Donald Trump has found yet another way to reveal his inner liberal Democrat. When speaking about the court case concerning Trump University which is currently before a federal judge of Mexican descent, Gonzalo Curiel, he opined that he doubted he could get a fair hearing before a jurist of that ethnicity, given the antipathy he's aroused among Hispanics during the primary campaign season.
This comment has sent the media talking heads into a flurry of self-righteous censure of the billionaire bigot's bigoted remark. He's so divisive, they moan. He's racially hateful, they pontificate. His remark disqualifies him from the presidency, they asseverate, and, in a heroic effort to deliberately miss the point, some commentators have intoned with supercilious solemnity that Judge Curiel isn't Mexican anyway, he's American.
Yet, this eruption of disapprobation directed at Mr. Trump seems to indicate an obliviousness among lefties that what the GOP candidate said is simply the logical extension of what liberal Democrats have been saying for decades. Every time it's insisted that a man can't understand what a woman goes through in pregnancy, every time an African-American deigns to instruct whites that they can't speak about the black experience because they've never been the victims of racial oppression, every time an African-American declares that blacks can't get a fair trial in racist white America, or every time some academic implies the same thing whenever the racial composition of a jury doesn't adequately reflect the race of the accused - every time statements like these are made and greeted with sage nods and sympathetic tsks at the injustice of being judged by someone of a different race or gender, the predicate is tacitly being laid which validates Trump's resentment at having his case decided by a Hispanic judge.
If it is righteous and acceptable for the left to protest when members of one racial, ethnic, or gender group make judgments about the behavior of members of another group, if the argument that the race, etc. of the first group biases them against those of the second group, why is it objectionable for Trump to offer the same argument?
The media and others would do well, rather than faulting Trump for expressing the same concerns about being judged by someone likely to be biased against him on ethnic grounds, concerns that liberals have expressed at every opportunity for the last fifty years, to instead desist from their destructive attempts to split our society along lines of race, ethnicity and gender, and to end their practice of pitting one group against another.
If Judge Curiel is to be presumed a fair and objective arbiter of the law because he's "an American" then that same presumption should be extended to every American in similar position, and the politically correct racial and gender qualifiers we use to pigeon-hole people should be considered to be just as illegitimately applied to everyone else as they are to Judge Curiel.
Liberals who find Trump's comment distasteful and divisive should look in the mirror. Trump's racial rhetoric is no different than what they themselves have been employing for decades, and it's a bit hypocritical of them to complain about it now when someone other than a member of one of our privileged minorities resorts to it.