Let's drop the euphemisms: Donald Trump is a racist president (2018)

Richard Wolffe, Let's drop the euphemisms: Donald Trump is a racist president (14 July 2018), The Guardian.

• Trump is a walking contradiction – but his nativism is consistent.

• Watching this pinball president ricochet around Europe, you could be forgiven for thinking there’s no method to Donald Trump’s madness. Nato is both a rip-off and very strong. Theresa May’s Brexit plan is both pathetic and terrific. Trump’s interview with the Sun was both fake news and generally fine. Trump has all the consistency of Katy Perry’s Hot N Cold, except when it comes to two things: immigrants and Vladimir Putin.

• Immigration is where Trump’s journey begins and ends: the message running all the way through this stick of rock.

• There was a time when politicians like you preferred to use a dog whistle, but those days seem quaint now. There’s something to be said for using a foghorn to blast your racism across the continents. At least we all know what kind of politics you represent.
  • About Donald Trump.

• The president of the United States just threatened the safety and security of immigrants the world over.

• So now we know. The reason Trump ordered the separation of thousands of immigrant children from their parents – some never to be reunited again – was because they better watch themselves. They are changing the culture and it better stop or else they’ll get hurt. Trump has mused before about how good it would be to deport people without judges messing things up. He doesn’t consider his own country’s ample immigration laws to be actual laws that he respects. It’s one short step for a president – but one long step for democracy – to go from disrespecting the laws to ignoring them. This is the language and mentality of so many extreme-right and neo-Nazi parties in Europe. So in the Trump spirit of saying it loud, it’s time to drop the euphemisms: Trump is today’s first major government to be led by the racist far right. It’s not some kind of new populist politics; it’s the old National Front.

• The moral choices that Trump poses to anyone with a conscience or love of country are only made more clear by the ludicrous irony of his own story.