Is Trump a Racist?

There's been a lot of silliness surrounding the infamous tweet storm unleashed by our president in recent days critical of the four Democrat congresswomen who fancy to call themselves "The Squad." The tweets that triggered extreme dudgeon among liberals and anxiety attacks among some conservatives were these:

So interesting to see 'Progressive' Democrat Congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world (if they even have a functioning government at all), now loudly and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run.

Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came. Then come back and show us how it is done. These places need your help badly, you can’t leave fast enough. I’m sure that Nancy Pelosi would be very happy to quickly work out free travel arrangements!

Well, since The Squad is comprised of four "women of color" these words drew from among his detractors, as do almost any words nowadays, the allegation of racism, but why? Have we sunk to the point in our polity where it's now deemed racist to criticize any politician who is a minority? If The Squad consisted of four Caucasian women would his remarks have been construed as proof of racism?

Or is he a racist because he advised the women to go back to fix their home countries when three of the four were born in America. That's clumsy wording, to be sure - he obviously meant to refer to the home country of their parents - but what's racist about it?

A woman on MSNBC's Hardball show last night insisted that not only is Trump a racist but that those who still support Trump are declaring themselves also to be racist. This is ridiculous. It's like saying that if you supported John Kennedy then by implication you supported Roman Catholicism.

There are lots of people who admire Charles Darwin for his theory of natural selection, we even observe Darwin Day on February 12th, but Darwin was a racist. There are lots of Progressives who would have voted for Woodrow Wilson or Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, but both those men would be considered racists by today's standards.

No one is perfect. Support for what a man is doing in office does not imply total support of everything the man says or believes. This is such an obvious truth that one wonders how the lady on Hardball could've missed it.

One final question. What exactly is racism, anyway. There may be no word in our lexicon used more frequently, the meaning of which everybody assumes they know until they're asked to define it.

Often when people on the left do offer up a definition it distills to something like, "a disease that afflicts white people," but this is a bit too tendentious and banal to be accepted by reasonable folks. So, I invite readers to submit their own definition of racism via our Contact Us feature. It'll be interesting to see what turns up.