Why You Shouldn’t Call Trump Supporters Racist
By: Jonah Woolley
Tags: Politics, Donald Trump, Trump Supporters, Racism

In the nearly 3 years President Donald Trump has been in office, a lot of things have changed. Our national debt has ballooned, public trust in the media has been whittled away to nonexistence, we’ve gone inactive on healthcare and climate change, and our foreign policy has become a joke.

The change that has been more impactful than all of these, however, is in our political discourse. The President has defied all kinds of political norms, from calling the press the “enemy of the people” to going on the record making hundreds of blatant lies.

This has fueled a lot of divisiveness on both sides of the political spectrum. Debates on almost every issue have become more extreme and closed off, and most Americans now doubt the intelligence of people who disagree with them, or believe the other side is “brainwashed”.

No issue shows this divisiveness more than race. The word “racist” has become one of the most used words in politics, being thrown around regularly by left-wing commentators to describe the President and the GOP as a whole.

This is unsurprising. The President’s rhetoric has been very questionable — he has repeatedly stoked racial tensions and fear of others throughout his presidency, going as far as to label himself as a nationalist.

Many have taken Trump’s rise to be a racist awakening of America as a whole. They think the ideologies that Trump has exhibited are again being adopted by the general public, and to be fair, many white supremacist and white nationalist groups have been emboldened by Trump’s presidency.

However, things aren’t as black and white as people think. While Trump’s election should raise some eyebrows about the racial attitudes of his supporters and Americans in general, we also need to look at it from the other side.

On the left, Trump has become synonymous with hatred and bigotry, but the story is much different for those on the right. After any of Trump’s controversies, liberals will come out and wonder aloud how anyone can support the President in good conscience, thinking that his supporters must stand with him on everything and think even his lowest actions are justified, but in reality, that isn’t how they feel.

The majority of Trump supporters don’t love everything he does, but stick with him because he’s their only choice.

Millions of people are lifelong Republicans, and even if they don’t support Trump all the way, he is still a Republican President. To them, even with his flaws, he is better than a Democrat in the White House.

Most Trump supporters don’t like all of his racist statements or repeated lies, but they tolerate them so they can keep a Republican in office. For the most part, they like his stances on economic policy and the environment and trade, so they stick with him even when he’s having so many controversies.

But how did Trump become the top Republican to begin with? After all, he had to beat out one of the most crowded Republican primary fields in history to become the GOP’s presidential nominee, and there were other candidates in the field that shared his positions on almost everything and weren’t so outwardly racist.

The reason Trump succeeded in that wasn’t because he managed to bring out all of the closeted racists, it’s because he struck a chord on immigration.

Most people who want a border wall or want checks on Muslims entering the country aren’t bigots or nationalists, they just want the country to be a safer place. They see immigrants and Muslims as a national security threat, and when Trump got up and made addressing those threats his priority, he got a lot of people excited.

Certainly, not all of his supporters like everything he’s done even on immigration — his less savory moves like his family separation policy couldn’t have been anticipated by his voters and still are not endorsed by most of them. If it was up to them, they would want the situation to be handled more humanely, but most of them are glad to at least have someone who cares about the issue they care about.

So when someone says they support Trump, the first thing you think shouldn’t be that they’re condoning racism and the abuse of immigrants. They voted for and continue to support reform of our immigration system to make the country safer, and they support a President who will sign off on the other conservative economic and social policies they want to see enacted.

Most of them don’t buy into his lies, aren’t extremists or nationalists and don’t hate the press, although there certainly are some who are like that.

What we have to remember with Trump supporters is that they won’t be Trump supporters forever. Whether it’s in 2020 or 2024, Trump will eventually leave office and these people will go back to just supporters of the GOP. Their banner holder will no longer be a habitual liar and fear-mongering bigot, it will likely be someone far more moderate and traditional, the typical conservative we’ve practically forgotten about.

When Trump is gone, we’re going to have to contend with the effects he’s had on our political climate. He has fueled a lot of hatred and divisiveness, that’s undeniable, but there are plenty of people who are unaffected, supporters of his that disagree with his rhetoric and still want to find a common ground with Democrats.

If liberals get baited by Trump, and lump in all of his supporters as racist, that’s going to turn those people off and perpetuate the divisiveness the President has created.

The healing process post-Trump will be slow, and things may never be entirely back to normal, but liberals need to give it a chance. We need to keep our minds open to the possibility of restoring a normal political climate, and we need to accept that Trump’s supporters aren’t all racist, and there is still a chance for unity.