Poll: Most say Trump has fueled racial tension

Even before President Trump’s racist tweets toward four Democratic congresswomen of color, Americans considered race relations in the U.S. to be generally bad — and said that Trump has been making them worse.

On Sunday, Trump tweeted that the congresswomen should go back to the “broken and crime infested” countries they came from, despite the fact that all are American citizens and three were born in the U.S.

Since his election, polling has shown Americans wary of Trump when it comes to race.

In January, a CBS News poll found nearly 6 in 10 Americans saying race relations are generally bad.

It wasn’t always that way. Positive views of the state of race relations in the country peaked with President Barack Obama’s inauguration, after which 66% of Americans said race relations were generally good in an April 2009 CBS News/ New York Times poll. But views started to sour in 2014 following a number of highprofile shootings of black men by police officers and have continued to be more negative than positive in the Trump era.

And Americans think Trump is contributing to the problem. A Pew Research Center poll earlier this year showed 56% of Americans saying Trump has made race relations worse.

Americans gave similarly poor assessments of the president’s impact on specific racial, ethnic and religious minorities. Nearly 6 in 10 considered Trump’s actions to be bad for Hispanics and Muslims, and about half said they were bad for African Americans, according to a February 2018 poll from the Associated PressNORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

That poll also found that 57% of Americans considered Trump to be racist.