Racism is alive and well, Thanks Trump and his supporters!

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Trump should just get on with using the n-word.  That way Yellow Wall can splooge all over the Macintosh they own in orgasmic glory.

#Resist

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Where Trump’s racist rants come from

“I know you are, but what am I?” is not only a time-honored playground rejoinder, it’s also one of Donald Trump’s favorite arguments. Hillary Clinton started the racist birther conspiracy, said America’s most prominent birther. She’s “crooked,” said the most corrupt president in U.S. history. I didn’t conspire with the Russians, the Democrats conspired with the Russians. I’m not a racist, Rep. Elijah Cummings is a racist.

When Trump made that last charge against Cummings in the midst of a days-long attack on the congressman’s city of Baltimore and everyone who lives there, some people found it puzzling. What the hell was Trump talking about? He didn’t even bother to explain.

But he didn’t have to, because if you didn’t immediately understand, he wasn’t talking to you.

Trump was talking directly to his base, for whom discussions about race have a particular resonance and a particular dynamic. As someone who spends hours every day watching Fox News, Trump is tuned directly into the discussion of race that occurs on that platform and elsewhere in conservative media; he knows it well. As much as liberals are concerned with racism and the operation of racist systems, exposure to that media would convince you that, in American politics today it is actually conservatives who spend the most time thinking about race.

For the uninitiated, here are the some of the main features of the racial narrative Fox and other conservative outlets weave:

Actual racial discrimination against African Americans and other minorities is largely a thing of the past.

The most common victims of racial discrimination today are white people, who are regularly elbowed aside by minorities given government benefits they don’t deserve.

Liberals constantly accuse conservatives of being racist with zero justification, an accusation that can be impossible to refute.

When minorities criticize government policy, it shows they are unpatriotic and “ungrateful.”
People of color are held back by their own pathologies.

Democrats are The Real Racists, which is proven by the fact that their party was pro-slavery during the Civil War and many 20th-century segregationists were Democrats.

Let’s not forget what the trigger was for Trump’s Twitter rant about Baltimore being “a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess” where “no human being would want to live.” It was, of course, a Fox News segment meant to invoke precisely that disgust. When Trump called Cummings (D-Md.) a racist, he was activating this entire narrative in the minds of his most ardent supporters, saying to them: You’re the victims here, and those people don’t have any right to criticize us.

Of course, racial revanchism was always at the core of Trump’s political project. For years conservatives had been told to feel angry by immigration, by social change and by “political correctness,” i.e., annoying liberals telling you to treat others with politeness and respect even if you don’t like them. Trump took all that anger and unleashed it by saying that you no longer have to feel constrained. You can let out all the feelings people have been telling you to tamp down and revel in your liberation. Put on that MAGA hat, chant “Lock her up!” and “Send them back!” and bathe yourself in liberal tears.

We should say here that on occasion some liberals are indeed too quick to charge conservatives with saying racist things. However often you think those excesses actually occur, what cannot be disputed is that conservatives have come to believe they are absolutely constant and fear that any expression of conservative ideas will be met with the accusation of racism.

Within the tightest circle of Fox obsessives, there is no ambivalence about any of this. But as you move outward from there, people’s feelings get more complicated. And Trump, by being so obviously racist, makes it difficult to keep insisting that all accusations of racism are unfair.

Yet he did other Republicans a temporary favor by calling Cummings a racist, because they could find safe harbor in asserting that neither Trump nor Cummings is in fact a racist, something one after another of them is now saying with evident relief at the ability to sound magnanimous while continuing to support the president their own constituents love.

They’re worried, though, because the possibility for backlash is real. Not only is Trump getting his opponents as activated as his supporters (if not more), evidence is growing that he’s alienating some of the very people he thinks he’s appealing to, not to mention other groups such as suburban women whose votes could be up for grabs in 2020. You can tell how desperately many Republicans wish he’d change the subject.

But he won’t. Trump believes he is winning, because he’s getting attention and giving his core supporters what they want. He turns on Fox News and sees good friends Sean Hannity and Jeanine Pirro amplify his arguments and tell him that he’s a genius executing a masterful strategy.

Which is why it’s likely that we’ll be repeating this cycle over and over between now and November 2020: Trump gets mad at a Democrat, he sees something on Fox that makes his blood boil, he tweets something racist, Democrats express their outrage, some Republicans try to explain it away while others back him up, the whole ugly mess dominates the news for a few days before finally fading — and then a couple of weeks later we do it all again.

The president believes that the endless repetition of that cycle will guarantee his victory. He believes that white people are motivated by racial animus, by resentment and fear, by anger and hate, and only by bringing those emotions to the fore will he be reelected. He accuses others of hating America, but this is his odious vision of who Americans are, at least the only Americans who matter to him. If only we could be confident that he’s wrong.

#Resist

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Trump lashes out anew at Rep. Cummings and the ‘corrupt’ city he represents, says Baltimore residents have thanked him

Trump lashed out anew Tuesday at Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.) and the “corrupt” city he represents, saying residents of Baltimore are “living in hell” and claiming that thousands of African Americans have thanked him for highlighting the city’s problems.

Speaking to reporters as he left the White House, Trump also said that he would visit Baltimore “at the right time” and claimed that he has helped himself politically with his relentless attacks that began with tweets over the weekend in which he called the city a “rodent infested mess.”

“The African American community is so thankful,” Trump said as he prepared to head to a commemoration in Jamestown, Va., the birthplace of representative government in the United States. “They’ve called me and said finally someone is telling the truth.”

“Those people are living in hell in Baltimore,” Trump added. “They really appreciate what I’m doing, and they’ve let me know it.” He offered no specifics about who had reached out to him.

Trump blamed Cummings, the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, for problems in the city, saying, “he’s had a very iron hand on it.”

Trump had a 6 percent job approval rating among African American voters in a Quinnipiac poll released this week. That figure has ranged as high as 18 percent approval in recent Washington Post-ABC News polling.

Quinnipiac also released a finding Tuesday that 51 percent of voters think Trump is racist while 45 percent do not.

During his remarks to reporters, Trump said, “I am the least racist person there is anywhere in the world.”

Later Tuesday, as he returned to the White House, Trump was pressed by a reporter for specifics about who in the African American community had been thanking him for his comments on Cummings and Baltimore. He didn’t offer any.

“A lot of people. Many, many people,” Trump said.

Following a visit Monday afternoon with students attending summer programs at the University of Maryland at Baltimore, Cummings referenced the controversy with Trump in a tweet.

“I am fueled by these smart and energized young people and I will continue to do every day what I am duty-bounded to do — help my constituents to live their best lives and serve as a check on the Executive Branch,” he wrote.

Trump’s comments Tuesday echoed tweets sent late Monday night about Cummings and his majority-black congressional district, which includes part of Baltimore, as well as parts of two neighboring counties.

After misleadingly calling Baltimore’s statistics “the worst in the United States on Crime and the Economy,” Trump suggested that the city had wasted aid.

“Billions of dollars have been pumped in over the years, but to no avail,” Trump tweeted. “The money was stolen or wasted. Ask Elijah E. Cummings where it went. He should investigate himself with his Oversight Committee!”

As with Trump’s first attack on Cummings, the president’s Monday-night insults weren’t fired off in a vacuum. Rather, they came amid hours of programming on Fox News blasting Cummings and Democrats, and backing Trump’s complaints about Baltimore.

Kimberly Klacik, a Baltimore Republican whose Saturday morning appearance on Fox inspired Trump’s initial attacks, was back Monday night on “The Ingraham Angle,” and the president tuned in to watch. After quoting from Klacik’s interview on Twitter, Trump echoed a controversial 2016 campaign slogan aimed at black voters, writing: “What the h.... do you have to lose?”

Trump’s latest missives made clear that days of withering criticism from Democrats and some Republicans have done little to temper his drive for stoking racial tensions as an electoral strategy. They also starkly highlighted how Fox News and its array of Trump-backing hosts continue to drive the president’s daily agenda.

When Trump tuned in to Fox on Saturday, he was already enraged at Cummings over the Democrat’s role in investigating his businesses and relatives as chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, and for his criticisms of Trump’s border strategy.

That anger was ignited by Klacik’s segment on “Fox & Friends Weekend,” featuring footage of dilapidated buildings and garbage in Cummings’s district. (The piece didn’t note that the district includes above-average median incomes, famed institutions such as the Johns Hopkins Hospital and even rental units owned by Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner.)

Within an hour of the piece airing, Trump opined on Twitter that “no human being would want to live” in “disgusting, rat and rodent infested” Baltimore and called Cummings “a brutal bully.”

Thus began a familiar cycle, exemplified earlier this month when Trump sent a racist tweet aimed at four minority Democratic congresswomen and demanding that they “go back” to the “crime infested places from which they came,” despite the fact that all four are U.S. citizens. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) likewise deemed Trump’s broadside against Cummings a “racist attack,” echoing many other prominent Democrats.

Two days of brutal verbal sparring followed. Trump first insisted that “Democrats always play the Race Card,” before then accusing Cummings — who is African American and whose district is nearly 53 percent black — of himself being “racist.” When the Rev. Al Sharpton joined the fray and slammed Trump for criticizing Cummings in “the most bigoted and racist way,” Trump claimed in a tweet that the former Democratic presidential candidate “Hates Whites & Cops.”

At the White House this week, The Washington Post reported, some advisers worried that Trump’s attacks on Cummings would distract from larger issues and declined to defend his more personal insults lobbed at the congressman. A Monday afternoon White House meeting with black pastors, many of whom supported Trump, hinted at a potential easing of hostilities.

But by Monday night, a trio of Fox News hosts went on air to enthusiastically back the president. As CNN’s Brian Stelter reported, Tucker Carlson’s show touted how “DEMS HAVE FAILED BALTIMORE,” while Sean Hannity cued up a segment on the “CRISIS IN BALTIMORE.” Laura Ingraham, meanwhile, invited Klacik back on the show under the chyron, “DEMOCRATS WRECK CITIES, BLAME TRUMP.”

Amid that cable news support, Trump returned to Twitter and his familiar grievances against Cummings and Baltimore. Trump has taken particular umbrage at Cummings for criticizing his Department of Homeland Security chief during a congressional hearing earlier this month over reports of unsanitary conditions for children at border facilities.

“None of us would have our children in that position,” Cummings said during the hearing. “They are human beings.”

On Monday night, Trump again hit out at the congressman over that critique.

#Resist

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Republicans don’t think Trump’s tweets are racist. That fits a long American history of denying racism.

During Donald Trump’s campaign and presidency, there has been an ongoing debate about whether Trump’s words and even the president himself should be called “racist.”

This debate has intensified in the past weeks. First, Trump tweeted that four nonwhite congresswomen should “go back” to where they “originally came from,” even though three of them were born in the United States.

And then, on Saturday, Trump, who has often used infestation imagery to describe places where minorities live, tweeted that Democratic Rep. Elijah Cumming’s Baltimore district was a “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess” and a “very dangerous & filthy place.” Cumming’s district is actually relatively affluent and well-educated, but it is majority black, and Cummings himself is also black.

Although many politicians, political commentators, news outlets and even a few longtime defenders of the president have called Trump’s words “racist,” Republican leaders have generally closed ranks and rejected this characterization.

To understand this debate about Trump and racism, it’s important to put it in historical perspective. First, it is but one episode in a long history of American denials of the extent and consequences of prejudice, racial discrimination, segregation, disenfranchisement and persecution. Whites have done so even when the racism was virtually undeniable.

Second, this debate illustrates the more recent and growing partisan polarization on the question of what constitutes racism. That polarization makes it unsurprising that so many Republican leaders would not condemn Trump in these terms.

Most Americans denied racism even under Jim Crow

The Jim Crow era, from the 1870s through the 1950s, was a period of explicit, legally sanctioned racism. Racial segregation was enforced by law for decades. Black people were subjected to systematic discrimination, property deprivation, disenfranchisement and even violent death at the hands of Southern racists.

But remarkably, when pollsters asked white Americans about the situation of blacks, most still thought that African Americans were being treated fairly. In 1944, 1946 and 1956, the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) asked Americans, “Do you think most [N]egroes in the United States are being treated fairly or unfairly?” The graph below shows that at least 60 percent of whites said that most blacks were treated fairly.



By contrast, only 11 percent of African Americans said that blacks were treated fairly in 1956.

How could so many white people think this? One simple reason is that most whites at that time had racist attitudes themselves, such as opposing interracial marriage. The most prejudiced whites have always been the least likely to acknowledge the harmful effects of racism and discrimination against African Americans. This is exemplified in a figure like former Alabama governor George Wallace, who once infamously proclaimed, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever” — and didn’t even consider himself racist in the 1960s. (He would later reject this view and apologize.)

The denial of racism today still fits the Jim Crow pattern

The pattern of prejudiced whites denying racism is still true today. In a 2018 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES) survey, 53 percent of whites said that blacks didn’t face a lot of discrimination. Once again, this attitude is especially prevalent among those with more prejudiced attitudes toward black people.

In this survey, whites who said they would prefer to see their close relatives marry other whites, as well as whites who rated whites more favorably than blacks, were much less likely to say that there is a lot of discrimination against African Americans.



What’s changed: The extraordinary partisan polarization on race

Of course, many things have changed since Jim Crow. One especially important difference is that hostility toward African Americans and the denial of racial discrimination was distributed across both parties in the 1950s. In the South, most whites were Democrats, after all.

Over time, however, and particularly in the past several years, Democrats and Republicans have moved further apart on questions of race. This gap is visible in how Democrats and Republicans think about racism as well.

Take one other seemingly clear-cut example of racism: the use of the n-word to describe African Americans. Polls show that Democrats and Republicans increasingly disagree on whether the n-word is offensive. Indeed, the percentage of Republicans who consider the word offensive or unacceptable has actually declined in recent years.



As of 2018, only 33 percent of self-reported Trump voters said that it was racist for whites to use the n-word, compared to 86 percent of Clinton voters.

We find this same partisan divide about other racial issues, including interracial marriage. In the 2018 CCES survey, only 23 percent of Trump voters disagreed with the statement, “I prefer my close relatives marry spouses of their same race,” compared to 63 percent of Clinton voters.

These gaps help explain why, overall, Trump voters think that discrimination against whites is more pervasive in the U.S. than discrimination against blacks.

To be sure, thinking that African Americans don’t face a lot of discrimination today, or saying that Trump’s racist tweets have nothing to do with race, is not the same as believing blacks were treated fairly in the Jim Crow era. But prejudiced whites have always denied the effects of racism and discrimination to justify and legitimize pervasive racial inequality — and this pattern holds today.

Don’t expect Trump’s tweets to change anything

Given this context, it’s hardly surprising that many Americans would not call Trump’s recent statements racist. Polling from Fox News and YouGov/Economist found that bare majorities — 56 percent and 54 percent, respectively — of Americans thought that the “go back” language used in Trump’s tweets was racist. But only one-fifth of Republicans agreed.

Absent more widespread and sustained criticism of Trump from other Republicans, this is unlikely to change. If it doesn’t, then American politics will continue to be divided not simply on how to address racism, but what constitutes racism — and whether it even exists — in the first place.

#Resist

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As Trump tells reporters how not-racist he is, a poll comes out showing that most Americans disagree

It wasn’t the best timing — but, then, there probably isn’t a great moment for President Trump to declare that he is the “least racist person there is anywhere in the world.”

Trump made that claim while standing outside the White House on Tuesday, responding to a reporter’s question about the still-bubbling controversy spurred by the president’s repeated attacks on black, Hispanic and Muslim members of Congress. Over the weekend, Trump turned his attention to Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.), bashing the congressman by disparaging the city of Baltimore, part of which Cummings represents.

As he often does, Trump claimed that the media was misrepresenting reality. There was that claim about how he isn’t racist, an extension of his long-standing claims that he’s the “least racist person” people have met or that, like so many white Americans, he is free of any racist bones.

“What I’ve done for African Americans in two and a half years,” he said — immediately after disparaging the Rev. Al Sharpton as racist — “no president has been able to do anything like it.”

Abraham Lincoln, Dwight Eisenhower and Lyndon Johnson were not available for comment.

To prove that his disparagement of Baltimore was warranted, Trump claimed that “the African American community” had called him to thank him for “telling the truth.”

“The African American people have been calling the White House,” Trump claimed. “They have never been so happy about what a president has done.”

Trump will often claim that he’s received calls from people offering their support; generally those claims are unprovable.

It is the case, though, that Trump met with black leaders at the White House on Monday. He announced a meeting with religious leaders on Twitter, a meeting that hadn’t appeared on his schedule before Monday morning. (In his tweet announcing the discussion, Trump said he was looking forward to his meeting with “wonderful Inner City Pastors” — deploying a descriptor that he has consistently used interchangeably with “black” or “black community.”) Those pastors included several who are long-standing allies of the president’s.

If Trump did hear from many other black Americans, the odds are good that the commentary was not as positive as Trump presents it. As Trump was talking to reporters on Tuesday, Quinnipiac University released new polling data showing that three-quarters of black Americans — and more than half of Americans overall — think Trump is not only not the least racist person in the world but is actually explicitly racist.



It’s not just black Americans. Most independents think Trump is racist. Most white women think Trump is racist. Most whites with a college degree think Trump is racist. The groups that don’t think that tend to be white, male, Republican and lacking a college degree.

A Fox News poll released last week asked respondents specifically about Trump’s tweets targeting four Democratic women, telling them to “go back” where they came from, despite three of them having been born in the United States. More than half the respondents said those attacks were racist.



Trump would certainly not be the first racist president. What’s interesting in Quinnipiac’s polling, though, is that many Americans see racism as a motivator behind at least one Trump policy.

The pollsters asked whether respondents thought Trump’s position on border security — a position explained by Trump at his campaign launch in June 2015 as being necessary to halt an influx of criminals from Mexico — was motivated by sincere concern about securing the border or by racist beliefs.

A plurality of respondents said it was the former. But 4 in 10 respondents said they thought Trump’s policies on the border were primarily motivated by racism. That includes most black Americans. White women and whites with college degrees are basically split on the question.

If there’s a bright spot here for Trump, opinions on his border policies and his views of race are basically unchanged since July 2018. Then, about the same percentage of respondents said Trump was racist and that his border policies are motivated by racism. In other words, all the recent debate over Trump’s disparagement of House Democrats doesn’t seem to have budged public opinion very much.

One side effect of that stagnation is that Trump may come to believe there’s no immediate political downside to continuing this line of attack against his critics. It wasn’t prohibitive in 2016: A poll taken shortly before that contest found that 7 percent of Trump’s supporters believed he was racist — but that they’d vote for him anyway.

#Resist

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Trump’s Racism Is a National Emergency

I often learn about President Trump doing or saying something bigoted before I’ve had a chance shake the cobwebs loose, as my father’s expression goes. Thanks to my phone alerts and my cursed curiosity about the news, I have to swallow some newly reported cruelty before I have brushed my teeth or have had a glass of water. What is old is often still old, often a regurgitated version of some former divisive strategy Trump has employed as far back as his old housing discrimination and Central Park Five ad days. He rarely changes what has worked since the 1970s, since it seems to resonate both with Republican Party sycophants and his entranced supporters. Racism doesn’t really have seasons.

It may be easy for some to digest, but not for me. There is no getting used to this when you are in the crosshairs of this policy, when people who look like you sit patronized by a president who tells them all the time about how he got a few more of us some jobs and few more of us out of jail, then acts as though we should be satisfied with that. “What do we have to lose?” he asks, while we sit in this systematically racist America. “Why do we hate America?” he wonders aloud, as we criticize his administration for working consciously to exacerbate inequities in everything from health care to education to housing. “Why don’t we want safety and security?” Trump proclaims, as we see his government treat migrants (the ones who survive) like literal vermin while comparing our communities to “infestations.” Again, there is no getting used to this.

A white-nationalist presidency is untenable. Having to endure one while the man in the office has committed obvious crimes, such as obstruction of justice, is even worse. Add on the ever-increasing threat of white-supremacist domestic terrorism — which the FBI director warned about just last week and the administration’s anti-immigrant policies and rhetoric fuels like gasoline — and it is impossible not to conclude that the presidency is too powerful for someone as racist as Donald Trump.

Saturday’s attack on Elijah Cummings may seem like a small example, just another episode in his reality show, but it was actually a demonstration of how grossly his power can be misused. The president reminded us that we are governed in part by a cable channel. He tweeted what Media Matters researcher Matthew Gertz called a “straight recitation” of a Fox segment comparing the supposed lack of cleanliness of Cummings’ 7th Congressional District — which covers West Baltimore, has a mix of mostly urban and suburban areas, and is 53 percent black — to the inhumane conditions ongoing at Border Patrol detention facilities, conditions about which the House Oversight chairman berated acting Homeland Security head Kevin McAleenan at a July 18 hearing.

Being a propaganda operation for the president, Fox naturally depicted the city as a decrepit, rodent-ridden ghetto, all caused by the neglect of Democrats. Both Trump and disciples like Kimberly Klacik, a Baltimore-based black Republican, continued through the weekend, posting selectively edited videos of filthy areas of the city and accusing Cummings of neglecting his district in favor of overzealous oversight of the White House.

Prideful Baltimore residents rebutted with hashtags, statistics, and beautiful imagery of their city that belied the president’s slander. Reminders of Jared Kushner’s history as a slumlord in the city flooded social media. CNN anchor Victor Blackwell, who is African American, nearly broke down in tears live on the air defending his hometown. Bristling in particular at Trump’s insistence that “no human being would want to live there,” Blackwell said, “People get up and go to work there. They care for their families there. They love their children who pledge allegiance to the flag just like people who live in districts of congressmen who support you, sir.” He concluded, “They are Americans, too.”

I admired Blackwell’s strength in that moment, even if I thought his effort and that of his fellow Baltimoreans may have been somewhat quixotic. He would never prove his point to Trump, but his tears did not signify weakness. It was a humanity confronting the lack thereof. We have laughed to keep from crying during this entire Trump administration, and sometimes we just cannot do it anymore.

Since taking over the House, the Democrats have not sat idly, passing several bills that have signified where they stand as a party. However, the semantic Twister the House Judiciary chairman Jerry Nadler is playing right now in order to avoid simply launching an impeachment inquiry when the number of House members in favor of one is now in triple digits is an insult to African American voters in particular, the Democrats’ most faithful and consistent constituency.

It is a slap in the face to see a president this criminal and this racist treated called as much by Democrats who won’t do anything about it, all to ensure that they save their own majority.

Yes, it matters that the Republicans not hold both chambers should Trump be re-appointed president by voters (and whatever foreign actors assist him in his election effort). But if not to take action at a time like this, what are we electing Democrats for?

The president’s attack on Cummings should light a fire, at the very least, every African American voter ahead of the August recess. They should be flooding town halls to not only press for the president’s impeachment, but to impress upon each House member whom they visit the urgency of the true emergency at hand. Not their power, but our communities. Not their pragmatism, but our reality.

Mitch McConnell and the Senate Republicans will never allow a conviction, I know. However, the other main Democratic arguments against impeachment are bunk: the effort against Richard Nixon united the country, they currently enjoy sufficient public support, and they can do all the business that the people require in Congress while putting Trump on trial for the crimes that they crow on Twitter all day that he committed. Again, what was the point of bringing Robert Mueller to testify before the American people if you weren’t going to do a single thing with his report other than tell us to go vote our conscience once we read it? What if we live in a state where Republicans take that vote away? What if Trump does something else even more disastrous before the election that makes all of this moot? And don’t tell me that it isn’t possible, because, please.

One of the high crimes and misdemeanors listed in the Constitution is “dereliction of duty.” In his attack on Cummings, the president made it clear that, in violation of his oath of office, he doesn’t want to be the president of Baltimore. Nor, one can presume, would he be the president of any urban area that was populated by people who didn’t vote primarily for him. He said much the same of Ferguson, Missouri, in a state he won by nearly 20 percentage points, before he won the 2016 election — calling it one of the most dangerous cities in the world, which would include war-torn parts of Syria and Afghanistan. This is what Trump thought of our America then. Any reason to believe, after these Baltimore remarks, that he has changed his mind?

When Blackwell spoke of “Americans,” it was difficult not to consider the fluidity of that word with regards to black and brown people over the history of this republic — or even since Trump has taken office. Our citizenship has always been subject to debate, and that is why Jim Crow horrors echo through today’s Trump migration policy as much as the history of concentration camps. And we should understand, going forward, that when Trump refers to America, the aspiring authoritarian is talking about himself. When he recently attacked the “Squad,” four first-year progressive Congresswomen of color, with racist barbs about their supposed lack of patriotism, he just meant that they weren’t pledging allegiance to him. Trump’s remarks about Baltimore showed that he hates the true America more than any of those four ever did.

Racism serves the purpose, for many black people and other marginalized populations he targets, that author Toni Morrison referenced in her noted 1975 speech at Portland State. “It’s important to know who the real enemy is and to know the very serious function of racism, which is distraction,” she said then. “It keeps you from doing YOUR WORK. It keeps you explaining over and over your reason for being.” Much like Blackwell’s message on CNN, we are constantly having to justify our existence in the country that is our home.

Keep in mind, that isn’t a message to white people. That isn’t a message to white reporters, white news producers, white editors, white anchors, white politicians, white policy directors, white columnists, white radio hosts, white business owners, white donors, nor even to white allies. None of them have much of a reason to be sidetracked by the racism that Trump or anyone else spits out, whether at Cummings last Saturday in a series or tweets or anyone else. The president’s racism is not some story that fades from the news as quickly as a tweet disappears from a timeline. It is a national emergency that has resonates through municipal water systems and online chat rooms, through hospital emergency rooms and classrooms that have no heat in the wintertime. We have enough problems with presidents who are merely unwilling to do anything about racism, let alone those pursuing an active platform of white supremacy.

Look at Baltimore alone. By virtue of Trump’s political disagreement with one person, he is effectively blocking an entire city from federal representation and — if you note what he wrote in his tweet — possibly federal aid. Trump has, in effect, blackballed an American city. How is that not the only thing Democrats are talking about?

It isn’t like impeachment wouldn’t be to Democrats’ benefit. The president is clearly losing it over this, tweeting at Al Sharpton on Monday morning that he “Hates Whites and Cops!” merely for announcing that he is going to Baltimore. But Trump has always hated the idea of an uppity Negro, and for that reason may even still be angry with Cummings for daring to give him the business two years ago during a private meeting — and it might be why he was so eager to hit him the way that he did now. “Most black people are doing pretty good. We have people struggling to make ends meet, but that’s insulting,” Cummings told Trump in March of 2017, per reporter Peter Nicholas. “Probably nobody has ever told you that.” “You’re right,” the president reportedly responded, “nobody has ever told me that.” Cummings correctly assessed in January of 2018, post-Charlottesville, that “I don’t think it made any difference.”

The truly sad thing is that Baltimore could use the help. It suffers from an underinvestment in city resources across the board, had a heating crisis in its schools last winter, and has a police department under federal oversight. For all these “infrastructure weeks” Trump keeps staging and false promises he keeps making, local leaders like Baltimore city council president Brandon Scott continue to reach and fight for their city to get federal resources, even from a president that now appears bent on using Baltimore as electoral cannon fodder. After all, it was Trump who just four years ago, retweeted one of his followers who’d asked during the Freddie Gray unrest, “Can we drop @realDonaldTrump off in the middle of #Baltimore so he can show Obama how it’s done?” The then-reality star and bankruptcy veteran responded “I would fix it fast!”

I don’t bring that up as a “gotcha,” because as Cummings would say, it doesn’t make any difference. The point is that Trump has had his chance to be the president of Baltimore, and of the United States. He said he wanted the job, and now he says it is someone else’s responsibility. We should take him at his word.

#Resist

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House Oversight Committee seeks documents related to secret CBP Facebook groups that ridiculed migrants

The House Oversight Committee is seeking documents from U.S. Customs and Border Protection as it investigates secret Facebook groups in which dozens of current and former employees allegedly shared racist and sexist memes and joked about migrant deaths.

The move suggests that the panel’s chairman, Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, is not backing down from his investigations into the Trump administration, despite the president’s recent attacks on the Maryland Democrat and his district.

In a letter Wednesday to acting customs and border protection commissioner Mark Morgan, Cummings voiced alarm that some of the agents involved in the Facebook groups may still be on the job.

“The Committee is concerned that Border Patrol agents and other CBP employees who wrote posts disparaging immigrants may still be working with immigrants and children,” Cummings wrote in the letter.

Cummings said members of the Facebook groups had made “racist, sexist and xenophobic comments relating to immigrants and Members of Congress” and requested that CBP provide all documents related to the matter by Aug. 14, including the postings themselves, the names and titles of every CBP employee investigated, and records of any employment action taken against them.

Cummings also reiterated his request for a briefing on the matter, setting a deadline of Aug. 7.

Earlier this month, CBP announced that it is investigating 62 current employees and eight former employees for possible misconduct over their alleged participation in the Facebook groups. The groups include “Real CBP Nation” and “I’m 10-15,” which is Border Patrol code for “aliens in custody.”

The announcement came after ProPublica published a report about content posted to one of the private online forums. According to Politico, CBP officials were already aware of the groups before they were reported by news outlets, prompting outrage from lawmakers and advocates for immigrant rights.

Some of the most recent offensive Facebook postings concerned a visit by members of Congress to a Border Patrol station in Clint, Tex. One post carried an illustration of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) performing a sex act at a Border Patrol facility; another portrayed a smiling President Trump pushing the congresswoman’s face toward his lap.

In testimony before Cummings’s committee this month, acting homeland security secretary Kevin McAleenan called the postings “unacceptable” and said CBP is “moving very quickly to hold people accountable for conduct that doesn’t meet our standards.” He added that some of the agents who participated in the groups had been placed on administrative duties, although he did not provide details.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

The Real Problem With Trump’s Rallies

Trump’s political rallies are certainly a spectacle, but a spectacle we’ve seen before. In both style and substance, the president’s campaign appearances bear strong resemblances to the rallies held a half-century ago by Gov. George C. Wallace of Alabama.

There are a number of similarities between the two politicians’ rallies. But there is one significant difference — and it shows how Mr. Trump remains a greater danger and poses a graver threat to peaceful political discourse, especially as we enter a presidential election campaign.

Like Mr. Trump, Mr. Wallace presented himself as the political champion of aggrieved working-class and middle-class whites. As governor, he embodied the cause of segregationist resistance, literally standing in the schoolhouse door to block the first black students at the University of Alabama and figuratively standing against what he called the “civil wrongs bill.”

Yet in his repeated campaigns for the presidency between 1968 and 1976, despite today’s consensus to the contrary, Mr. Wallace didn’t make open appeals to racism. Instead, he couched opposition to the civil rights movement — both his own opposition and that of whites in the North and South alike — in new terms. Taking aim at liberals in government and leftist protesters in the streets, Mr. Wallace presented himself as the champion of ordinary Americans besieged by both. He promised then, as Mr. Trump has now, to restore “law and order” to a troubled nation.

A former bantamweight boxer, Mr. Wallace thrived on the combative nature of politics. In the political ring, he lashed out at hippies, beatniks, civil rights “agitators,” “pointy-headed intellectuals,” both “briefcase-toting bureaucrats” and “bearded bureaucrats,” “lazy” welfare recipients, “anarchists and communists,” atheists, antiwar “radicals and rabble rousers,” and street thugs whom liberals, he said, believed had “turned to rape and murder because they didn’t get enough broccoli when they were little boys.”

While he lacks Mr. Wallace’s background in boxing, Mr. Trump has adopted a similar stance in his own rallies. He’s claimed some of Mr. Wallace’s specific phrases as his own — most notably the call for “law and order” — and more generally has stoked the same fires of resentment and racism.

Mr. Wallace’s words electrified crowds of working- and middle-class whites. “Cabdrivers and cattle ranchers, secretaries and steelworkers, they hung on every word, memorized the lines, treasured them, savored them, waited to hear them again,” noted an Esquire profile. “George Wallace was their avenging angel. George Wallace said out loud what they nervously kept to themselves. George Wallace articulated their deepest fears, their darkest hates. George Wallace promised revenge.”

Mr. Trump has tapped into that sentiment, winning over white voters with a willingness to buck “political correctness” and voice their anger and anxieties directly. “He says what we’re thinking and what we want to say,” noted a white woman at a Trump rally in Montana. “We wish we could speak our mind without worrying about the consequences,” explained a white man at a Phoenix event. “He can speak his mind without worrying.”

By articulating their audiences’ hatred, both men effectively encouraged them to act on it.

Mr. Wallace’s rallies regularly erupted in violence, as his fans often took his words not just seriously but also literally. Mr. Wallace often talked about dragging hippies “by the hair of their head.” At a Detroit rally in 1968, his supporters did just that, dragging leftist protesters out of their seats and through a thicket of metal chairs. As they were roughed up, the candidate signaled his approval from the stage: “You came here for trouble and you got it.”

Mr. Trump’s rallies have likewise been marked by violence unseen in other modern campaigns. At a 2015 rally in Birmingham, Ala., for example, an African-American protester was punched, kicked and choked. Rather than seeking to reduce the violence from his supporters, Mr. Trump rationalized it, saying “maybe he should have been roughed up, because it was absolutely disgusting what he was doing.”

This leads us to the significant difference between Mr. Wallace and Mr. Trump. Mr. Wallace’s targets were, for the most part, presented in the abstract. Though he denounced broad categories of generic enemies — “agitators,” “anarchists” and “communists” — he rarely went after an individual by name.

Mr. Trump, in pointed contrast, has used his rallies to single out specific enemies. During the 2016 campaign, he demonized his political opponents in the primaries and the general election, and also denounced private individuals, from Megyn Kelly, the former Fox News anchor, to the former Miss Universe Alicia Machado and the federal judge Gonzalo Curiel.

At recent rallies, he has targeted four Democratic House members who have criticized him and his administration — Representatives Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley.

Participants at Mr. Trump’s rallies have been moved to attack individuals he’s singled out. For most rally participants, the attacks have been confined to ominous but nevertheless nonviolent chants — from the 2016 cries of “Lock her up!” to the recent refrain of “Send her back!” But a handful have gone further, targeting the individuals named by the president with death threats and even attempts at violence.

In late 2018, a Trump supporter, Cesar Sayoc Jr., mailed pipe bombs to high-profile Democrats and media figures who had criticized the president and whom the president had denounced in return. After his arrest, Mr. Sayoc explained that Mr. Trump’s rallies had become “a newfound drug” for him and warped his thinking. “In the lead up to the 2018 midterm elections,” Mr. Sayoc’s lawyers added last week, “President Trump warned his supporters that they were in danger from Democrats, and at times condoned violence against his critics and ‘enemies.’”

Since the midterms, Mr. Trump’s rhetoric and the threats from his supporters have only intensified. In March, a Trump backer in New York was arrested on charges of threatening to “put a bullet” in Ms. Omar’s “skull.” In April, a Trump supporter in Florida was arrested on charges of making death threats to Ms. Tlaib and two other Democrats. This month, two police officers in Louisiana were fired over a Facebook post suggesting that Ms. Ocasio-Cortez should be shot.

As the 2020 campaign heats up, the president’s rhetoric will as well. It’s long past time that he started worrying about the consequences of his words.

#Resist

[Jed_]

[Athos_131]

Worse than Baltimore? Trump won't attack ravaged red states because his friends run them

President Donald Trump is right when he says Baltimore’s got problems. Like all big cities, it has crime, drugs, corruption, pockets of poverty and yes, rodents. But it also has wonderful neighborhoods, beautiful parks, a world class university, rich history and a lively, vibrant culture.

Obviously, Trump hasn’t singled out Charm City because he's concerned about it. It's only 40 miles away, but he has never visited as president and hasn't offered to lift a finger to help. Shouldn't presidents want to make things better for all Americans? Not Trump, whose only concern is that Rep. Elijah Cummings, the powerful Democratic chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, believes in the Constitution and its time-honored system of checks and balances — and is using his authority to probe the president and his administration. And half of Cummings' district is in Baltimore.

Or perhaps I’m wrong and Trump really does care. But if that’s the case, why stop at Baltimore? His loud criticism of it can be contrasted with his silence on other places that also have serious problems.

Least educated, most dangerous
The least educated states are, from 46th to 50th: Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, West Virginia and Mississippi.

Highest poverty rates (46th to 50th): Kentucky, West Virginia, New Mexico, Louisiana, Mississippi.

Most dangerous (46th to 50th): Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, Louisiana, New Mexico.

Highest share of people on food stamps in 2017 (46th to 50th): Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, West Virginia, New Mexico.   

Most dependent on federal aid — i.e., “socialism” (46th to 50th): Kentucky, Arizona, New Mexico, Louisiana, Mississippi.

Most polluted (46th to 50th): Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana.

Most people lacking health insurance (46th to 50th): Florida, Georgia, Alaska, Oklahoma, Texas.

What’s interesting is that of the 16 states mentioned in these seven categories, 15 are red states that voted for Trump in 2016. Trump can't mention their problems, because he fears offending people who voted for him.

Deep red hellholes in the South
Trump thinks Baltimore’s a hellhole? The data shows Mississippi, a deep red state, is poorly educated and mired in poverty and crime and heavily dependent on federal aid. Of course, because Mississippi’s governor, two senators and three out of four Congressmen are Republicans who are all in the tank for him, Trump won’t say a word. The good people of Mississippi deserve — and should demand — better. 

The good people of Kentucky also deserve better. Another state that can’t support itself and is heavily dependent on Washington (it gets $2.61 for every dollar it sends to Washington), the Bluegrass State also ranks poorly on the poverty and pollution scale.

Trump criticizes Cummings, who has been in Washington since 1996. But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky has been in the Senate since 1984 — what’s he done? Besides watering down and flat-out blocking efforts to safeguard our electoral process, I mean. Turning a blind eye to Russian attacks on our democracy — which has kept him busy since the Obama era — is nothing less than dereliction of duty, and although he bristles at his new nickname, “Moscow Mitch,” I say if the boot fits, comrade, wear it.

You get the idea. When Trump, who wants those critical of America to leave, criticized it himself in his dark, creepy “American carnage” inaugural address (no inspirational “shining city on a hill” or “malice towards none” for him), he could have been talking about these ravaged, failing, mostly red states just as much as Baltimore’s 7th congressional district. But he’ll never do that, of course.

Jared Kushner could help Baltimore
One way Trump could help Baltimore clear up its rodent infestation without spending a dime of taxpayer money is to summon his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, down the hall to the Oval Office and tell him to be a better landlord in that city. The Kushner family — which owns nearly 9,000 rental units in 17 locations, most of them in Baltimore County — racked up 200-plus housing violations there in 2017 alone.

More Baltimore commentary: The president is right about Baltimore. Are Democrats really prepared to defend failure?

ProPublica reporter Alec MacGillis, who found substandard conditions were par for the course in Kushner properties, tells the story of one resident, Marquita Parmely: “She had a mouse infestation that was severe enough that her 12-year-old daughter recently found one in her bed. Parmely also has a 2-year-old with asthma, which is aggravated by allergens in mice droppings. She moved her own bed and other furniture away from the walls to dissuade mice, kept the family’s laundry in tote bags after mice started appearing in the hamper and vacuumed twice a day.” The greedy Kushner clan fixes things only when threatened with fines, and even then, “violations on nine properties were not addressed, resulting in monetary sanctions."

How ironic that Trump complains of problems that a greedy, uncaring member of his own White House staff has been complicit in creating. It seems that the great city of Baltimore isn’t the only place that needs to be cleaned up.

#Resist

[_priapism]

Racists love Trump, because he employs the Presidency to legitimize their own racism, and gives them permission by example to express their racism in ever more public and provocative displays.  Hitler had the same effect on racist Germans.  Provoking them to the point of Kristallnacht.

Trump threatens 100 years of political and social progress in this country.  This cannot be understated or emphasized.  It will require action on the part of every voter to turn the tide back next year.

[psiberzerker]

Racists love Trump, because he employs the Presidency to legitimize their own racism, and gives them permission by example to express their racism in ever more public and provocative displays.

The same goes for sexists, and sexual harassers.  (To be fair, that went for Clinton as well.)  Embezzlers, and bribery.  It's literally corruption at the highest office.

He let Nazis march with the Klan, and talked about the "Good people" marching with the Nazis, and Ku Klux Klan.

If we tolerate him, we tolerate everyone like him.

[Athos_131]

I'd advise anyone responding Yellow Wall's recent whiner thread to reply here, as it's just another racist rant by that poster.  It hates this thread, and replying to it here will give the bigot a conniption fit.

All replies the in OP's thread will just give them something to masturbate to.

#Resist

[psiberzerker]

It's funny, how you can tell me I'm not a woman one day, and then use "them" as a singular pronoun the next.

It's almost like you only use them when you know it's an insult.

[Athos_131]

Dear Shitbird,



I'll say it again.  Everything is not about you.  Go write some child rape.  Go Fuck Yourself.  Go fly a kite.  Go jump in the lake.

You want to know why I'll never be your friend?  It's shit like this.

Please do fuck off.

#Resist

[psiberzerker]

You want to know why I'll never be your friend?

No, you'd rather have an enemy.  I told you that.  Several times.

You being an asshole is about you, not me.

Now that I got my mandatory demerit for the day, there's no incentive to pander to you.  I can call you an asshole with impunity.

Asshole.

[_priapism]

The comments were concerning Yellow Wall, not you Psi.  But you look for something to be upset about.  If you can’t find something, you make something up.  Peace.

[psiberzerker]

But you look for something to be upset about.

I'm not upset.  Surely you've all seen me upset, enough times to tell that this was nothing by comparison.  Pathos is the one that got triggered so easily.  He misgendered me yesterday, and I let it go, because I knew he was trying to bait me.

This is in 1408.  I can troll him all I want, but I couldn't help noticing, he knows how to use the pronoun "They," when it's convenient to disparage the gender of someone he doesn't like.

I'm not upset, but that doesn't mean I forget.

[Athos_131]

It’s not just Baltimore; Trump is running against America’s cities

He was born in Queens and lives on Fifth Avenue. His skyscrapers dot city skylines on several continents. But President Trump is increasingly intent on disparaging urban areas, depicting them as blighted and overrun by criminals and homelessness — all part of a divisive reelection strategy heading into 2020.
Trump’s denigration of cities is part of an effort to animate a base of rural, mostly white supporters while depressing minority turnout in places like Milwaukee, Detroit and Philadelphia — a repeat of the two-pronged strategy that helped him to a surprising electoral college victory in 2016 and could be determinative again four years later.

“No one has paid a higher price for the far-left destructive agenda than Americans living in our nation’s inner cities,” Trump said Thursday night at a rally in Cincinnati, drawing cheers from the mostly white crowd. “We send billions and billions and billions for years and years, and it’s stolen money, and it’s wasted money.”

“For 100 years it’s been one party control, and look at them,” he continued. “We can name one after another, but I won’t do that because I don’t want to be controversial.”

In reality, the country’s largest urban areas are major engines of the national economy and generate more tax money than they receive from the federal government. By contrast, most rural areas receive more from Washington than they generate.

The president singled out California and two of its largest cities, commenting on a homelessness problem that he laid at the feet of the state’s leaders.

“Nearly half of all the homeless people living in the streets in America happen to live in the state of California. What they are doing to our beautiful California is a disgrace to our country. It’s a shame,” he said.

“Look at Los Angeles with the tents, and the horrible, horrible disgusting conditions. Look at San Francisco, look at some of your other cities,” Trump added.

Trump’s administration has not made homelessness a priority and has offered no new policy ideas for dealing with the problem.

After a skirmish in the crowd, as Trump supporters swarmed around a small group of protesters who had unfurled a sign that read “Immigrants Built America,” the president took the opportunity to punctuate his chosen message.

“Cincinnati, do you have a Democrat mayor?” Trump asked the crowd. “Well, that’s what happens.”

Last weekend, Trump tweeted more than 30 times about Baltimore, the nation’s 30th largest city, calling it a “very dangerous & filthy place” where “no human being would want to live.”

He blamed Rep. Elijah Cummings, the Democratic chairman of the House Oversight Committee that is investigating the administration on multiple fronts, and described his district, which includes parts of Baltimore as well as its suburbs, as a “disgusting, rat- and rodent-infested mess.”

A Trump campaign aide defended the president against critics who called those statements racist.

“It’s notable that no one has challenged the President’s descriptions of the problems in Baltimore and other cities. Critics would rather focus on the word ‘infested,’ which is the very same word Congressman Cummings used to describe his own city’s drug problems in a congressional hearing 20 years ago,” said Tim Murtaugh, a spokesman for Trump’s reelection campaign.

“After all this time, why hasn’t it gotten better? It’s completely legitimate to call out the leadership in cities where conditions haven’t improved decade after decade.”

“When the nation and our economy are clearly on the right track, why would we turn the country over to the same political party whose ideas have failed so many of our city residents?” Murtaugh added, noting, as the president often does, that African-American unemployment is dropping.

While Trump avoided mentioning Cummings by name at the rally Thursday night, he did assert that Baltimore’s homicide rate was higher than several Central American countries.

“I believe it’s higher than — gimme a place that you think is pretty bad,” Trump said, bringing his supporters in on the bit. “Gimme a place.” People shouted the names of American cities and foreign countries. Trump picked up on a shout of “Afghanistan.”

“I believe it’s higher than Afghanistan,” the president said.

Then on Friday morning, Trump tweeted about a recent burglary at Cummings’ home, presenting a news story that seemed to prove his point under a thin veil of “you hate to see it” empathy.

“Really bad news! The Baltimore house of Elijah Cummings was robbed. Too bad!”

Trump’s ambiguous tweet drew a bipartisan wave of rebukes.

Former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, who left the administration late last year on good terms with the president, replied to the tweet Friday. “This is so unnecessary,” she wrote, adding an emoji of a perplexed face.

In running against urban centers, Trump, whose family originally became wealthy building tax-supported housing in Brooklyn and Queens, is picking up an American political tradition of appealing to rural voters by depicting cities as centers of crime and disease. In the current context, in which America’s urban population is more racially diverse than most of its rural areas, the slogans have taken on an added dimension.

“He’s talking about cities and urban areas and using it as a proxy for minorities,” said Cornell Belcher, a Democratic pollster in Washington. “He’s pretending to be benevolent, but he’s locking in the stereotype that ‘these people need us to take care of them — those people can’t govern themselves.’ It’s this white savior idea — that is as fundamentally and historically racist as it comes in this country, the idea that people of color need to be saved by the white man.”

Trump’s expressions of concern for urban communities also offer him something to point at to rebut charges of racism sparked by his comments about Cummings and his tweet telling four female Democratic members of Congress who call themselves “The Squad” to “go back” to other countries.

“It just further demonstrates how disconnected he is from reality,” said Denver Mayor Michael Hancock. “It’s really at the city level where the issues of bread-basket America are being addressed: housing, homelessness, mobility, the opioid epidemic. Cities are doing the things the federal government has failed to do.”

Even in attacking Democratic presidential hopefuls who have suggested decriminalizing the border, Trump has geared his argument toward African Americans in inner cities, suggesting that they will be the ones most hurt by more undocumented immigrants coming to the U.S.

Matt Schlapp, the chairman of the American Conservative Union and the husband of Trump 2020 campaign senior advisor Mercedes Schlapp, suggested that Democrats might be “cavalier” about their support from African American voters.

“The party is moving to open borders and that’s a disastrous policy for urban blacks,” Schlapp said. “It makes perfect sense that Trump would point that out.”

But Michael Nutter, a former two-term mayor of Philadelphia who is African American, said that all of Trump’s rhetoric is meant to obscure racism and his actual indifference to urban America, where he is unlikely to garner much support.

“He has no plan for America’s cities at all,” Nutter said. “This is just more red meat for his base. The whole presidency and the reelection will be focused on dividing the country,” he said. “That is the only way he believes he can win.”

Nutter said Trump’s “psychological warfare” aimed at depressing African-American turnout next year will have the opposite effect.

“In 2016, people just couldn’t believe that this kind of bizarro character had any possible chance,” Nutter said. “Now, I think that folks’ eyes are wide open. People are fully woke.”

#Resist

[Athos_131]

After El Paso, We Can No Longer Ignore Trump’s Role in Inspiring Mass Shootings

On Saturday Morning, a gunman at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, shot and killed at least 20 people before surrendering to the police. By all accounts, Patrick Crusius, the 21-year-old alleged shooter, is a fan of President Donald Trump and his policies. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, “a Twitter account bearing the suspect’s name contains liked tweets that include a ‘BuildTheWall’ hashtag” and “a photo using guns to spell out ‘Trump.’”

Incredibly, the nation woke up to more grim news on Sunday, with reports that a man suited up in body armor and bearing a rifle with high-capacity magazines had carried out a rampage in Dayton, Ohio, killing at least nine people and injuring 26.

Little is known yet about the Dayton shooter, but a four-page manifesto authorities believe was written by Crusius and posted shortly before the El Paso attack is full of the kind of hateful rhetoric and ideas that have flourished under Trump.

The manifesto declares the imminent attack “a response to the Hispanic invasion,” accuses Democrats of “pandering to the Hispanic voting bloc,” rails against “traitors,” and condemns “race mixing” and “interracial unions.” “Yet another reason to send them back,” it says.

Sound familiar? The president of the United States — who condemned the El Paso attack on Twitter — has repeatedly referred to an “invasion” at the southern border; condemned Mexican immigrants as “rapists” and Syrian refugees as “snakes;” accused his critics of treason on at least two dozen occasions; and told four elected women of color to “go back” to the “crime infested places from which they came.” (It is worth noting that Crusius, in his alleged manifesto, claims his views “predate” and are unrelated to Trump, but then goes on to attack “fake news.”)

That there could be a link between the attacker and the president should come as no surprise. But it might. Over the past four years, both mainstream media organizations and leading Democrats have failed to draw a clear line between Trump’s racist rhetoric and the steadily multiplying acts of domestic terror across the United States. Some of us tried to sound the alarm — but to no avail.

“Cesar Sayoc was not the first Trump supporter who allegedly tried to kill and maim those on the receiving end of Trump’s demonizing rhetoric,” I wrote last October, in the concluding lines of my column on the arrest of the so-called #MAGAbomber. “And, sadly, he won’t be the last.”

HOW I WISH I could have been proven wrong. Yet since the publication of that piece almost a year ago, which listed the names of more than a dozen Trump supporters accused of horrific violence, from the neo-Nazi murderer of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville to the Quebec City mosque shooter, there have been more and more MAGA-inspired attacks. In January, four men were arrested for a plot to attack a small Muslim community in upstate New York — one of them, according to the Daily Beast, “was an avid Trump supporter online, frequently calling for ‘Crooked Hillary’ Clinton to be arrested and urging his followers to watch out for Democratic voter fraud schemes when they cast their ballots for Trump in 2016.”

In March, a far right gunman murdered 51 Muslims in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand — and left behind a document describing Muslim immigrants as “invaders” and Trump as “a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose.”

And now, this latest massacre in El Paso. Let’s be clear: in an age of rising domestic terrorism cases — the majority of which are motivated by “white supremacist violence,” according to FBI Director Christopher Wray — Trump is nothing less than a threat to our collective security. More and more commentators now refer, for example, to the phenomenon of “stochastic terrorism” — originally defined by an anonymous blogger back in 2011 as “the use of mass communications to incite random actors to carry out violent or terrorist acts that are statistically predictable but individually unpredictable.”

Sounds pretty Trumpian, right? As I wrote in October: “The president may not be pulling the trigger or planting the bomb, but he is enabling much of the hatred behind those acts. He is giving aid and comfort to angry white men by offering them clear targets — and then failing to fully denounce their violence.”

And as I pointed out on CNN earlier this year, there is a simple way for Trump to distance himself from all this. Give a speech denouncing white nationalism and the violence it has produced. Declare it a threat to national security. Loudly disown those who act in his name. Tone down the incendiary rhetoric on race, immigration, and Islam.

Trump, however, has done the exact opposite. In March, in the wake of the Christchurch massacre, the president said he did not consider white nationalism to be a rising threat, dismissing it as a “small group of people.” A month earlier, in February, Trump was asked whether he would moderate his language after a white nationalist Coast Guard officer was arrested over a plot to assassinate leading journalists and Democrats. “I think my language is very nice,” he replied.

In recent weeks, the president has again launched nakedly racist and demagogic attacks on a number of black and brown members of Congress, not to mention the black-majority city of Baltimore. When his cultish supporters responded to his attack on Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., with chants of “send her back,” Trump stood and watched and later referred to them as “patriots.”

So we’re supposed to be surprised or shocked that white nationalist violence is rising on his watch? That hate crimes against almost every minority group have increased since his election to the White House in 2016?

On Tuesday, just days before this latest act of terror in El Paso, the leaders of the Washington National Cathedral issued a scathing, and startlingly prescient, rebuke of Trump:

Make no mistake about it, words matter. And, Mr. Trump’s words are dangerous.

These words are more than a “dog-whistle.” When such violent dehumanizing words come from the President of the United States, they are a clarion call, and give cover, to white supremacists who consider people of color a sub-human “infestation” in America. They serve as a call to action from those people to keep America great by ridding it of such infestation. Violent words lead to violent actions.

Thanks to his hate-filled rhetoric, his relentless incitement of violence, and his refusal to acknowledge the surge in white nationalist terrorism, the president poses a clear and present danger to the people, and especially the minorities, of the United States.

#Resist