Trump's Pattern of Racism

Even though Donald Trump maintains that his tweets last week were not racist: It's part of a pattern.

Let's be clear, first, that the four women of "the squad" are pushing extreme views, and Trump is right for calling out some of the things they've said. However, his attacks this week were grounded less in policy differences than in pure racism.

1) Trump told these women they should "go back" to "crime infested places from which they came". He has never said something like this to Bernie Sanders, or Elizabeth Warren, or Nancy Pelosi, or Joe Biden, or Hillary Clinton, despite his policy differences with them. But they are all white. Trump doesn't necessarily like it if white people disagree with him, but he's not going to tell them to leave, because in his view white people belong here and people of color don't.

2) Last year Trump lamented that we have too many immigrants from "shithole countries" and not enough from "places like Norway". Yet Norway is the exact country Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez consistently hold up as a model for what they (perhaps misleadingly) call "democratic socialism". Trump isn't asking anyone to go back and fix Norway before we allow immigrants from there. But again, nearly all Norwegians are white.

3) Two summers ago, after the "unite the right" rally in Charlottesville, where neo-Nazis marched through the streets saying derogatory things about America and chanting antisemitic slurs, Trump said there were fine people among that group. They were all white.

4) Three years ago, when Trump was running for president and was also fighting a court battle over his fraudulent university, he claimed he couldn't get a fair trial because he was assigned a "Mexican" judge. The judge, Gonzalo Curiel, was born in Indiana and is a lifelong U.S. citizen. But in Trump's view, Curiel doesn't belong here because he is not white.

5) Going back even further, Trump was a prominent voice in the "birther" conspiracy, alleging that Barack Obama was not a U.S. citizen. In Trump's view Obama does not belong here because he is not white.

This week's tweets were not an isolated incident. When all the evidence is laid out, it forms a pattern that is hard to explain as anything other than pure racism.