Is Donald Trump “racist?” Seriously? Do You Still Have to Ask?

Beginning with Nixon’s southern strategy of 1968, the seeds of the current GOP’s white nationalist electoral strategy and policy platform has been hiding in plain sight for over five decades.

Appeals to northern urban hard hats and Wallace supporting segregationists. The school busing wars of the 70’s. Attacks on affirmative action. Reagan’s demonizing of Black “welfare queens”. The law and order fixations on urban hellscapes. Lee Atwater’s Willie Horton ads. Active campaigns of voter suppression. The systematic legal neutering of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. The mainstreaming of birther cards against our first African-American President.

In short, the GOP positioning itself as the party of White backlash and resentment is nothing new. Far from it. The difference (and we can quibble over whether it was an admirable difference) is that in the recent Republican past, racially-based views were coded. They were offered through often-inelegant dog whistles. They were couched in terms of states rights or small government or public safety or personal freedom.

They were racial and arguably racist policies. They were designed to appeal to an aging white male demographic who longed for their idyllic if illusory version of American history where White people didn’t have to share income or influence with immigrants or people of color. Again, turning back the clock on minority gains may have been the de facto outcomes of the GOP’s platform. But they at least adhered to the modern political mores of not openly admitting racism or race-based intent.

Until now.

In the past week alone, we have seen VP Mike Pence blithely praise the detention centers/ concentration camps that have seen babies die, children cages and families separated. All a tragic function of the trumped-up “national emergency” at the southern border. An emergency essentially fabricated to rile up the white GOP base against the specter of brown invading hordes from South and Central America and Mexico. The fact that Pence has feigned more outrage at NFL players kneeling at a Colts game than he demonstrated at the squalid, inhumane conditions of the camps tells you all you need to know about this administration’s prioritizing the complete demonization of people of color.

This should come as zero surprise. In his pre-political life, Donald Trump was found to have committed ongoing racial housing discrimination by the Justice Department. He called for the execution of 5 Black New York teenagers for a crime they didn’t commit (and continued to long after they were forensically exonerated.)

He raged against purported foreign bogeymen — Chinese companies, Japanese carmakers, Latin immigrants and Islamic terrorists — as the source of what he viewed as America’s perpetual decline that only he could ameliorate.

And of course, Trump made his most significant political bones by perpetuating and championing the racist canard that Barack Obama’s wasn’t born in America — an effort to patently delegitimize our first Black President. For being Black.

Since taking office, Trump’s playbook has been a wildly transparent gambit to divide America along clearly race-based lines. To stir his base with race-based attacks. To vilify minorities as “other” and less American than white folks. And he’s pursued this strategy in a progressively more and more overtly racist way.

Donald Trump may feign phony outrage over being called a racist. But there is no longer any legitimate case that he isn’t. He will gladly create a racial chasm in America to serve his own re-election interests. No codes. No dog whistles. Just flat-out, uncut, unmitigated racism. His political calculus is that enough Americans want a restoration of white superiority after decades of increasing demographic diversity. And he will destroy our shared national character to achieve it.

Need proof? Trump began his first campaign event by demeaning Mexicans as rapists and murderers and drug dealers. He painted a dystopian view of modern urban crime not supported by an empirical evidence. He flat-out dismissed the impartiality of a judge because of his “Mexican” descent.

Trump sought to ban all immigrants from Muslim-majority nations. He defended Neo Nazi protesters in Charlottesville as “good fine people.” He showed exponentially less compassion towards the Puerto Rican hurricane victims than those from whiter states that voted for him. The President called Haiti and African nations “shithole countries.” He has separated kids from families seeking legal asylum. Children of color have been caged by his government. Some have died in their custody.

And now, this week he has waged a nakedly racist rhetorical war against four Democratic congresswomen of color. He has suggested they move back to the countries where they came from — even though 3 of 4 were born here. He has questioned their patriotism, their right to dissent, their very American-ness. All in terms that couldn’t more clearly signal a racist political agenda.

Donald Trump is a racist and white supremacist. He staunchly believes that white Americans are more of “real Americans” than people who don’t look like him. And he is betting that enough Americans agree with his blatant appeals that white people have gotten a raw deal by the digital economy and ethnic diversity of 21st century America.

It’s time to dispense with the naive and disingenuous debates about “whether Trump is a racist.” Of course he is. And he honestly doesn’t care that you know it. He believes white people are entitled to power and influence and will do whatever he can to return them to it. Or at least promise that he will.

So let’s stop wondering if Trump has an agenda of racial division. He does. Let’s stop pondering if he will really enact policies just to inflame white resentment. He has and will continue to do. The only lingering question is what we will do to stop this man and the wholly complicit GOP party from completely rupturing the fabric of our great nation just so they can win the next election.

What constitutes an American? Can we survive as a racially-diverse, pluralistic society? Will America ever get past its racist origins? These are the questions the next year and a half will answer. And the stakes could not be higher.