The Proof That Racism, Not Economic Distress, Produced Trump's Presidency
Channel: Jason Zenith
Date: 2019-08-19

Racism Put Trump In the White House, Not Economic Distress.

That's the case that Mehdi Hasan of Al-Jazeera television (Qatar) makes with facts and statistics.

Another fact: if, as some assert, people voted for Trump out of disillusionment with the betrayal of progressive principles and policies by the Democrats, then those voters must be idiots. Yet it takes relative sophistication to understand the Democrats' scam. If it was thirst for progressive policies that Trump voters were after, they would logically have voted for the Green Party ticket headed by Jill Stein. Officially the Green Party only got 2% of the "popular" vote. Even the rightwing Libertarian Gary Johnson got more: 8%, four times as many votes as the Greens.

Trump voters were disproportionately well-heeled, not the dispossessed workers of leftie myth.

Trump voters are reactionaries, xenophobes, hyper-national chauvinists, and racists. Especially racists. Trump's main theme in his campaign was vulgar demonization of Hispanics. (His second big theme was attacks on Clinton, his opponent for the presidency.)

This segment appeared in the middle of an interview Hasan conducted with Noam Chomsky. "Noam Chomsky on the new Trump era-  UpFront special," November 25, 2016. This interview was conducted shortly after Trump's "election" but before he assumed the presidency on inauguration day, January 20, 2017.

Chomsky says Jill Stein's opinion that Clinton's climate change program would be no different from Trump's is "madness." He takes Clinton's campaign rhetoric at face value. 

With Clinton we would have gotten hypocrisy,the tribute vice pays to virtue, just as Obama ramped up oil drilling in the U.S. hugely, even opening the Arctic regions to drilling. Of course with Trump we have climate denialism, a backward step.

Chomsky high-handedly says the only "moral" vote is to vote Democratic since they're the lesser evil. This advice means being trapped forever in the straitjacket of the corporate-imperialist two-party political cartel, with the U.S. becoming ever more repressive and aggressive. People simply have to go through the political wilderness of building a genuine opposition that can eventually take power. The first step is building up the opposition party, the Green Party.

The interview is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jB54XxbgI0E&t=432s