If the shoe fits
by digby
I’m sorry these people won’t admit that what Trump is doing is racist, divisive and ugly. I’m sorry they feel the need to cheer him on when he does it. If they aren’t racist themselves, I’m sorry they have no self-awareness and understand that he is one. But it is on them to do a little soul searching and ask themselves if they really believe that Trump’s endless insults toward black, brown and female people are just because all those people are uniquely bad or if maybe he’s got another agenda.
Donald Trump’s supporters would like to be clear: They are tired of being called racists.
Leave it to the president’s eldest son to set the tone. Last night at the 17,500-person-capacity U.S. Bank Arena downtown here, Donald Trump Jr. strode onto the stage two hours before the president was scheduled to speak. The venue was already brimming.
It had been a rough week for his father. On July 28, President Trump was once again deemed racist after lashing out at House Oversight Chairman Elijah Cummings, whose district includes part of Baltimore. Trump referred to the city 40 miles north of Washington as “a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess” in which “no human being would want to live.” Those comments came shortly after the president suggested that four progressive congresswomen of color “go back” to the “totally broken and crime infested places from which they came,” prompting the crowd at his July 17 rally in Greenville, North Carolina, to chant, “Send her back!” Trump—though he later disavowed the chant—did nothing to stop it.
Last night, Trump supporters in Cincinnati were eager to defend their man.
“It’s amazing that when Donald Trump makes a comment about Baltimore, it’s racist, it’s terrible, it’s this. But when the mayor of that town, when the congressman from that town, says the exact same thing, ‘Oh! No problem!’” Trump Jr. boomed, referring to a statement that Cummings made in 1999, calling Baltimore “drug-infested.”
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“It’s sad,” he continued, “that using ‘racism’ has become the easy button of left-wing politics. All right? Because guess what? It still is an issue … But by making a mockery of it by saying every time you can’t win a fight—‘Oh! We’re just gonna push the button! It’s racist’—you hurt those that are actually afflicted by it. People hear it, they roll their eyes, and they walk on. And that’s a disgrace, and that’s what you’ve been given in the identity politics of the left.”
The crowd erupted in jeers and boos. It was a segment of Jr.’s speech that in many ways echoed that of a speaker who’d appeared before him, Brandon Straka, a gay Trump supporter who founded the WalkAway movement to encourage people to leave the Democratic Party. “Insinuations of bigotry and racism,” Straka claimed, were “divisive tactics” used by the “liberal media to control minorities in this country.” “This is a president who serves minorities,” he said, “because he loves minorities.”
As speakers mounted their defenses of the president, it seemed apparent that supporters were cheering them on as a means of affirming not just Trump, but also themselves. Because to accuse a politician of holding virulent racist beliefs is also, if only implicitly, to condemn his or her voters of harboring those same tendencies.
And that’s what the rally-goers I spoke to last night seemed most nonplussed by—not so much that Trump had been roundly condemned in recent days as a racist, or a bigot, but that they, by virtue of association, had been as well. But rather than distancing them from Trump, the accusations have only seemed to strengthen their support of this president. To back down, they suggested, would be to bow down to the scourge of political correctness.
“We’re all tired of being called racists,” a 74-year-old bespectacled white man named Richard Haines told me. “You open your mouth, you’re a racist. My daughter is a liberal, and she’s [using the word] all the time. We don’t talk politics; we can’t—all the time she always accuses me of hate.”
[…]
Before the rally began, I sat down on the floor of the arena with two women—Roseanna, 50, and Amy, 48—who felt similarly. (Neither woman was comfortable providing her last name for this story.) Roseanna, who wore a red T-shirt, white shorts, and a MAGA hat adorned with multiple buttons, including one featuring the likeness of Hillary Clinton behind bars, had driven an hour and a half from Lexington, Kentucky. She defended Trump’s statements about Baltimore. “He didn’t say nothing about the color of somebody’s skin,” Roseanna said, yet it seemed like everyone was “wishing him toward ‘He’s a bigot.’
“I’m sick to death of it. I have 13 grandchildren—13,” she continued. “Four of them are biracial, black and white; another two of them are black and white; and another two of them are Singapore and white. You think I’m a racist? I go and I give them kids kisses like nobody’s business.”
Oy. I guess her grandkids are “the good ones.” Not like those others …
I know it’s hard to admit you are wrong. It’s not easy for anyone. But they need to take a long look in the mirror and ask themselves if they really believe that Trump isn’t a racist or if they are just making excuses for him. They need to ask themselves if they know what Trump really “means” when he says these things, if they recognize it, if it’s not something they’ve felt themselves about people of color.
If they do that and come out believing that Trump truly is not a racist then we know that they are too.
He is. That’s a fact. And there’s a reason why the Republicans have one black Senator, just lost their only black congressman and is hemorrhaging women and Latinos. It’s not because Trump and his followers are being falsely accused. People know what they are seeing.
As I said, it’s on them, not the rest of us. It really is.
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