Supporters of Donald Trump are more likely than other voters to tell pollsters that blacks are “lazy,” “violent” and “unintelligent.” Four out of five Trump backers say that discrimination against whites is as big a problem as discrimination against blacks. And only 39 percent of Trump supporters believe that President Obama was born in the United States.
.. Take something as simple as crossing the street. In one study by scholars at Portland State University and the University of Arizona, three black men and three white men played pedestrians trying to cross a street at a crosswalk. On average, a black pedestrian was passed by twice as many vehicles before a driver yielded.
.. teachers reviewing discipline reports in some cases were more likely to favor harsh punishment for a student named “Deshawn” or “Darnell” than one named “Greg” or “Jake.” And black children with appendicitis are less than halfas likely to get strong pain medication at an emergency room as white children with appendicitis.
.. Devah Pager of Harvard conducted a study of racial discrimination in New York City in 2004 by sending young black and white men to apply for jobs at 170 businesses, bearing fictitious and carefully matched résumés. She found that white applicants were more than twice as likely to get a call back; indeed, a white applicant purportedly just released from prison did no worse than a black applicant with a clean record.
.. This year, Pager published a follow-up based on what had happened to these businesses in the 2008 recession. She found that the companies that had discriminated were significantly more likely to have gone out of business — which may suggest a price tag for discrimination.
.. I was just in Detroit, where 9 percent of children suffer lead poisoning (more than in Flint); if this were happening to rich white children on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, there would be outraged demands for a national commission and reparations.
.. When opioids were primarily a black problem, America’s instinct was harsh prison sentences; now that it is mainly a white problem, we’re more compassionate and are improving treatment programs.
How the Clinton-Trump Race Got Close
Part of the answer is that a lot more Americans than we’d like to imagine are white nationalists at heart. Indeed, implicit appeals to racial hostility have long been at the core of Republican strategy; Mr. Trump became the G.O.P. nominee by saying outright what his opponents tried to convey with dog whistles.
.. As it happened, it failed to find any evidence of wrongdoing — but nonetheless wrote the report as if it had. And this was the beginning of an extraordinary series of hostile news stories about how various aspects of Mrs. Clinton’s life “raise questions” or “cast shadows,” conveying an impression of terrible things without saying anything that could be refuted.
.. The culmination of this process came with the infamous Matt Lauer-moderated forum, which might be briefly summarized as “Emails, emails, emails; yes, Mr. Trump, whatever you say, Mr. Trump.”
.. I still don’t fully understand this hostility, which wasn’t ideological. Instead, it had the feel of the cool kids in high school jeering at the class nerd.
The Problem with Trump Isn’t His Debating Skills
what was really outside any norm of decency was what he thought even after you had dutifully distilled away the incoherence and the manic improvisations. Talking, again, about President Obama’s birth certificate, he displayed not only the usual pathological inability to admit to an error—any error, ever—but an underlying racism so pervasive that it can’t help express itself even when trying to pass as something else.
.. Yet Trump continued last night his self-congratulations for compelling the President to do this, along with the grotesquely racist notion that it was “good for him” (i.e., for the President). It slowly dawned on the listener that this was all of a piece with the rest of Trump’s racial attitudes: he believes that, as a rich white man, he had a right to stop and frisk the President of the United States and demand that the uppity black man show him his papers. Stop-and-frisk isn’t just a form of policing for Trump; it’s a whole way of life.
.. It was of a line with his equally bizarre notion that owning a country club that doesn’t actively discriminate against black people is not a minimal requirement of law but a positive achievement of the owner.
.. His cruelty to Alicia Machado was unleavened by any apparent respect for her as a human being in any role other than as an envelope of flesh—an attitude he only doubled down on the following morning by complaining that she presented what he saw as an obvious problem as a reigning Miss Universe: she had gained “a massive amount of weight” (by Trump standards, that is). Again, this wasn’t a problem of how he chose to present his beliefs; the problem is with the beliefs. This wasn’t a question of preparation. It was that the things he actually believes are themselves repellent even when coherently presented. This was not a bad performance. This is a bad man.
Donald Trump’s Wild Night
He has made outrageous commonplace on the trail. And he went for it again on the debate stage.
he tried to interrupt 25 times in the first 26 minutes of the debate, according to Vox—and say a lot of wild, perplexing and untrue things that may well overstimulate the national fact-checking economy
.. Trump came off as an overconfident blowhard, the mouthy guy at the office meeting who never knew much about the topic, didn’t try to get himself up to speed in advance, interrupts all his female colleagues anyway, then tells them to wait until he’s done when they try to get a word in edgewise.
.. he scored points portraying her as a tired politician who had stayed in the game too long. But he did seem a lot less comfortable and more agitated than he does at his rallies, as if mass adulation suits him better than one-on-one confrontation
.. there does not seem to be a lot of recognition of just how remarkable some of Trump’s comments were. Some of those comments have become familiar through repetition, like his suggestion that in America’s minority neighborhoods, you can’t walk down the street without getting shot, or his claim that American jobs are “leaving in bigger numbers than ever,” when in fact unemployment has been cut in half since 2010. But as I’ve discovered after attending Trump rallies, many of us have become so desensitized to his outrageousness that it no longer sounds as abnormal as it is.
.. Janet Yellen is widely considered one of the least political people in Washington, but it barely seemed to register last night when Trump accused her of keeping monetary policy loose for purely political reasons—even though the policy should presumably be even looser if the economy were really in the shambles Trump says it is.
.. Trump also tried to push the preposterous notion that Clinton was a fervent birther, but a less effective one than Trump
.. And when Clinton insinuated that maybe he still isn’t paying the federal taxes that support troops, schools and health care, he again took the bait, not to deny that he’s a free rider, but to scoff that his taxes would just be wasted if he did pay them.
That was a pretty damning non-denial.
.. When Clinton pointed out that it would be a disaster if the country declared bankruptcy the way Trump’s companies have, he said he had just taken advantage of the laws for his own benefit, because “that’s what I do.”
.. it’s hard to imagine another presidential candidate expecting brownie points for allowing blacks in his club.
.. He denied last night that he had ever called global warming a Chinese hoax, even though the evidence remains on his Twitter account. He also clung to his disproven claim that he always opposed the war in Iraq, citing Sean Hannity as his character witness. Trump just keeps blustering through, never admitting error, always assuming his confidence projects authority.
.. “Because I settled that lawsuit with no admission of guilt…It’s just one of those things.”
It’s one of those things that won’t make the news tomorrow, even though “no admission of guilt” at least partially captures the Trump approach to politics.
.. He’s going to keep saying things that normal politicians don’t. He won’t apologize for them. He’ll attack the media for even questioning them. And his supporters will continue to love him for them.