If your wife keeps showing up with black eyes muttering that she fell down the stairs, it merits asking every day. If Trump stopped pandering to white nationalists, people would stop having to ask.
> The results are sobering. We began by asking eligible voters how “convincing” they found a dog-whistle message lifted from Republican talking points. Among other elements, the message condemned “illegal immigration from places overrun with drugs and criminal gangs” and called for “fully funding the police, so our communities are not threatened by people who refuse to follow our laws.”
> Almost three out of five white respondents judged the message convincing. More surprising, exactly the same percentage of African-Americans agreed, as did an even higher percentage of Latinos.
> These numbers do not translate directly into support for the Republican Party; too many other factors are at play. Nevertheless, the results tell us something important: a majority across the groups we surveyed did not repudiate Trump-style rhetoric as obviously racist and divisive, but instead agreed with it.
If the media had any self-awareness, it wouldn’t automatically label points a majority of non white people “agreed with” as “obviously racist and divisive.”
As someone from a third-world country I felt this way over the pearl-clutching when Trump said “s—thole countries.” It’s a crass and very cruel thing to say. Definitely offensive. But not racist. People don’t leave Bangladesh because they’re racist, they do so because of the poverty, arsenic in the water, etc.
Is it hard? It seems to me he does it quite plainly. I feel like people who reach for defense of this man are having to face their own biases and demons and it's ugly.
At a certain point you get tired of answering, “have you beaten your wife today?” Even if the answer is always no.