Majority In New Poll Believe Trump Is A Racist
A new poll has a majority of respondents saying the President is a racist. He won't care.
In the wake of his comments about four minority Congresswomen and Democratic Congressman Elijah Cummings, President Trump continues to insist that he isn’t a racist but a new poll shows Americans believe otherwise:
About half of registered voters believe President Trump is racist, according to a new national poll released Tuesday, which showed voters are sharply divided along partisan lines on the question.
The survey was conducted by Quinnipiac University from July 25 to 28, several days after Mr. Trump said that a group of four congresswomen of color should “go back” to the countries they came from, even though all four are American citizens and three were born in the United States. The survey period also included the day that the president launched a new attack on Representative Elijah E. Cummings, a leading black congressman, calling him “a brutal bully” whose Baltimore-area district he characterized as a “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess.”
The poll results come as Democrats seeking the party’s nomination for president prepare for a second round of debates, beginning Tuesday night in Detroit. Nearly all of the 2020 candidates have roundly condemned Mr. Trump’s remarks as racist and divisive.
The Quinnipiac poll found that 51 percent of voters think Mr. Trump is racist while 45 percent do not. When separated by party, 86 percent of Democratic voters classified Mr. Trump as racist while 91 percent of Republicans said he was not.
About 88 percent of those who said Mr. Trump was racist disapprove of the job he is doing as president, while 94 percent of those who said he was not racist approve of his performance.
It was one of several surveys in recent days that have offered a window into how Americans are processing Mr. Trump’s comments and assessing his core beliefs. National polls conducted by USA Today/Ipsos, The Economist/YouGov and Fox News this month have shown that between half and two-thirds of Americans believe that telling someone to “go back” is a racist statement and that Mr. Trump’s tweets “cross the line.”
On Monday, Mr. Trump again attacked a prominent black person —this time the Rev. Al Sharpton, a civil rights leader. Mr. Trump denounced Mr. Sharpton on Twitter as “a con man” who “Hates Whites & Cops” and again assailed Mr. Cummings.
He also linked the clash with Mr. Cummings to his demand that the four Democratic congresswomen of color — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ayanna S. Pressley of Massachusetts — leave the country.
Days after Mr. Trump’s first tweets about the congresswomen, the House passed a resolution, largely along party lines, condemning his remarks.
Mr. Trump has denied that his words were racist and called the House resolution a “con game.”
“Those Tweets were NOT Racist,” Mr. Trump wrote on the day the House voted to condemn them. “I don’t have a Racist bone in my body!
Looking deeper into the poll, the numbers do not look good for Trump at all:
- Overall, voters as a whole say that Trump is racist, with 51% saying that he is racist and 45% saying he isn’t;
- Among self-identified Republicans and Democrats, the results are predictable, with 93% of Republicans saying the President is not racist while 86% of Democrats say that he is;
- Among self-identified independents, 56% say that the President is racist while 38% say he is not;
- Among whites overall, 50% say the President is not racist while 44% say he is;
- Among white men 58% say the President is not racist while 38% say he is;
- Among white women, 53% say the President is racist, while 44% say that he isn’t;
- Among African-Americans, 80% say the President is racist, while 11% say he isn’t;
- Among Latinos, 55% say that they believe the President is racist while 44% say they don’t believe that he is
The conclusion that the President is a racist is not a hard one to make, of course, as long as one is willing to look at the evidence. This, after all, is the same man who engaged in housing discrimination in the 1970s. The same person who in the 1990s took out a full-page ad in The New York Times calling for the death penalty for the so-called Central Park Five, a group of five African-American teens who were falsely convicted of raping a jogger in Central Park. Even to this day, Trump refuses to apologize for that position and refuses to acknowledge the overwhelming evidence of their innocence. It’s the same candidate who first dipped his toes in the political waters by embracing the racist birther conspiracy. When he became a candidate for the Republican Presidential nomination in 2016, he did so by attacking Mexicans, Muslims, disabled people, a Federal District Court Judge who happened to be Mexican-American and a Gold Star Family who happened to be Muslim. In response to N.F.L. players who were peacefully kneeling to protest racially biased police violence, he responded by calling the largely African-American players “sons of bitches.” And, of course, most recently he has spent the last two week engaged in racist attacks on four minority Congresswomen and on House Oversight Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings. This week, that target list expanded to include CNN anchor Don Lemon, who is African-American and who Trump once against described earlier today as “one of the dumbest men on television,” something he has said about the CNN host in the past.
In part, of course, it’s clear that Trump says these things because he knows the crowds will eat it up and that they’ll not only give him and his racist tropes a pass but that they actually support and agree with them. Given their frequency, though, one can only conclude, though, that this isn’t just an act, it’s something that Trump believes himself. No doubt, there is evidence of this racism elsewhere in the past. There have long been rumors, for example, of incidents during the taping of episodes of The Apprentice during which Trump uttered racial epithets, including the “n-word,” when referring to African-American competitors on the show. So far, the tapes of those incidents have not become public, largely because they are under the control of Mark Burnett, the producer of the show and a close Trump friend who was also behind other reality shows such as Survivor.
We don’t need tapes of Trump using offensive racial epithets to know the truth, though. He reveals it for us practically every day. He is perhaps the most racially biased person to sit in the Oval Office since Woodrow Wilson, who screened the racist film Birth of A Nation in the White House and largely looked the other way as the Ku Klux Klan made a reappearance in the south, resulting in a rise in lynchings and a tightening of Jim Crow laws that it would take another five decades to bring crashing down.
The President of the United States is a racist. The polls show that the American people recognize this fact. What it means when the 2020 election is upon us remains to be seen.
White Men Uniquely Incapable of Recognizing Racism by Other White Men 🙂 😀
Yet Trump said the other day that the WH was absolutely flooded with calls from “African American persons” congratulating him and thanking him for what he said about Baltimore.
I suppose his moronic base believes him.
And for yet another day, water is wet.
And, of course, it doesn’t matter. The people who swear Trump doesn’t have a racist bone in his body will cling to their Hispanic wives and tell comforting stories about Ben Carson, Rocky A$AP, and Diamond and Silk while, in the background Republican PoC like Will Hurd and others flee the party.
Off topic: Trump has just dumped Ratcliffe.
https://www.npr.org/2019/08/02/747670127/trump-abruptly-drops-john-ratcliffe-as-dni-nominee-amid-political-headwinds?
@Jen: Allegedly out of concern for Ratcliffe. I wonder what the real reason was.
@Jen:
@CSK:
They can’t possible be vetting these nominees. None of them are competent.
It’s like when he got pissed at Sessions for recusing. Well…did you ask him if he was going to recuse???
@CSK:
“All thinking Southerners know that the solutions of the South’s economic problems will depend to a large degree on the educational and economic gains by our Negro population. Our progress as a section must be brought about by both races working in harmony together and living in harmony side by side as good neighbors. We believe in racial integrity and are opposed to racial integration. The former is for the best interest of each race, the latter is good for neither. I challenge any one to show where in the history of civilization one race has done more to help another than the white people of the South have done for the Negroes in their midst.” — Strom Thurmond, 1948
In addition, this trash is taunting Elijah Cummings over an attempted robbery of his home…what a total and complete dirt bag we have in the White House…it can’t be sanitized soon enough…
@CSK: For normal people, it would be the glaring evidence of incompetence, but that’s a feature not a bug with this administration.
Maybe McConnell finally told him this wasn’t going to fly? BTW, Trump is set to block Sue Gordon, who *legally* would have been acting DNI.
Shorter post; old white racist men don’t think old white racist man is racist.
@Daryl and his brother Darryl:
Even shorter:
White racist men don’t think white racist man is racist.
The real number is more like 80%. That’s the 50% who know he’s a racist and think that’s a bad thing, plus 30% who know he’s a racist and are glad of it, but as usual with Republicans, dare not ever speak the truth about their real beliefs.
There are just two kinds of people who publicly deny Trump is racist: racists who lack the balls to admit the truth, and people who’ve been in comas the last three years.
@Teve:
Another interesting number:
Democrats falling all over themselves to open the borders need to realize that Latinos are not African-Americans. You get Latino votes with health care and jobs, not open borders. That talk is for Park Slope and Ann Arbor.
@michael reynolds:
Democrat Pols don’t believe that the plight of Hispanic immigrants is not the most important issue to Hispanic citizens. Yes they care, but it is down the list and doesn’t motivate them to vote.
@mattbernius: And don’t forget, General Franco is still dead, too. 😀
@CSK: My guess would be that somebody read the tea leaves that said the GOP Senate Caucus wasn’t going to be able to circle the wagons for him.
The human capacity for self-delusion, especially through rationalization, is infinite. I’ve read arguments to the effect that Hitler wasn’t antisemitic, and the Holocaust was undertaken against his will, only because France and Britain were so unreasonable.
@Kathy:
That’s pretty remarkable given that he openly identified as anti-Semitic. One of his speeches is called “Why We are Anti-Semites.”
Wish I could take credit for this:
My mother to my sister: I can’t believe you’re going to lose friends because politics!
My sister to my mother: Mom. I’m not losing friends over politics. I’m losing friends over morality, ethics, principles, and, most of all, self-respect.
I have told my kids there are only two possible reasons why black Americans as a group are not as successful* as white Americans as a group. Either its a result of how society works or a result of the capability of black Americans personally. Those are really the only choices. I think a huge percentage of white Americans cannot accept that it’s society and believe they are just trying to explain to black Americans how to “fix” themselves.
*I understand “success” has different definitions.
@Kathy:
well maybe the Nazis weren’t anti-semitic, but those Jews kept calling them anti-semitic, so they had no choice but to elect an anti-semite. I’ve heard similar “logic” before. 😛
People are throwing the word “racist” around so much now it has become meaningless. If a person is male, white, and over forty they are automatically a “racist”.
I was around in the 50’s and 60’s. I know what racism is. I saw and heard it daily. And not every white person back then was racist. People would be surprised how many university educated types were racist, while I knew common plumbers and brick masons who were much more open minded and accepting. I worked with and for black persons. I had black neighbors, friends, and classmates. Not every place was Montgomery, Alabama. Not every politician was George Wallace.
There was mainly one political party down here: the Democrats. The Republican party was virtually non – existent in many areas.
I remember a pastor saying that it was harder to integrate the varying income groups than it was the different races.
@Tyrell:
Oh bullshit, Tyrell. Utter, absolute bullshit.
Yes, the term has been overused. No, it is not meaningless. The only people who think it’s meaningless are guess who? Black people? No. Who believes it? ONLY WHITE PEOPLE.
Exactly the same with sexism/misogyny. Who thinks it’s a problem? Women. Who doesn’t think it’s a problem? MEN.
You know who thinks anti-semitism isn’t a problem? NAZIS.
In fact the pattern holds true for economic disparities, too. Who thinks it’s OK for people to work 40 hours a week and still not be able to pay rent? Guess what? It’s not the people working those jobs. It’s the people paying the crap wages. Right? Right.
The only people who think no ‘crime’ has been committed are the people committing the crime. So what you are regurgitating so thoughtlessly is nothing but callous indifference and contempt toward anyone outside of your own tribe. IOW, Republicanism. IOW, racism.