Trump is obviously racist and divisive.
Trump has delivered insane results for minority groups, and has done things even supposed 'progressive' candidates wouldn't do. All this has convinced me that the man is clearly not a racist, despite constant claims otherwise.
Also, I suppose I am somewhat immune to the racism claims against trump. My parents are immigrants, as is my entire family. My parents were the first ones on the Trump bandwagon in 2016, followed by the rest of my family. I thought they had gone off their rocker and thought the man was nuts, despite being a Republican leaning voter. I voted against him in 2016. I thought he was clearly a racist and would hurt immigrants, like my uncle. However, Trump became president, and my uncle's case suddenly went faster. All this talk about how he was delaying immigration simply didn't pan out for anyone in my family. My uncle became a citizen a few years ago, and now the entire family is voting Trump. My sister-in-law (who is Hispanic) is also voting Trump, along with a bunch of her family. They didn't 4 years ago.
Funnily, enough, most of my friends growing up (who are mostly non-white) are either Trump voters or are okay with Trump (like they do not believe people who vote for him are racist). I do have friends who believe that all Trump voters are nuts, and they are mostly the white friends I made in my super-elite college. I do have non-white friends from college who are also against Trump, but given how few non-whites there are in elite colleges to begin with, that's the minority for me.. Even more amazingly, despite my own immigrant family and my sister-in-law's supporting Trump, the only family I have that is rabidly anti-Trump are my white relatives (who are more highly educated than anyone in my non-white family, I suppose).
The fact is Hacker News and most of these elite media outlets cater to an audience of mostly white, educated, coastal liberals. Their experiences do not match the reality of every day Americans, including black and brown and immigrant ones. I would not be surprised to see massive black and brown turnout for Trump. Perhaps not majorities, but enough to give the democrats real cause for concern.
As an outsider to the US bunfight, your statement seems, based on what we see, pretty self-evident.
It suits some people to conflate immigration policy and racism. It then allows them to then label anyone opposed to immigration as racist. It is further confounded by the fact that those people that are deeply racist are almost always opposed to immigration. They do it all the time in the UK and I see no reason why it would be different in the US.
For "evidence" of Trump's racism, most will bring up his clumsy statement when he first announced he was running for president. To me he was clearly referring to hardened criminals and gangs, others say he is referring to every illegal immigrant. Again if you take it in the worse possible intent yes then you could say it is racist. However that is the worst possible interpretation and it shouldn't be your default. From my observations Trump was speaking off the cuff and I can forgive a poorly worded statement.
I am not particularly partisan (I am a centre -> centre-right libertarian when taking political compass tests). However after spending a lot of time paying attention to what is going on both sides will try to spin any issue in their favour.
I've been duped a few times by both sides of the political spectrum when it comes to contentious statements. Sp when a media outlet claims someone has made such a statement, I find the original clip of what was said and listen to it in context before I form an opinion.
https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/456523-donald-trumps...
I don't believe he is a racist. He has strong opinions and no fear of hiding them. That is actually a huge draw for people voting for him.
Accusations of racism are mostly political play.
I don't really see how it is self-evident though. What do you think makes him racist? The Obama stuff could be seen as that but I am unsure if it is racism or craziness, but I would tend to think the latter to be more correct.
You want to understand, read outside your bubble. Not extremist view, just speeches and responses to direct questions and whatnot.
Some reports may seem extremist because of the shocking response they have to our potus. It's a normal reaction to a fundamentally troubling character that's somehow in power. Somehow its not honest for them to speak out like that, while the candidate gets every benefit of the doubt?
I suggest using those contortionist skills, to understand outrage and shock at the spectacle of an incoherent, largely immoral money-grabber in the White House.
But he is judgmental about everyone and I don't think it is connected to race.
His voters specifically let him say controversial stuff. They like it if it hits sensibilities of his political enemies since it signals his voters that the others just think themselves to be exalted above the allegedly less sophisticated members of society.
Which is funny because his "strong opinions" usually contain much bigotry.
I didn't cast any vote in the thread, but here's an explanation. If I did decide to vote, I would definitely downvote it, since it only repeats a cliche that has been said over a thousand times, even though I, too, consider it as "fact". The problem is, saying "Trump is racist and divisive" does not add any new insight to the discussion, and the only outcome is attracting angry yelling from the most politically biased people, hence triggering an unproductive flamewar (I think you've just experienced exactly what I described. When you said "what in the god damn was that", I think you could see my points already). When I see something like this, I usually downvotes all related comments and their replies regardless of which side they're arguing for (thus, all angry pro-Trump and anti-Trump comments would be downvoted - only downvoting the original thread is unfair), as nothing good can come out of it.
I believe this strategy can promote what the Hacker News Guidelines is trying to achieve.
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
> Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
Saying either "$controversial_politician is good" or "$controversial _politician is bad" violates all of those Guidelines above.
For controversial political discussions, I found the worst thing you can do is posting a general criticism, such as "$something is bad". Instead of doing that, a better strategy is talking about a specific issue, for example, instead of saying "$politician is bad", it's better to pick and criticize one of his policies, and to analyse its perceived harmful effects due to the policy. The more specific the criticism, the better. While it's still saying "$politican is bad", but it contains new insights and information that prevent the discussion from being dragged into a name-calling flamewar (it may still be a flamewar, but with fewer name-calling posts and more discussions). I found it dramatically improves the quality of discussions.