What did Donald Trump do today?
Open, gutter racism.
Trump, who is 79 years old and the son of a man who attended Ku Klux Klan rallies in the 1920s, has never been particularly shy about his racial prejudices. His public debut came in 1973 as the co-defendant in a housing discrimination case after he was caught screening out qualified Black renters. He publicly campaigned for the death penalty for five Black and Hispanic men falsely accused of rape—and continued to do so even after their innocence was proven. He stoked the "birther" allegations that falsely claimed President Barack Obama was ineligible to be president—and repeated the slur against the next Black person he ran against, Vice-President Kamala Harris, for good measure. He graduated from quietly accepting the support of Klansmen and white nationalists like David Duke to openly courting explicitly racist gangs. He's openly encouraged his administration to post racist and inflammatory memes that directly quote Nazis and white supremacists. He's said that Black people come from "shithole countries," slurred a judge in two lawsuits against him as incompetent for being "a Mexican," spread obvious lies about personally witnessing Arab-Americans celebrating in the streets after 9/11 (among other 9/11 lies he's told), and said Puerto Ricans desperate for lifesaving aid after Hurricane Maria "lazy" and that they "wanted everything done for them." More recently, he's cheered on a terror campaign against citizens, legal immigrants, and undocumented immigrants alike that has had a federal paramilitary force arresting dark-skinned people on sight on the grounds that their skin color alone is sufficient grounds to suspect them of being in the United States illegally.
Today, in a press appearance that was erratic and incoherent even by Trump's standards, Trump went back to the well of racism one more time. He said that Somalis, including the Somali-Americans he just targeted for deportation in spite of their legal status, were "backwards" and that piracy and theft were "the only thing they're good at" and that he "didn't want them in our country" because they were "very low IQ people."
Not only is this racism by any definition of the word, it's an open and venomous form of it that some Americans might have hoped had gone out with their great-grandparents. It didn't—but for a time, it was at least generally understood that a politician who got caught saying openly racist things, even in private conversations, was unfit for office in a country that had rejected the racial theories of slave owners.
But Trump has always been a sucker for the idea that there is something genetically perfect about himself, and by extension people he sees as being like him, and he's never much minded if that puts him in the company of other people with strong views about how immigrants and Jews and people with dark skin are "poisoning the blood" of the nation—which is a phrase that both Trump and Adolf Hitler have used on many occasions.
Trump's racism predates concerns that he is slipping further into dementia, although it's not uncommon for people to lose the ability to put a polite face on racist beliefs as they suffer cognitive decline. But on that subject, not everything Trump said to the media today was cartoonish racism. He also answered a softball question about what he hoped Congress would take up in the new year with a ramble about executive orders on drinking straws.
Why does this matter?
- Racism is evil, stupid, and cowardly, and so is everyone who practices it.