The GOP's Racist Rot Began Long Before Trump

https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-gops-racist-rot-began-long-before-trump?ref=home

The GOP’s Racist Rot Began Long Before Trump
The party’s rot didn’t begin with this president, but it’s collapsing beneath him.
Goldie Taylor
06.22.18 8:57 PM ET

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Decades of criminalizing the poor and disenfranchised and bedeviling anyone who was not white, male, Christian, and wealthy has finally cost us our standing in the world. Our allies look on in pity and horror as their once trusted partner—that shining light on the hill—now favors warlords, dictators, and autocrats.

The respectable Republicans told us that Donald Trump would surround himself with advisers who would serve as a check on his worst impulses. Instead, he installed people like Sarah Huckabee Sanders—who wastes no breath lying to protect him—and relies on a cadre of sycophants and anchors-for-hire, like Jeanine Pirro and Sean Hannity, to slavishly feed him and the rest of their audiences a daily dose of democracy-busting fan-fiction.

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We should remember their cowardice as indictment after indictment of some of his closest advisers is handed down. We should remember that they did not disavow people like neo-Confederate and alt-right hero Corey Stewart or former judge and child molester Roy Moore. We should remember Trump’s silence after four black victims were killed in a Tennessee Waffle House, his “fine people” on both sides remarks during the Charlottesville press conference, and his failure to speak out about any number of atrocities committed here in the U.S., while quickly responding—even before the facts could be determined—about mass casualties in Paris or London committed by people of color. We should remember today’s House vote that could strip school lunches from thousands of schoolchildren.

When taken to task, the president’s response is the same as it always was: a Twitter feed festooned with brickbats aimed at those who oppose his most vile impulses.

We should remember that his grown children and his companies have profited handsomely from his selective glad-handing with foreign leaders. We should remember his embrace of Putin, asking that Russia be readmitted to the G-7 despite their known interference in U.S. elections, annexation of the Crimean Peninsula and the jailing and murder of political dissents and journalists. We should remember his attempted Muslim travel ban, concocted by Miller, and how he ordered thousands of innocent immigrant children—at least one as young as 8 months old, another with Down syndrome, and some too young to remember their mother’s names—forcibly separated from their parents and held in cages in an attempt to bully Congress into funding a border wall.

We should also remember how he demonized NFL players for exercising their First Amendment right to free speech, while pandering to white supremacists after Heather Heyer was mowed down and killed for daring to march for justice.

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We must decide that the folks subsisting on broken promises in Appalachia, the black boys dying in the streets of north St. Louis, our Muslim brothers and sisters praying in mosques throughout the land, the Guatemalan children crying in pens uncertain of when or if the people who love them will ever come back, the babies with untold health conditions and inadequate schools drinking poisoned water in Flint, the families without electrical power in Puerto Rico and unable to reach the mainland, the Palestinian journalist who faces a sniper’s bullet.

We can right this road. But we must do it. We can and we must throw the bastards out—Trump and every elected official who stands with him.

We must decide that every single life matters. We must decide that the Republic matters.


https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-gops-racist-rot-began-long-before-trump?ref=home