Racist rants on the up in US and it’s all about Trump
PRESIDENT Donald Trump once exulted in the success of Roseanne. “Look at her ratings! Look at her ratings!” he raved at a rally on March 29 after calling to congratulate the star. “And it was about us!”
Fast-forward to this week. Roseanne Barr’s show has been cancelled by ABC after she compared former Obama aide Valerie Jarrett, an Africanamerican, to an ape and falsely accused George Soros, a Jewish Holocaust survivor, of being a Nazi collaborator. And now, if you listen to Trumpland, the fired TV star has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with the former reality TV star in the White House.
I beg to differ.
My immediate reaction, upon seeing the news of Barr’s vile comments, was to post on Twitter: “Trump is normalising racism.” Brett Baier and Dana Perino of Fox News were incredulous.
“I don’t think that President Trump had anything to do with this tweet,” Perino said. Baier denied Trump is “responsible for that tweet”. Brit Hume jumped in on Twitter to proclaim that my comment “is an example of the way too many Trump critics think everything is somehow about him”.
Of course I wasn’t suggesting that the president dictated Barr’s comments or that she wasn’t a racist before Trump was elected. Barr has a long history of pushing crazy conspiracy theories – lately, pro-trump conspiracy theories – and of making racist comments. In 2013, she tweeted that Susan Rice, another African-american and former Obama aide, was “a man with big swinging ape balls”.
Such comments did not, of course, prevent Trump from embracing Barr – indeed, he thanked her for her support in 2016.
He still hasn’t condemned anything she has said – instead, he condemned ABC for not apologising for criticism of him! And his son Donald Trump Jr hasn’t apologised for retweeting Barr’s vicious attack on Soros.
What I was suggesting is that racists such as Barr might feel emboldened to publicly vent their hatred because they see the president doing something similar. This should not be such a radical idea for conservatives.
They used to believe that a president’s conduct mattered, because it set a moral tone for the entire nation.
Here is Bill Bennett writing in 1998: “Civilised society must give public affirmation to principles and standards, categorical norms, notions of right and wrong.
“Even though public figures often fall short of these standards – and we know and expect some will – it is nevertheless crucial that we pay tribute to them.” Bill Clinton’s flagrant misconduct with Monica Lewinsky, Bennett opined, “is moral bankruptcy, and it is damaging our country, its standards and our self-respect”.
How much greater must the damage be from a president who pays off a porn star, endorses an accused child molester for the senate, mocks a disabled reporter, lies an average of 6.5 times a day – and, yes, engages in flagrant racism.
It is striking how little conservatives who scolded Clinton have to say about any of this – and especially about Trump’s regular attacks on minorities.
Remarkably enough, nearly 80% of Republicans claim that Trump isn’t biased against black people. (More than 80% of Democrats and 52% of all Americans say he is.) How can they deny what’s in front of their eyes?
He has a decades-long history of racist comments and acts, and he rose to political prominence by claiming that the first Africanamerican president wasn’t born in America.
As president, Trump has said there were “very fine people” on both sides at the white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville, defended Confederate monuments, pardoned racist Sheriff Joe Arpaio, described African nations as “shithole” countries, and vilified African-american NFL players who were peacefully protesting police brutality by saying they “shouldn’t be in the country”.
Trump calls certain immigrants “animals” – this has become part of his rally shtick – and complains that people in sanctuary cities are “breeding” like, well, animals.
He claims it’s only MS-13 gangsters that he is referring to as “animals,” as if that somehow makes it okay to employ the kind of dehumanising language used by ethnic cleansers from Rwanda to Nazi Germany. But he is seeking to make these outlaws, who make up less than 1% of all gang members in America, the symbols of undocumented immigrants.
Can I prove that Trump’s hatemongering is infecting the culture? No, I can’t, but it stands to reason – and there are signs that it is.
This year, there are at least 10 white supremacists running for office – and that doesn’t count failed West Virginia gubernatorial candidate Don Blankenship, who excoriated “China people”, or failed Georgia gubernatorial candidate Michael Williams, who campaigned in a “deportation bus”. Organisations such as the Antidefamation League, the Centre for the Study of Hate and Extremism and the Southern Poverty Law Centre report that the number of hate crimes and hate groups have increased since Trump became president.
This is evidence to support conservatives’ intuition that the character of a president matters. But apparently that’s something conservatives no longer believe. Or do they simply not care that a president is setting a racist tone for the nation? – The Washington Post