Talking About Politics: Trump, Toxic Tweets, and Racism
What are your thoughts on Trump tweeting that four liberal congresswomen should go home to the countries from which they came when three of them were born in the US?
Frankly, I am not surprised in the slightest. Donald Trump has a long history of saying insensitive, degrading, racist, and xenophobic remarks about people of color and foreigners who are not from mostly-white European countries.
In an August 2016 Time magazine story, readers were reminded of how then-Candidate Trump expressed his views about Mexicans:
Donald Trump kicked off his presidential bid more than a year ago with harsh words for Mexico. “They are not our friend, believe me,” he said, before disparaging Mexican immigrants: “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
He’s also not shy about his feelings about American citizens whose skin tone is darker than his own orange-tanned epidermis.
During the 2016 Presidential campaign, then-Candidate Trump reinserted himself into the narrative of the Central Park Five, so-called for the five black and Latino kids wrongly accused and convicted of raping a white banker in the summer of 1989. Charged and tried based on coerced “confessions,” the five teens served their sentences but were later exonerated when the real culprit, a serial rapist and murdered, confessed to the crime in 2002. DNA evidence confirmed the innocence of the Central Park Five.
Yet, in 2016, NBC News had this to say about Trump’s beliefs about the case:
Wading into a racially-charged case from his past, Donald Trump indicated that the "Central Park Five" were guilty, despite being officially exonerated by DNA evidence decades after a notorious 1989 rape case.
"They admitted they were guilty," Trump said to CNN in a statement.
"The police doing the original investigation say they were guilty. The fact that that case was settled with so much evidence against them is outrageous. And the woman, so badly injured, will never be the same."
The five men were convicted as teenagers after implicating each other under intense questioning over a brutal sexual assault on a jogger that dominated the tabloids. Defenders said they were coerced into confessing and all five were later cleared by DNA evidence and a separate confession in 2002 from another criminal who took credit for the assault.
New York paid them $41 million in a settlement in 2014 over their ordeal.
Trump took out a full-page ad at the time of the crime calling for New York to reinstate the death penalty in response.
As you can see, Trump is a person with deeply-held racist beliefs. The fact that he appointed Ben Carson as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development or hired Omarosa Manigault Newman to work in the White House does not absolve him of being prejudiced toward minorities.
So, the fact is that Trump targeted four women who just happen to be members of Congress and represent the opposition party. They are also from minorities; Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez is Latina, while the other three are black or Arab-American. The only one who was not born in the U.S., Ilhan Omar, immigrated legally from war-torn Somalia and became a U.S. citizen at age 17. (This means she has been a citizen longer than Melania Knauss Trump.)
Plain and simple, when Trump says he wants to make America great again, he really means that he wants to make America great for whites again.
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