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In a recent Gallup poll, we learned that Trump’s approval rating holds firm in the low 40s, even though the polling period covered the episodes in which he told The Squad to go back to their shithouses and characterized Baltimore as infested by the wrong kinds of non-people.
How can this be possible? How can a man who spews such obvious racism have the support of almost half the country (a plurality that controls a disproportionate number of electoral college votes)?
The answer is that Trump’s racism is not a flaw in his public persona…it’s one of his superpowers. As people in the tech industry would say, his racism is a feature — not a bug.
How does it work? He’s provoking those of us who understand and hate actual racism into calling him a racist. A significant portion of Trump supporters think that as long as they have a Black friend or speak nicely to the Black guy at work and haven’t gotten caught using the N-word lately, then they’re not racist.
Any get confronted with uncomfortable facts:
Trillions of dollars have been stolen from Black people, in terms of theft of labor and outright theft. White people received more financial assistance from the government than Black people ever got in the form of subsidized public housing. They’ve inherited housing equity that is not equitable. Blacks and Hispanics are arrested for minor drug offenses at 4 to 5 times the rate of whites, even though drug usage rates are roughly the same. “Tough on…