there.”
When challenged on these views by subordinates, Trump has invariably responded with indignation. “He would say, ‘No one loves Black people more than me,’ ” a former senior White House official said. The protests rang hollow because if the president were truly guided by such sentiments he “wouldn’t need to say it,” the official said. “You let your actions speak.”
In Trump’s case, there is now a substantial record of his actions as president that have compounded the perceptions of racism created by his words.
Over 3½ years in office, he has presided over a sweeping U.S. government retreat from the front lines of civil rights, endangering decades of progress against voter suppression, housing discrimination and police misconduct.
His immigration policies hark back to quota systems of the 1920s that were influenced by the junk science of eugenics, and have involved enforcement practices — including the separation of small children from their families — that seemed designed to maximize trauma on Hispanic migrants.
With the election looming, the signaling behind even second-tier policy initiatives has been unambiguous.
After rolling back regulations designed to encourage affordable housing for minorities, Trump declared himself the champion of the “Suburban Lifestyle Dream.” He ordered aides to revamp racial sensitivity training at federal agencies so that it no longer refers to “White privilege.” In a speech at the National Archives on Thursday, Trump vowed to overhaul what children are taught in the nation’s schools — something only states have the power to do — while falsely claiming that students are being “fed lies about America being a wicked nation plagued by racism.”AD
The America envisioned by these policies and pronouncements is one dedicated to preserving a racial hierarchy that can be seen in Trump’s own Cabinet and White House, both overwhelmingly white and among the least diverse in recent U.S. history.
Scholars describe Trump’s record on race in historically harsh terms. Carol Anderson, a professor of African American Studies at Emory University, compared Trump to Andrew Johnson, who succeeded Abraham Lincoln as president and helped Southern Whites reestablish much of the racial hegemony they had seemingly lost in the Civil War.
“Johnson made it clear that he was really the president of a few people, not the American people,” Anderson said. “And Trump has done the same.”
But as Hayes points out in the tweet above, they all attribute it to his “old fashioned” worldview — and that he’s just really dumb:
Most attributed Trump’s views on race and conduct to a combination of the prevailing attitudes of his privileged upbringing in the 1950s in what was then a predominantly White borough of New York, as well as a cynical awareness that coded racial terms and gestures can animate substantial portions of his political base.
The perspectives of those closest to the president are shaped by their own biases and self-interests. They have reason to resist the idea that they served a racist president. And they are, with few exceptions, themselves White males. […]
Several current and former administration officials, somewhat paradoxically, cited Trump’s nonracial biases and perceived limitations as exculpatory.
Several officials said that Trump is not a disciplined enough thinker to grasp the full dimensions of the white nationalist agenda, let alone embrace it. Others pointed out that they have observed him making far more offensive comments about women, insisting that his scorn is all-encompassing and therefore shouldn’t be construed as racist.
“This is a guy who abuses people in his cabinet, abuses four-star generals, abuses people who gave their life for this country, abuses civil servants,” the first former senior White House official said. “It’s not like he doesn’t abuse people that are White as well.”
As president, he has cast his record on race in grandiose terms. “I’ve done more for Black Americans than anybody with the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln,” Trump said July 22, a refrain he has repeated at least five times in recent months.
None of the administration officials interviewed for this story agreed with Trump’s self-appraisals. But several sought to rationalize his behavior.
Some argued that Trump only exploits societal divisions when he believes it is to his political advantage. They pointed to his denunciations of kneeling NFL players and paeans to the Confederate flag, claiming these symbols matter little to him beyond their ability to rouse supporters.
“I don’t think Donald Trump is in any way a white supremacist, a neo-Nazi or anything of the sort,” a third former senior administration official said. “But I think he has a general awareness that one component of his base includes factions that trend in that direction.”
Yeah, he’s very dumb but he’s a racist and he knows that his base is made up of racists who loves it when he “tells it like it is.”
In recent months, Trump has condemned Black Lives Matter as a “symbol of hate” while defending armed White militants who entered the Michigan Capitol, right-wing activists who waved weapons from pickup trucks in Portland and a White teen who shot and killed two protesters in Wisconsin.
Trump has vowed to safeguard the legacies of Confederate generals while skipping the funeral of the late congressman John Lewis (D-Ga.), a civil rights icon, and retweeted — then deleted — video of a supporter shouting “White power” while questioning the electoral eligibility of Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.), the nation’s first Black and Asian American candidate for vice president from a major party. In so doing, Trump reanimated a version of the false “birther” claim he had used to suggest that Obama may not have been born in the United States.
These add to an already voluminous record of incendiary statements, including his tweet that minority congresswomen should “go back” to their “crime infested” countries despite being U.S.-born or U.S. citizens, and his claim that there were “very fine people on both sides” after torch-carrying white nationalists staged a violent protest in Charlottesville.
In a measure of Trump’s standing with such organizations, the Stormfront website — the oldest and largest neo-Nazi platform on the Internet — recently issued a call to its followers to mobilize.
“If Trump doesn’t win this election, the police will be abolished and Blacks will come to your house and kill you and your family,” the site warned. “This isn’t about politics anymore, it is about basic survival.”
As the election approaches, Trump has also employed apocalyptic language. He recently claimed that if Democratic nominee Joe Biden is elected, police departments will be dismantled, the American way of life will be “abolished” and “no one will be SAFE.”
Given the country’s anguished history, it is hard to isolate Trump’s impact on the racial climate in the United States. But his first term has coincided with the most intense period of racial upheaval in a generation. And the country is now in the final stretch of a presidential campaign that is more explicitly focused on race — including whether the sitting president is a racist — than any election in modern American history.
And there was Charlottesville which remains, along with Helsinki, Trump’s most iconic moment in office. (I suppose we have to add the drinking bleach comment during the deadly pandemic to that list as well.)
Speaking from his golf resort in Bedminster, N.J., Trump at first stuck to a calibrated script: “We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence.” Then, improvising, he added: “on many sides, on many sides.”
In six words, Trump had drawn a moral equivalency between the racist ideology of those responsible for the Klan-like spectacle and the competing beliefs that compelled Heyer and others to confront hate.
Trump’s comments set off what some in the White House came to regard as a behind-the-scenes struggle for the moral character of his presidency.
John F. Kelly, a retired Marine Corps general who was just weeks into his job as White House chief of staff, confronted Trump in the corridors of the Bedminster club. “You have to fix this,” Kelly said, according to officials familiar with the exchange. “You were supporting white supremacists. You have to go back out and correct this.”
Gary Cohn, the White House economic adviser at the time, threatened to resign and argued that there were no “good people” among the ranks of those wearing swastikas and chanting “Jews will not replace us.” In a heated exchange, Cohn criticized Trump for his “many sides” comment, and was flummoxed when Trump denied that was what he had said.
“Not only did you say it, you continued to double down on it,” Cohn shot back, according to officials familiar with the exchange. “And if you want, I’ll get the transcripts.”
Trump relented that Monday and delivered the ringing condemnation of racism that Kelly, Cohn and others had urged. “Racism is evil,” he said, “and those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other hate groups”
Aides were briefly elated. But Trump grew agitated by news coverage depicting his speech as an attempt to correct his initial blunder.
The next day, during an event at Trump Tower that was supposed to highlight infrastructure initiatives, Trump launched into a fiery monologue.
“You had a group on one side that was bad,” he said. “You had a group on the other side that was also very violent. Nobody wants to say that. I’ll say it right now.” By the end, the president appeared to be sanctioning racial divisions far beyond Charlottesville, saying “there are two sides to the country.”
For all their consternation, none of Trump’s top aides resigned over Charlottesville. […]
In some ways, Charlottesville represented a high-water mark for white nationalism in Trump’s presidency. Civil rights groups were able to use footage of the mayhem in Virginia to identify members of hate groups and expose them to their employers, universities and families.
“Charlottesville backfired,” Levin said. Many of those who took part, especially the alt-right leadership, “were doxed, sued and beaten back,” he said, using a term for using documents available from public records to expose individuals.
“When the door to the big political tent closed on these overtly white nationalist groups, many collapsed, leaving a decentralized constituency of loose radicals now reorganizing under new banners,” Levin said.
Some white nationalist leaders have begun to express disenchantment with Trump because he has failed to deliver on campaign promises they hoped would bring immigration to a standstill or perhaps even ignite a race war.
“A lot of our people were expecting him to actually secure the borders, build the wall and make Mexico pay for it,” Black said.
“Some in my circles want to see him defeated,” Black said, because they believe a Biden presidency would call less attention to the white nationalist movement than Trump has, while fostering discontent among White people.
But Black sees those views as dangerously shortsighted, failing to appreciate the extraordinary advantages of having a president who so regularly aligns himself with aspects of the movement’s agenda.
“Symbolically, he’s still very important,” Black said of Trump. “I don’t think he considers himself a white supremacist or a white nationalist. But I think he may be a racial realist. He knows there are racial differences.”
“Racial differences….” Yes, he certainly does believe that. Indeed, he believes his own “good German genes” are very superior to everyone else’s (although he did compliment a crowd of white Trump voters in Minnesota the other day.)
I urge you to read the whole article which has a bunch of other interesting information, including about other members of the White House staff. Trump’s racial views are antediluvian and they are straight up racist. And he’s the leader of a coalition that is fine with that at best and enthusiastic supporters of it at worst.