Memo to President Trump’s backers: If you want people to stop calling you racist, stop saying and doing racist things. And stop excusing racist posts and rants by leading voices in the MAGA media.
When Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson recently ranked among the top five on Spotify’s list of top trending podcasts, it screamed out that racism and antisemitism are not a problem for their MAGA-world fan base.
That is one reason why 60 percent of Americans told a PPRI poll this month the “state of race relations in the U.S. has mostly changed for the worse” since the start of the year and Trump’s return to Washington.
Here’s what baffles me about the damage being done to race relations.
As a Black guy with lots of Republican friends and even Republicans in my family, I notice that rising racism under Trump is no big deal for 48 percent of White Americans who still hold a favorable view of him, according to the PPRI poll.
As comedian Bill Maher puts it, “To be a Republican, we certainly shouldn’t say they are all racist. But if you’re racist, you probably are a Republican.”
Good logic that is backed up by recent text messages among Trump Republicans, revealing blatant racism. According to Politico, members of the group referred to Black people as “monkeys” and “watermelon people.” These Republicans “lauded Republicans who they believed support slavery,” Politico reported.
Hatred of Jews was also on display. One wrote: “Great. I love Hitler.” Another: “I’m ready to watch people burn now.”
There is no way to excuse that kind of talk. But Vice President JD Vance offered a try.
“The reality is that kids … tell edgy, offensive jokes. That’s what kids do. And I really don’t want us to grow up in a country where a kid telling a stupid joke … is [good reason] to ruin their lives.”
Vance’s attempt to sugarcoat rancid speech utterly failed because the people involved are obviously not children. They are grown-ups, leaders of today’s Republican Party.
And let me speak directly to the vice president’s rush to put on blinders to avoid seeing racism. Those hateful people likely speak with hate about your wife, Mr. Vance — she is an Indian American — and your brown-skinned children. Just as their hate likely attaches to the young Black man that Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) raised as his son, whom he curiously seldom mentions or is photographed with.
Those people also likely hate me and my children, even if some of us are Republicans, because we, too, have brown skin.
And the same not-funny hate from Trump’s base extends to Jews.
“I do have a Nazi streak in me from time to time, I will admit it,” Paul Ingrassia, a Trump White House aide, allegedly wrote in a message. In another: “Never trust a Chinaman or Indian.” Ingrassia was nominated to lead the Office of Special Counsel and currently serves as White House liaison to the Department of Homeland Security. His nomination has been pulled, but he remains in Trump’s White House.
The animating idea behind this epidemic of racial hate is that it is daring to speak forthrightly about “reverse racism.” That is to say that the nation’s real racial problem is that Black people supposedly get unfair advantages over whites.
That incredible viewpoint, so easily refuted by data and history, somehow is a live wire through conservative commentary. It’s being voiced by the Trump supporting majority on the U.S. Supreme Court. In oral arguments, they seemed to think that limiting redistricting intended to increase white representation in Congress is reverse racism against whites. With that twisted logic, they appear poised to gut what remains of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The impact will be to minimize the voice of Black people in Congress.
Similar racist thinking is evident in the administration carving out a discrete pathway for roughly 7,000 white South Africans to come to America, while conducting mass deportation raids primarily against Latinos and Blacks.
Where is the Republican majority willing to call out this naked racism in the Party of Lincoln?
Thirty years ago next year, Republican presidential nominee Bob Dole said this in accepting the party’s presidential nomination: “If there’s anyone who has mistakenly attached themselves to our party in the belief that we are not open to citizens of every race and religion … the exits … are for you.”
In 2008, when a woman called the Democratic presidential nominee an “Arab,” who could not be trusted, the Republican nominee, John McCain corrected her: “No, ma’am. He is a decent family man, a citizen that I just happen to have disagreement with on fundamental issues.”
I wrote a book published during the first Trump administration about Trump’s lifelong record of racism. In “What the Hell Do You Have to Lose? Trump’s War on Civil Rights,” I noted that Trump’s rise in Republican politics was tied to race-baiting. He used the “birther” conspiracy theory to gain a hold in the party by telling a racist lie that Obama was not born in the U.S.
Today, racism in America is flourishing under Trump.
MAGA boosters, if you don’t want to be labeled a racist movement, stop elevating racists, stop excusing racist ranting as “jokes.” Until then, don’t complain about the label.
Juan Williams is senior political analyst for Fox News Channel and a prize-winning civil rights historian. He is the author of the new book “New Prize for These Eyes: The Rise of America’s Second Civil Rights Movement.”