Welcome to DU!
The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards.
Join the community:
Create a free account
Support DU (and get rid of ads!):
Become a Star Member
Latest Breaking News
General Discussion
The DU Lounge
All Forums
Issue Forums
Culture Forums
Alliance Forums
Region Forums
Support Forums
Help & Search
Yes, it's really this simple: Donald Trump is a cranky, obsessive racist
SATURDAY, SEP 9, 2017 09:00 AM EDT
Yes, it’s really this simple: Donald Trump is a cranky, obsessive racist
Trump is a simple man driven by a single-minded racist obsession: delegitimizing Barack Obama's presidency
AMANDA MARCOTTE
No one in the reality-based world can really deny, at this late date, that Donald Trump is a racist, but there continues to be some debate over the extent that white supremacy drives Trump’s decisions, hangups and obsessions. I learned this, to my chagrin, on Wednesday, when I tweeted out a link to a Think Progress piece by Ian Millhiser that debunked Jeff Sessions’ claim that DACA is unconstitutional.
“Trump accusing Obama of overreach is always rooted in a belief Obama was never a rightful president,” Link to tweet
" target="_blank">I mused, adding in a follow-up, “As with most things Trump, it really goes back to racism. The only reason to believe Obama was incompetent and illegitimate is racism.”
While it might seem a bit odd to link a discussion of the constitutionality of an executive order to racist animosity toward Obama, I felt it was justified in this case. Both during the Sessions speech and while reading Millhiser’s takedown, I was struck by how unnecessary it was for the Trump administration to challenge the constitutionality of DACA. The president has a lot of latitude to set priorities for immigration enforcement — which is the power that Obama invoked to justify DACA in the first place — so all Trump had to do was declare that he was rearranging immigration enforcement priorities. To declare Obama’s actions illegal struck me as further evidence of Trump’s endless obsession with delegitimizing Obama’s presidency — an obsession that is rooted in Trump’s racism.
Kevin Drum of Mother Jones took me to task both on Twitter and in a blog post titled, “Racism Is Not the Explanation for Everything Republicans Do,” in which he argued that Republicans had taken an obstructionist attitude toward Obama as a political move, scolding, “it’s unwise to make [racism] the go-to explanation for everything.”
more
http://www.salon.com/2017/09/09/yes-its-really-this-simple-donald-trump-is-a-cranky-obsessive-racist/
