You know, a lot of people are saying that Donald Trump is racist. A lot of people are thinking that. It’s something I’m looking at. I’m looking at a lot things. And some other people are saying that it’s just the crooked liberal media trying to discredit him. But is it? Let’s find out! But first: a word from a genuine and very real Trump supporter.

Hello boys and girls. My name Trumpie the Transvestite, etc.

So if you Google “Donald Trump racism,” you get a bunch of articles from liberal media sites like Slate and Huffington Post. These articles all mention the same evidence of Trump’s racism: there’s a series of allegations of racial discrimination in his casinos and hotels; his reluctance to distance himself from white supremacists, his conspiracy theorizing about Obama’s nationality; his tendency to phrase things like a racist grandpa; his encouragement of violence toward minority protesters; and of course his persistent stereotyping of Jews and blacks and Mexicans and Asians and Indians. 

All this sketches a picture of a man who is happy to exploit racism for political gain. But if I’m going to convince people that Trump personally holds racist beliefs, I’m gonna need to present the kind of rigorous evidence and logic demanded by internet rationalist skeptics with furry avatars or beards.  Why do these guys all have beards? I guess they’re trying to communicate a message, like, thanks to the testosterone lozenge in my rectum, my thicket of pubes is at least as robust as my face merkin. Or maybe they’re just trying to disguise the quivering chins of embattled manhood.

My face is nothing like that. It’s smooth and pure. Like a boy’s face. Like a doll’s face.

Actually, l-l-l-let’s not psychoanalyze this too much. I don’t think any of us benefit much form the Internet poking around in our psyches. In fact, don’t even look at me. 

Now where was I? Right, trying to prove that this corn-silk tufted cheese puff of a man is racist. Unfortunately, it’s pretty hard to prove what someone’s private feelings and beliefs are. Honestly I have no idea what’s going on in Trump’s head. For all I know it’s just a kind of frothy bubbling sound, or like a monkey howling, or crazy circus music. I don’t know. I don’t know what Trump does at night before he goes to sleep. Maybe he reads Dostoyevsky and wonders what the hell he’s doing with his life. Or, more probably, he just looks at pictures of his ex-wife. But this is all speculation.

Fortunately, what really matters is not what he personally believes but what he does and says. But in order to understand that, we have to consider it in the context of American politics and race relations.

Now, it’s good to keep in mind that a hundred years ago America was so racist that, of the more than two hundred anti-lynching bills introduced by Congress, not a single one ever passed the Senate. I bring this up not to suggest that things haven’t changed at all, but as a reminder that terribly racist things were once justified using the same kinds of arguments that appear in today’s political discourse.

Lynching apologists didn’t generally say, “I hate the blacks, let’s kill them at random to keep them terrorized and in their place.” They argued that lynching was a necessary measure to keep black criminality in check, and especially to protect white women from black sexual aggression.

Though the latter idea is now pretty disreputable, politicians and pundits still invoke fear of a savage black or brown menace in order to persuade white people to support racist violence. The strategy works because a lot of white Americans have a deep visceral fear of black people and black crime. This is why it’s so easy to rationalize to a white audience racist murders or police violence against blacks. All you have to do is show a picture of a scary lookin’ black dude, and a lot of white people get triggered as shit. That’s why, in the aftermath of the murders of Trayvonn Martin and Michael Brown, there was so much debate over the pictures of the victims displayed by the media. If you show a picture of a black man looking like a thug, a lot of white people immediately conclude that he deserved to die.

Exploiting the race-based fears of white people to win votes is a longstanding American political tactic known as the Southern strategy. When overt racist declarations became more disreputable in the 1960s, politicians found more subtle ways of employing the tactic. In an anonymous 1981 interview, republican strategist Lee Atwater described the strategy in a roundabout way:

“You start out in 1954 by saying, "N*gger, n*gger, n*gger." By 1968, you can't say "n*gger" — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now that you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things, and a byproduct of them is that blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "N*gger, n*gger."

This kind of encrypted racism is sometimes called dog-whistle politics, since it’s abstract enough not to appear overtly racist, but has enough racist overtones to resonate with certain white voters. A classic example is the “law and order” rhetoric of Goldwater, Nixon, and Reagan, aimed at white fears of ghetto riots and crime. Reagan also conjured up images of Chicago welfare queens in Cadillacs and ‘strapping young bucks’ buying steaks with food stamps. The implication was that social programs enriched lazy blacks at the expense of hard-working whites. And, of course, Sarah Palin’s term “real America” which refers to white, rural America, bears the implication that non-whites are not real Americans.

This tactic is typically associated with Republicans, but don’t think democrats are immune. Hillary Clinton once described black, I mean “urban,” youth gangs as “super predators,” while, as Christopher Hitchens often argued, her shitty husband once reveled in the execution of a brain-damaged black man in order to resuscitate his dwindling 1992 campaign and portray himself as tough on blacks, I mean crime.

What I’m suggesting is that there’s an uninterrupted history of ugly racism in American politics that continues to the present day. So, where does Trump fit in to all of this?

Well, Trump’s conspiracy theorizing about Obama’s nationality and use of phrases like “the blacks” and “the Hispanics,” looks like classic dog-whistling to me. Even his campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again” is designed only to resonate with whites, who are the only demographic that can believe that things aren’t better now then they were several decades ago. These little things communicate to racist white people that Trump is one of them, while remaining subtle enough that the charge of racism can be plausibly denied.

But more worrying are Trump’s more overt signals. When he calls undocumented Mexican immigrants “rapists,” he’s basically one step away from repeating the age-old technique of asking white people, “how would you feel if your lily-white daughter were raped by a gang of savage negroes.”

I mean this isn’t even dog-whistle politics anymore. He straight-up called them rapists. Now, you might be thinking: but Mexican is a nationality, not a race, to which I respond that that’s a totally pedantic objection, and that the kinds of fears that Trump’s rhetoric appeals to don’t make these fine distinctions.

In a lot of ways, Trump’s campaign is more racist than any major presidential candidate’s in recent history. When the KKK endorsed Ronald Reagan, Reagan wrote in response,

“Those of us in public life can only resent the use of our names by those who seek political recognition for the repugnant doctrines of hate they espouse. The politics of racial hatred and religious bigotry practiced by the Klan and others have no place in this country, and are destructive of the values for which America has always stood.”

Compare this with Trump’s response to former Grand Wizard David Duke’s endorsement.

Pretty goddamn weak. Now, Trump did disavow the KKK the following day, but only under a lot of pressure. By itself, this apparent reluctance could be interpreted as a fluke, but it happens again and again. When confronted with the news that two of his supporters had assaulted a homeless Hispanic man, Trump’s response was:

[8:30]

Yes, so passionate that they assault minorities and homeless people. You know who else had passionate supporters? [Godin’s law, ten points] And then there’s this: [hibi-jabi]

Compare Trump’s basically affirmative response to a racist supporter with John McCain’s handling of a similar situation: []

McCain shuts that shit down, while Trump makes sure there’s room for it to thrive. He’s always winking and nudging at white nationalists; it’s no wonder he’s the Stormfront candidate of choice—you know, except among the ones who believe that even Trump is a puppet of the Zionist agenda.

My main point is that there’s vast reservoir of white racism in America for politicians to draw on for political gain, and it’s such an effective strategy that it’s hard for them to avoid the temptation. But I think that the situation is getting even worse. After Obama’s election there was a surge of involvement in hate groups and right-wing militias. But this extreme fringe stuff is starting to seep into mainstream politics, especially into Trump’s campaign.

Trump is perhaps at his white-identity-politics worst when he gets nostalgic for the “good old days” of violence against protesters, and even encourages violence at his own events.

Now, to be clear, I don’t think most of Trump’s supporters are violent bigots. A lot of them are basically decent people like Charlene, the cashier at my local 7-11. She’s having a tough time financially, and her son is addicted to meth, and she herself occasionally likes to get tweaked as fuuuuck. Trump, stop manipulating Charlene’s brain with racist nonsense!

To return to the initial question: is Trump racist? Well, no one piece of evidence is enough to say whether he is, but taken in sum, his dog-whistling, racial fear mongering, xenophobic implicating, and white supremacist wink-nudging are enough to convince me that he’s a candidate who’s happy to exploit racist attitudes and emotions as one of his campaign’s foremost rhetorical ploys. So I guess, yeah, that does make him pretty goddamn racist, the goddamn orangie. I’m just about sick of him and all his orangie-loving followers. Ah jeez, is that racist? Oh no. I am the real racist. FUUUUUUUUU