Trump a Racist? Who knew?!

Public service message:

• His tweets are racist. This should surprise no one because he is a racist.
• He will get away with it. No one else would.
• It is patriotic to call out racism. Racism does not make America great.
• Hating racism is not the same as hating the U.S.A.

Racist is an overloaded word and it represents something far too complex for this sound-bite and tweet obsessed era. President Trump himself used this word against Jussie Smollett, Spike Lee, Bryant Gumbel, Touré Neblett, Barrack Obama and 14 West African countries. He uses other insults such as dumb, stupid and low IQ for people of color. From his point of view, racists are rarely white and he is the least racist person… and some of his best friends are…

We need a stronger word for someone who helped build his family empire upon racial-redlining, used this money to take out full page ads demanding the death penalty for the Central Park Five, falsely-accused black and Latino boys. We need a stronger word for someone self-entitled to prosper through multiple bankruptcies, bilk employees and business partners, hire illegal immigrants and then rise to the Whitehouse by focusing attention on a different class of so-called illegals which are judged by Arpaio-style racial profiling which catches more Navajo than Northern Europeans. We need a word for someone so opposed to accepting America’s first black American president that he tried to undermine Obama’s presidency by pushing white supremacist conspiracy theories that Obama wasn’t American.

We need a word for someone who based his campaign on scapegoating refugees as terrorists and immigrants as drug dealers and rapists. Someone who treats a protesting black football player as public enemy number one while ignoring more than 3000 black and Latino Americans citizen deaths in Puerto Rico. We need a powerful word for someone who obsesses over the alleged crimes of a black television star or any Islamist attack anywhere in the world but ignores white-nationalist (who he called “very fine people”) violence against immigrants and minorities on American soil and who kowtows to men who have murdered thousands, used chemical weapons on allied soil and organized to have journalists killed with radioactive poison or a bone saw.

One day we will have a word for this type of racism, an insidious infection dredged from the past, spread like a plague through social media and harnessed to elect a person who has zero understanding of what makes America great. Just as Senator Joe McCarthy’s name entered the dictionary as a particularly toxic form of social violence, Donald Trump will have his own legacy in the form of a word named after his particularly bitter flavor of racism. It will be known as: Trumpism.