Here's an overview of various news and analysis in the United States:
More voters think Donald Trump is a racist than thought George Wallace was in 1968
As CNN reported, A Quinnipiac University poll out this week shows that a majority (51%) of voters believe that President Donald Trump is a racist. Forty-five percent say that he is not. To opponents of the President, this poll may not be surprising. But think about it for a second. This isn't just the normal opposition you'd expect to a president. This is a majority of voters saying their president is a racist.
Compare these numbers to a Harris poll from September 1968. Former Alabama Gov. George Wallace, a segregationist, was running for president as an opponent to the Civil Rights movement. As he campaigned, 41% agreed when asked whether Wallace was a racist. That was basically even with the 40% who disagreed with the statement.
There are a few ways to look at these numbers, and none are complementary to Trump. You can say that more voters believe Trump is racist than believed a segregationist running for president in 1968 was. You could be generous to Trump and say that the spread between racist and not a racist (5 points in Trump's case and 1 point in Wallace's case) is closer because more voters were undecided on Wallace. Even so, the net margin for Trump being a racist is wider than it was in Wallace's case.
Perhaps, the one bit of decent news for Trump in these numbers is that they are fairly stable. Even before Trump's most recent comments, many voters thought he was racist. In the summer of 2018, 49% of voters said Trump was racist in a Quinnipiac poll. This was slightly higher than the 47% who said he wasn't racist.
Still, the latest polling indicates that the President was mistaken if he thought the latest attacks were going to help him. We don't just see that the President's attacks have been an electoral angle in the question about racism; we see it in Trump's approval ratings as well.
Trump's approval rating is 43% among all voters in a national average. A month ago, before his tweets against the four progressive congresswomen, his approval rating among voters was the same 43%.
It shouldn't be too surprising that Trump's approval rating has not gone up. Not only has his approval rating been steadier than any president in polling history, but we've seen him previously employ similar tactics that he did in his racist tweets. These methods have not moved the numbers.
Unfortunately for Trump, numbers such as these a year from now would mean that he would be an underdog for reelection. The last time Trump had an approval rating like this heading into a national election, the Democrats gained 40 House seats and won the House popular vote by 9 points.
Also New Yorker reported that Next month, Jamestown will mark four hundred years since the first slaves set foot in North America—a year before the Mayflower’s Pilgrims landed in Plymouth Harbor. There were only “twenty and odd,” according to an early account from John Rolfe, Virginia’s first tobacco planter and the widower of Pocahontas. The slaves had been captured in Angola and herded, with hundreds of others, onto a slave ship bound for Veracruz, in today’s Mexico. British pirates seized them in a raid on the high seas while searching for gold and silver. In Jamestown, the pirates exchanged their human loot for provisions. Jamestown became ground zero for slavery in the Americas. Among that first generation were Isabella and Antony, who worked in the household of Captain William Tucker. They were allowed to marry, according to historical accounts in Jamestown. In 1624, their son William was the first recorded birth of an African-American in what became the United States.
On Tuesday, President Trump visited Jamestown, which is also marking four hundred years since settlers there founded the first representative assembly in the Western Hemisphere. In 1619, twenty-two representatives of local settlements and plantations met in a small wooden church to create a new legislative body, the House of Burgesses. Jamestown was ground zero for democracy in the Americas, too. Four hundred years later, the theme on Tuesday was not the celebration of democracy but the stench of racism that has increasingly pervaded Trump’s Presidency. Most recently, the President, on
Twitter, attacked four congresswomen of color and Representative Elijah Cummings, an African-American politician who represents Baltimore. Cummings is the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, which recently subpoenaed the personal e-mails and texts of Trump, his inner circle, and his key associates. The President says he is simply attacking his critics, but his remarks repeatedly smack of racism.
As he left the White House, en route to Jamestown, Trump told reporters that he was “the least racist person” in the world. “What I’ve done for African-Americans in two and a half years, no President has been able to do anything like it,” he said. “Unemployment at the lowest level in the history of our country for African-Americans—nobody can beat that. You look at poverty levels. They’re doing better than they’ve ever done before.” (This is statistically true, but some experts question if Trump is solely responsible for it.) Trump added, “So many things: opportunity zones, criminal-justice reform. President Obama couldn’t get it done.” The biggest beneficiaries of his Presidency, he insisted, are African-Americans. He claimed that the White House had received more letters, e-mails, and phone calls about his stance against Cummings and, as he put it in tweets over the weekend, the “disgusting, rat and rodent-infested mess” in Baltimore than on any other subject. “We have a large African-American population and they really appreciate what I’m doing,” he said, “and they’ve let me know it.”
In Jamestown, a different Trump said the right words on racism in a carefully scripted speech; the President, for once, did not deviate from the teleprompter. The arrival of those first slaves, he said, “was the beginning of a barbaric trade in human lives.” On this day, he said, the United States also remembers “every sacred soul who suffered the horrors of slavery and the anguish of bondage.” He acknowledged that after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, it took another eighty-five years, and a civil war, to outlaw slavery, and then another century to “extend the blessings of freedom to all Americans.” He quoted Martin Luther King, Jr., and lauded African-Americans who “built, strengthened, inspired, uplifted, protected, defended, and sustained our nation from its earliest days.”
The African-Americans in Virginia’s democracy today didn’t buy it. The Black Caucus in the Virginia legislature boycotted Trump’s appearance in Jamestown. “It is impossible to ignore the emblem of hate and disdain that the President represents,” the lawmakers said, in a statement. Trump’s “repeated attacks on black legislators and comments about black communities” make the President an “ill-suited” choice to “commemorate a monumental period in American history. . . . The current President does not represent the values that we would celebrate at the 400th anniversary of the oldest democratic body in the western world.”
One elected African-American to attend Trump’s speech was Democratic Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax, but he too took a swipe at the President. The two commemorations, he said in an essay posted on Medium, “far supersede the petty and racist actions of the current occupant of the White House.” He added, “The bigoted words of the current President will thankfully soon be swept into the dustbin of history. Our democracy, born in Virginia, will live on.”
In the middle of Trump’s speech, a lone state assemblyman, Ibraheem Samirah, stood up in the audience and shouted, “You can’t send us back. Virginia is our home.” He unfurled three signs that read “Go back to your corrupted home,” “Deport hate,” and “Reunite my family and all those shattered by systematic discrimination.” Samirah is Palestinian-American. In a subsequent tweet, the Democratic lawmaker wrote, “I just disrupted the @realDonaldTrump speech in Jamestown because nobody’s racism and bigotry should be excused for the sake of being polite.”
A poll released by Quinnipiac University on Tuesday also contradicted Trump’s claims of support among African-Americans. Eighty percent of African-American voters said Trump is racist. Fifty-five percent of Hispanics agreed. Among all Americans, a simple majority—fifty-one percent—said the President has racist views. (In a striking split between the genders, fifty-nine percent of women described Trump as a racist, while fifty-five percent of men said he wasn’t.)
Trump’s hypocrisy about race was reflected when he returned to the White House from Jamestown, two hours later. Pressed by reporters about just who among the African-American community had called to express support for his badgering of Cummings and Baltimore, Trump replied, “A lot of people,” but offered no names. The President was then asked what was the driving strategy behind his recent rampage of Twitter attacks on members of Congress of color. In what may be the most telling indicator of his Presidency, he said, “I have no strategy. There’s zero strategies,” he said. “It’s very simple.” Or maybe simpleminded. And a tragic comment on the four hundredth anniversary of the most abominable practice in our democracy.
Patti Davis: America won't survive Donald Trump's racism revival if we give it oxygen
Patti Davis wrote in USA TODAY that It was more than 50 years ago and his eyes still haunt me. The civil rights movement was strong and growing, but there were still too many men in white robes burning crosses on the lawns of Americans who weren’t white. Racism was stitched into the fabric of American society.
At my co-ed boarding school in Arizona, there was no one of color, until my junior year in 1968, when the school decided to integrate. Their idea of integrating was to bring in one black boy and one Hispanic boy.
Both boys kept to themselves; they were quiet and seemed as if they wanted to be invisible. Who could blame them, being dropped off in a sea of white high schoolers? The Hispanic boy was particularly shy. One afternoon, I heard from a group of giggling students that, the night before, several boys had lashed him to a bunk bed and dripped warm water on his wrists, which was supposed to make him pee. Apparently, it worked.
This is nothing new: I saw the KKK burn crosses in North Carolina. 'Send her back' chants can't shock me now.
After the wet his pants, they untied him and let their laughter float behind him as he ran from the room. The story went around the school, and I’m sure it got to the teachers, but no students were ever punished. I remember one of the boys bragging about it, laughing cruelly, and saying that the boy never should have come here; that he doesn’t fit in.
I said hello to him whenever we were near each other, but my memory is that I never heard his voice again. His eyes, however, traveled to a place deep inside me and scored themselves on the walls of my heart. Eyes full of wound, of helplessness, of a bitter acceptance that simply because his skin was brown, he had to watch his back and be on guard. Eyes that preferred to look down rather than meet anyone else’s gaze.
I thought about him the other day when an African American friend said to me that things are getting worse in this country, and too many people are looking the other way. This conversation was after President Donald Trump tweeted about the four congresswomen of color and how they should "go back" to where they came from. Since then, the president has also attacked another African American lawmaker, civil rights activist Rep. Elijah Cummings.
Just when I was getting comfortable: Ilhan Omar is me. Trump's 'go back' tweet is painful reminder America won't accept us.
I thought about the other eyes that haunt me now. The cold blue steel of Donald Trump’s gaze as he let the chant of “send her back!” reverberate around him for 13 seconds. And the eyes of those in the crowd chanting — they were having fun, enjoying themselves. They might as well have been singing "Happy Birthday."
If you avert your eyes from this, if you will lull yourself into thinking that we’ll be okay, that America will survive this gleeful resurgence of racism, then you are in fact helping to make hatred synonymous with patriotism. Eyes that look away will doom us as much as those that are filled with cruelty.
Don't give Trump's rhetoric any oxygen
This is going to get worse. Donald Trump is on a roll and he isn’t going to stop. He’ll unleash his racist insults at anyone of color who stands up to him. And the hatred he has set free will result in more incidents like Republicans defending or refusing to condemn the president's racist remarks; like the memorial for Emmett Till being shot at and vandalized by students posing in front of it with guns; like the murder at Charlottesville, Virginia.
I have a suggestion. What if the media ignored his racist tweets? There is no value in giving them or him any more attention. We know enough about the president's character and opinions not to need any further evidence or reinforcement. I have no idea if Fox News and other Trump-supporting media outlets would participate in a blockade on this president’s tweets, but it really doesn’t matter.
Trump's supporters in the media and the electorate are outnumbered by many other news organizations and Americans who could make the collective decision to simply deny them the space to grow. Hatred is like a tangled weed that needs oxygen and sunlight to survive. If all it finds is a vacuum, it will have trouble growing. And then, maybe, America will survive.
MNA/TT