Donald Trump took a break on Sunday from attacking black athletes over a silent, peaceful protest waged against racism to claim that “this has nothing to do with race.” No, really, he said that:
“This has nothing to do with race,” he said. “I’ve never said anything about race. This has nothing to do with race or anything else. This has to do with respect for our country, and respect for our flag.”
It’s not just the fact that—as so many people have observed, torch-wielding neo-Nazis include “many fine people,” according to Trump, while kneeling football players are “sons of bitches” that makes this about race. It’s not just the fact that the anthem protest is about race and has been from the beginning. It’s also, as Philip Bump reminds us, that Donald Trump’s campaign was built around race from the beginning:
In addition to his explicit racial arguments (starting with his disparagement of immigrants from Mexico), Trump repeatedly insisted that he would stand behind and defend America’s police — leveraging hostility to Black Lives Matter for his own purposes.
At the same time, Trump warned of spiking crime rates, at one point retweeting a racially loaded — and wildly inaccurate — image arguing that most white people who were murdered were victims of black people. By August 2016, after the Republican convention, a Post-ABC poll found that 60 percent of Americans thought Trump was biased against women and minorities — including 20 percent of people who planned to vote for him. In August of this year, Fox News asked a similar question, with more than half of the country and 15 percent of Republicans saying he doesn’t respect racial minorities.
Trump again highlighted the racial divide he’s trying to stoke on Monday morning with a tweet lauding the patriotism of NASCAR drivers. About that …
Dale Earnhardt Jr., the son of NASCAR legend Dale Earnhardt and a top NASCAR driver in his own right, had a swift response.
It’s all about race, though. It has always been all about race with Trump, a man who basically got into politics because he was so enraged by the existence of a black president, let alone a successful, respected, downright iconic one. That rage at a black president came after decades of evidence that Donald Trump is a flaming racist, and it was the foundation for the racially divisive, dog whistle-laden campaign Trump ran, a campaign that, returning to Philip Bump’s analysis, was fueled by exactly that appeal to racism:
Racial attitudes were a “major factor” in why less-well-educated whites backed his candidacy so strongly, another report conducted after the election found. Exit polling showed that voters most worried about the economy more heavily favored Hillary Clinton. Trump’s voters were twice as likely to say that whites face a lot of discrimination as they were to say that black people did.
Colin Kaepernick’s silent protest, kneeling during the national anthem, was about race in that it was prompted by police killings of black people. Donald Trump has made it about race in even more ways, but he’s done nothing so much as prove Kaepernick’s point.