Our reader who goes by the pen name “Democracy” left the following comment on recent events. We are familiar with Trump’s racist, enophobic outbursts. He has no problem with immigration from Europe but is apoplectic about immigration from nonwhite countries. The usual word for this is racism. How do other Republicans react to Trump’s overt racism?

Democracy wrote:

Here are the parts of the Heather Cox Richardson article that I found to be astounding:

“Since he announced his presidential candidacy in June 2015 by calling Mexican immigrants rapists and criminals, Trump has trafficked in racist anti-immigrant stories. But since the September 10 presidential debate when he drew ridicule for his outburst regurgitating the lie that legal Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating their white neighbors’ pets, Trump has used increasingly fascist rhetoric. By this weekend, he had fully embraced the idea that the United States is being overrun by Black and Brown criminals and that they, along with their Democratic accomplices, must be rounded up, deported, or executed, with the help of the military. 

Myah Ward of Politico noted on October 12 that Trump’s speeches have escalated to the point that he now promises that he alone can save the country from those people he calls ‘animals,’ ‘stone cold killers,’ the ‘worst people,’ and the “]’enemy from within.’  He falsely claims Vice President Kamala Harris ‘has imported an army of illegal alien gang members and migrant criminals from the dungeons of the third world…from prisons and jails and insane asylums and mental institutions, and she has had them resettled beautifully into your community to prey upon innocent American citizens.’

When Trump said, ‘We have to live with these animals, but we won’t live with them for long, a person in the crowd shouted: ‘Kill them!’ “

Jennifer Rubin put it like this today in The Washington Post:

“Trump has consistently evidenced racism throughout his career. He might have flipped on abortion, but racial animus seems baked into his psyche. Whether being sued for refusing to rent to African Americans, demonizing the innocent Central Park Five, promoting the ‘birther’ conspiracy theory to delegitimize the first Black president, announcing his entry into politics by slandering immigrants as murderers and thugs, refusing to denounce white nationalists at a debate in 2016, referring to non-White-majority countries as ‘s—holes’ or preemptively blaming Jews for his defeat, Trump has never departed from a steady stream of racism, xenophobia and antisemitism. His exaggeration about crime in big cities is a racial dog whistle; his phony ‘immigrant crime wave’ is a racial bullhorn. This is who he is.

…for Trump, racism is crucial to his voter suppression and election denial. The spate of voter suppression laws following Jan. 6 disproportionately affecting non-Whites, the targeting of cities in swing states with large Black electorates in 2020 (Detroit, Philadelphia), the attacks on Black poll workers and the ongoing claims of millions of undocumented immigrants voting all have a common purpose. Trump and his followers aim to put non-Whites outside the American electorate (not ‘real Americans’) and cry foul based on unsubstantiated charges of fraud when the candidate loses. If non-Whites are not ‘real’ Americans or stand in the way of Whites attaining or retaining power, then making it harder to vote (or not counting their votes) — and removing immigrants on the mere suspicion that they are illegal — are justified.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/10/15/trump-racism-detroit-immigration/

Like Rubin notes, it’s NOT just Trump. It’s virtually the entirety of Republican politicians AND Republican voters.

Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin was on CNN yesterday defending Trump’s racist rhetoric.

As Tom Nichols at The Atlantic described it,

“Tapper read Trump’s remarks verbatim, and then asked: ‘Is that something that you support?’ Youngkin replied that Tapper misunderstood Trump, who he said was referring to undocumented immigrants. No, Tapper responded, Trump clearly meant American citizens…Youngkin aw-shucksed his way through stories about Venezuelan criminals and Virginians dying from fentanyl. “’Obviously there is a border crisis,’ Tapper said. ‘Obviously there are too many criminals who should not be in this country, and they should be jailed and deported completely, but that’s not what I’m talking about.’ And then, to his credit, Tapper wouldn’t let go: What about Trump’s threat to use the military against Americans?

Well, Youngkin shrugged, he ‘can’t speak’ for Trump, but he was certain that Tapper was ‘misrepresenting [Trump’s] thoughts.’ “

UVA political analyst Larry Sabato described the Youngkin Critical Race Theory strategy this way:

“The operative word is not critical.And it’s not theory. It’s race. What a shock, huh? Race. That is what matters. And that’s why it’s sticks. There’s a lot of, we can call it white backlash, white resistance, whatever you want to call it. It has to do with race. And so we live in a post-factual era … It doesn’t matter that [CRT] isn’t taught in Virginia schools. It’s this generalized attitude that whites are being put upon and we’ve got to do something about it. We being white voters.”

When Youngkin ran for governor in 2021, his entire campaign was overtly racist. Youngkin claimed – falsely – that Critical Race Theory permeated all of Virginia’s public schools, and that teachers were teaching to kids – white kids – that they were “racists.” Noe of this was true, but Youngkin turned out the low-education white cracker vote.

THIS is where we are now with Trump, and expect it to get even worse between now and November 5.