If you’re tired of Trump supporters claiming they’re not racists when they are fetching upon hearing Donald Trump’s dog whistles, listen up. Here’s the proof that there is a deep relationship between Donald Trump and white supremacists.
Nicholas Confessore reported in the New York Times on the “circular current” that flows between white nationalists and Donald Trump:
Mr. Trump’s Twitter presence is tightly interwoven with hordes of mostly anonymous accounts trafficking in racist and anti-Semitic attacks. When Little Bird, a social media data mining company, analyzed a week of Mr. Trump’s Twitter activity, it found that almost 30 percent of the accounts Mr. Trump retweeted in turn followed one or more of 50 popular self-identified white nationalist accounts. At times, a circular current seems to flow between white nationalists and Mr. Trump on Twitter.
And…
On the internet, Mr. Trump is invoked by anonymous followers brandishing stark expressions of hate and anti-Semitism, surprisingly amplified this month when Mr. Trump tweeted a graphic depicting Hillary Clinton’s face with piles of cash and a six-pointed star that many viewed as a Star of David.
It’s a fact that Donald Trump confirms his racism almost daily. Just yesterday he turned down an invitation to speak at the NAACP. “Mitt Romney, George W. Bush, and Ronald Reagan all addressed the NAACP convention. Bush addressed the NAACP both as a candidate in 2000 and as president in 2006.”
Yesterday on Fox News, Trump likened his alleged struggles (not born out by reality, by the way) with the struggles of Black Lives Matter. Trump thinks his life as a privileged trust fund baby is the same as a person whose kid was shot and killed by police for no reason. Trump thinks the system is rigged against him:
Trump to O'Reilly on what he'd tell blacks citing racial bias: "even against me, the system is rigged. I can relate it very much to myself"
In that one statement, Trump did the most hurtful thing white people can do in response to Black Lives Matter. He dismissed experiences he knows nothing about, appropriated the experiences and funneled them through his own self pity and made it all about him. He completely shut down any willingness to hear about a life that doesn’t resemble his own. Donald Trump knows nothing about the terror facing the black community. And worse yet, he is not only unwilling to listen to but he sees himself when they speak.
Noting these things doesn’t make reporters racists, contrary to the allegations of the right. These are facts and facts matter.
Donald Trump is playing with fire and trying to rip this country apart at the seams while emboldening hate. Donald Trump might not be a racist, but he sure looks, sounds and acts like one. He is also doing something even worse than being a racist – he is using racism as a tool of division in order to get support. Trump has nothing else to offer.
Supporting Donald Trump means supporting racism, sexism and bigotry.
Republicans are on the wrong side of history and they are putting this country at risk simply because they haven’t found a better disguise for their harmful policies and platform than to distract voters with their racial resentments and fears.
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Sarah has been credentialed to cover President Barack Obama, then VP Joe Biden, 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and exclusively interviewed Speaker Nancy Pelosi multiple times and exclusively covered her first home appearance after the first impeachment of then President Donald Trump.
Sarah is two-time Telly award winning video producer and a member of the Society of Professional Journalists.
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