The US president’s bigotry has a political purpose: to distract voters and energise his base. He doesn’t care about the damage he might inflict in the process
Donald Trump’s agenda is to turn the clock back in the United States half a century, to a time when elected leaders spoke the language of white supremacy. Like Mr Trump, they did not use dog whistles. Until 1967, 17 states had laws banning interracial marriage. Mississippi did not vote to ratify the 13th amendment of the US constitution, which outlawed slavery, until 1995. Of course, legal segregation is a distant memory today, and race in America is not the chasm it once was. The country has had a black president and immigrants, white and non-white, have become rich and famous. Yet Mr Trump has, in a short space of time, remoulded the Republican party by excluding and gagging anyone who challenges him. This is no longer a question of the Republican leadership’s inability to deal with the president’s racism, but of its complicity in it.
Mr Trump is an heir to the tradition of American failure on race, one which misunderstands or ignores the country’s fundamental premise that people, in the words of Martin Luther King, “not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character”. In business such racism might be deplored but considered a private affair. However, in office it is an understatement to say that a bigoted, misogynistic narcissist is unfit to be US president. Mr Trump has long thought that only white people can be considered truly citizens and that immigrants are only conditionally American. So it came as no surprise to hear the US president tell four female members of Congress, all of whom are not white, to “go back” to the countries “from which they came”.
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