2020

:: politics, doomed

What sort of people will vote for Trump in 2020, if he lasts that long?

Racists will.

After his tirades of the last few days it’s completely clear that Trump is a racist. He’s no longer a ‘dog whistle’ racist: telling people from minorities to ‘go home’ and supporting ‘send her back’ chants at rallies is explicitly & openly racist. And there’s evidence that this is deliberate policy.

Here’s the thing: if you vote for a racist, then you are a racist. There’s a very common argument that somehow people who vote for something didn’t really understand what they were voting for: this argument was made about brexit and about Trump’s election. The argument is, essentially, that the people who voted for, say, Trump or brexit in 2016 were just too stupid to know what it was they were voting for. The argument is that people who disagree with us are stupid, that people who vote for racists aren’t, really, racists, they are just too stupid to understand what they’re voting for. They’re not, you know, bad people, they just have weak minds, unlike our superior strong minds.

Really? Do you really think that someone who votes for a man who tells minorities to ‘go home’, and who chant ‘send her back’ at rallies don’t understand what that means? Of course they understand what it means. People who do this are racists — perhaps, perhaps, they are stupid racists, but they are racists — and they are supporting a racist president.

If Trump wins in 2020 then racism & bigotry will have won in the US.