Trump's Overt Racism Is Uniting Democrats and Unnerving Some Republicans

[riversedge]

Trump’s Overt Racism Is Uniting Democrats and Unnerving Some Republicans

https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/trumps-overt-racism-is-uniting-democrats-and-unnerving-some-republicans

By John Cassidy

July 15, 2019

On Monday, instead of backing down from his weekend tweets, Donald Trump dug further into his playbook for incendiary right-wing demagogues.

Photograph by Sarah Silbiger / Bloomberg / Getty

As Donald Trump would be the first to tell you, he’s a political genius. Certainly, in a period of a little over twenty-four hours on Sunday and Monday, he accomplished three things that many observers had considered impossible. First, he made it even more clear than it was before that he is a garden-variety racist. Second, he united the entire House Democratic Caucus behind the four young, female firebrands who have been tussling with Nancy Pelosi. Third, he prompted at least some elected Republicans to criticize him publicly.

Since the G.O.P. is confined to a state of what seems like permanent vassalage to Trump and his MAGA supporters, the final development was perhaps the most surprising, and it provided an answer to a question that has been hanging for at least two and half years: Just how far does the President have to go before his supine Party colleagues on Capitol Hill muster the independence to register some semblance of a protest?

For the congressman Mike Turner, who represents Ohio’s Tenth District, which includes the city of Dayton, it seems like the answer came when Trump suggested on Sunday that Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib should “go back” to “the places from which they came,” even though, for three of them—Ocasio-Cortez, Pressley, and Tlaib—that would have meant quickening to the Bronx, Chicago, and Detroit, respectively. “I am confident that every Member of Congress is a committed American,” Turner wrote on Twitter on Monday. “@realDonaldTrump’s tweets from this weekend were racist and he should apologize. We must work as a country to rise above hate, not enable it.”

In defying the online MAGA trolls and Sean Hannitys of the world, Turner deserves credit. So does Will Hurd, of Texas, the only black Republican in the House, who said that Trump’s comments were “racist and xenophobic,” and also dumb. “While you had a civil war going on within the Democratic Party, between the far left and the rest of the Party, and now they have circled the wagons and are starting to protect one another,” Hurd told CNN...........................................

[marble falls]

1. Good. Trump will be one of our best recruiter and a sharp wedge in the GOP ...

yet. He'll condemn himself with his own words.

[raccoon]

2. Amen! Nt