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For years people have debated whether Donald Trump is a racist.
For some, the answer was always an obvious yes. When you launch your campaign by calling Mexican immigrants rapists and drug dealers, claim a Mexican American judge can’t fairly adjudicate a lawsuit against you because of his ethnicity, call African nations “shitholes,” and suggest we need more immigrants from Norway and fewer from Haiti or Central America, you’ve earned the title. To say nothing of soft-pedaling Nazis in Charlottesville, of course.
The evidence of Trump’s racial bias is clear; it stretches back decades and is available for all who are willing to see.
But for others, the charge was unfair. Not only Trump supporters, whose denial is at least understandable but even those who are critical of him.
“Well,” they would aver. “Maybe it’s not fair to call him a racist. I mean, we don’t know what’s in his heart.”
But as Amanda Marcotte explained after watching the always execrable Chuck Todd inquire into the aortic nature of Trump’s prejudice, the question of whether one is a racist “in their heart” is a bizarre one:
Let us imagine for a minute a person who loves, say, the Philadelphia Eagles as…
