Donald Trump is not a racist per se. He doesn't spew racial epithets. He doesn't overtly traffic in prejudices or any of the other heinous accusations of knee-jerk leftwingnut crazies like the ones that have been chasing him around California recently.
And as far as anybody knows, he has not and did not ask for the endorsement of the KKK that he received on Friday:
INTERVIEWER: You’re paying attention to the presidential elections?
IMPERIAL WIZARD: Oh, yeah.
INTERVIEWER: In your personal opinion who is best for the job?
IMPERIAL WIZARD: I think Donald Trump would be best for the job.
INTERVIEWER: For president?
IMPERIAL WIZARD: Yeah. The reason a lot of Klan members like Donald Trump is because a lot of what he believes we believe in.
When I saw that vid, I honestly suspected that it was a parody, a stunt, or a hoax. Maybe a Saturday Night Live bit, if not particularly funny and more than a little skin-crawling.
Further research yielded that no, this is an actual news story and an on-the-level interview conducted by the NBC affiliate in Richmond, Virginia.
You know the long time disagreement that the Director and I have had over his assertion that the GOP has been "infiltrated by progressives," and how I've been arguing that that infiltration is actually happening now under the rubric of Trumpmania? Well looky what else it's seeping into the party but the Democrat Party's one-time domestic terrorist arm.
I'm not going to dignify the Grand Exalted Imperial Omnipotent Stomper's "We're patriotic Christian Americans" bullshit. I didn't even want to listen to the eerily papally dressed critter for as long as I did. But I endured the reprehensible fecality because I was waiting for the inevitable other shoe to drop, and it did when he tried to draw a distinction between "white supremacy" and "white separatism". And that ought to tell you all you need to know about who the Ku Klux Klan still are: flaming racists (Besides, as a practical matter, given that whites are still the majority in America, if a shrinking one, how would we go about "separating" ourselves from minorities? Wouldn't that have to take the effect of separating minorities from us? And what form would that take, especially since, apart from illegal aliens, the remainder are American citizens with Constitutional rights? Doesn't that question matter?). The only thing that has changed about them is their tactics, which explains his claim that "today's Klan" is no longer a "hate" group but a "political" organization. Which metaphorically translates to night-riding in minivans, I guess. As the Black Klan spokesman observed in the second vid, when the KKK starts burning crosses on their own lawns, perhaps we can revisit their blasphemous claim that it represents "God's light". Why they don't change their name to the "National Association for the Defense of White People" (NADWP) to at least make a token effort to shed that indelibly racist image they claim no longer applies is frankly baffling. Or maybe it isn't.
Again, Trump has not and is not seeking white supremist endorsements like this, and I, for one, am not accusing him otherwise. But I cannot help but wonder why he is not disavowing them. Why would any decent human being seeking high elective office not come out after such an expression of support and make clear that he doesn't want their backing and does not represent anything they stand for? I would have already expected a statement to that effect from the Trump campaign, just so there were no lingering doubts. I mean, how many votes would that really cost him? Or do we really want to know?
And yet, just as when he didn't disavow David Duke, so now all that comes from TrumpWorld on this toe-curling subject, up to now anyway, is....
Is this the kind of company Trump wants to keep? And if so, why?
My theory remains the same:
Trump did not set out to attract the Klansman vote, but that was an unanticipated side effect of the wedge issue he used to try and sell himself as a "conservative". In other words, Trump, a liberal Democrat who clearly thinks that all conservatives and Republicans are "racists," depicted himself on illegal immigration in the way that he believes REAL conservatives and Republicans think and are motivated; not by the Constitution and the rule of law, but by "nativism" and "xenophobia". So instead of emphasizing the former, he emphasized the latter - "Mexican rapists," etc. - because that's the "language" he thought he needed to speak, and because he wasn't fluent in the other one. And that just happened to have been right in the wheelhouse of animals like David Duke.
And the Grand Exalted Imperial Omnipotent Stomper above.
In short, he's committed to this angle, and if he were to backtrack on any of it in the slightest, he fears it would be seen as weakness - to say nothing of bowing to "political correctness," also a concept that he and his drones don't understand (being "anti-PC" doesn't mean being a jerk and/or a monster).
But then, as far into the Kool-Aid tank as Trumplicans are now, would they really even raise an eyebrow at their hero giving the KKK the bum's rush? He's already told his supporters at one of his rallies to their faces that he could shoot one of them right there on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan (or anyplace else) and the rest would only embrace him more. There's no reason to think that he was kidding about that. So what would it cost The Donald to repudiate the Klan? Especially with a weather eye toward the fall campaign (and given that he contradicted himself on illegal immigration months ago)?
Unless....maybe it's not so much that Trump is a racist as that he just quietly outsources that vile impulse to those who have adopted it as their chosen profession. It's up to him to prove otherwise.
All I know is what Streiff did me the favor of reiterating as I have been repeating since last June 15th:
Donald Trump is personally validating every liberal Democrat Upper West Side stereotype of the Republican Party and doing damage that will be impossible to overcome.
Mission (almost) accomplished.
Exit question: The Stomper also said this:
If Donald Trump dropped out tomorrow I’d support Kasich before I would Ted Cruz.
INTERVIEWER: Why is that?
IMPERIAL WIZARD: Because he’s not an American citizen.
Cruz IS an American citizen; the issue is whether he's constitutionally eligible for the presidency. Bringing us to the question: Do the "progressive" infiltrators not know how to speak our language, and does this mean that Trump's campaign store will soon be doing a brisk business hawking white hoods?
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