Politics The Washington Post and Boston Globe - Trump is a bigot and a liar

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Washington Post - Donald Trump is a bigot and a racist

Let’s not mince words: Donald Trump is a bigot and a racist.

Some will think this an outrageous label to apply to the frontrunner for a major party’s presidential nomination. Ordinarily, I would agree that name-calling is part of what’s wrong with our politics.

But there is a greater imperative not to be silent in the face of demagoguery. Trump in this campaign has gone after African Americans, immigrants, Latinos, Asians, women, Muslims and now the disabled. His pattern brings to mind the famous words of Martin Neimoller, the pastor and concentration camp survivor (“First they came for the socialists…”) that Ohio Gov. John Kasich adroitly used in a video last week attacking Trump’s hateful broadsides.

It might be possible to explain away any one of Trump’s outrages as a mistake or a misunderstanding. But at some point you’re not merely saying things that could be construed as bigoted: You are a bigot.

It has been more than a quarter century since Trump took out ads in New York newspapers calling for the death penalty for “criminals of every age” after five black and Latino teens were implicated in the Central Park jogger case. The young men, convicted and imprisoned, were later cleared by DNA evidence and the confession of a serial rapist – and Trump called their wrongful-conviction settlement a “disgrace.”

[How Trump courted the right-wing fringe to conquer the GOP]

Since then, Trump led the “birther” movement challenging President Obama’s standing as a natural-born American; used various vulgar expressions to refer to women; spoke of Mexico sending rapists and other criminals across the border; called for rounding up and deporting 11 million illegal immigrants; had high-profile spats with prominent Latino journalists and news outlets; mocked Asian accents; let stand a charge made in his presence that Obama is a Muslim and that Muslims are a “problem” in America; embraced the notion of forcing Muslims to register in a database; falsely claimed thousands of Muslims celebrated the 9/11 attacks in New Jersey; tweeted bogus statistics asserting that most killings of whites are done by blacks; approved of the roughing up of a black demonstrator at one of his events; and publicly mocked the movements of New York Times (and former Washington Post) journalist Serge Kovaleski, who has a chronic condition limiting mobility.

He hasn’t gone after Jews recently, but his backers have, and Trump was uncharacteristically silent when prominent booster Ann Coulter, responding to Republican candidates’ support for Israel in a debate, tweeted: “How many f---ing Jews do these people think there are in the United States?”

Though all Trump supporters surely aren’t racists or bigots, even a cursory examination of social media reveals that many are. Those supporting Trump tend to be white, less-educated and middle-aged and older – those who are anxious and angry because they are losing ground as the American economy changes. An analysis of the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll by my colleague Scott Clement found that Trump, who has the support of 14 percent of registered voters overall, does particularly well among white men who aren’t college-educated (24 percent) and white, non-evangelical Protestants (27 percent), but gets only 3 percent of non-whites and 5 percent of those under 30 years old.

[Greg Sargent: Trump’s demagoguery just got even uglier]

This doesn’t mean Republicans or conservatives generally are bigoted. I wouldn’t label any other candidate in the GOP field that way (though Carson’s remarks disqualifying Muslims from the presidency crossed the line) and Trump, though leading in the polls, lacks the support of most. Thirty-two percent of Republicans supported Trump in the latest Post poll, which means 86 percent of the overall American electorate hasn’t embraced him.

Trump’s rivals for the nomination are slowly and haltingly finding the courage to call the man what he is. Chris Christie on Monday criticized Trump’s treatment of Kovaleski. John Kasich, after last week’s Neimoller video, issued an ad Monday showing Trump’s mockery of Kovaleski’s disability and saying Trump isn’t “worthy” of the presidency.

Some Trump defenders claim the candidate isn’t racist but simply “careless and undisciplined,” as John Hinderaker of the conservative website PowerLine put it. When I called in last week to a radio show Hinderaker hosted, he defended the treatment of the black man at Trump’s rally (“he was obviously being disruptive and he was a big burly guy”), Trump’s tweet falsely blaming African Americans for most killings of white people (“he just fell for some bad data”) and Trump’s embrace of a Muslim database (“that was brought up by a reporter”).

I argued that the large number of instances over an extended period add up to a pattern of bigotry.

“We’d be at it a long time if we go back through history,” the host said.

Exactly. Shouldn’t Republicans take that time before they nominate a racist?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opin...hpid=hp_no-name_opinion-card-e:homepage/story

 

Boston globe - Donald Trump is a liar

Donald Trump is a liar.

For anyone who has been following the Republican presidential campaign for the past few months, this statement will not elicit much surprise. But then again, that’s also true if you’ve been following the direction of Republican presidential campaign rhetoric over the past several years.

When Trump claimed that he saw thousands of Muslims in New Jersey cheer when the Twin Towers were felled, he was lying, because thousands of Muslims in New Jersey didn’t cheer when the Twin Towers fell.

He is not stretching the truth when he says the Obama administration wants to take in 250,000 Syrian refugees. He is lying.

He was not, as ABC News put it, making “questionable comments” when he retweeted the racist claims of a neo-Nazi that black Americans are overwhelmingly responsible for homicides in America. He is peddling made-up racist claims about black Americans.


When he said that there should be a database of American Muslims and that US mosques should possibly be shut down, he wasn’t misquoted. He was quite clearly playing on xenophobic fears.

Some have argued that Trump’s intentions are unclear. Maybe he truly believes he saw Muslims in New Jersey celebrating on 9/11.

And maybe some of Trump’s best friends are black or Mexican. Instead he’s just playing on fears about immigrants, Muslim terrorists, and black criminals, like countless politicians before him.

But this is a dodge. It’s been consistently pointed out, by reporters and fact checkers alike, and often directly to Trump, that he is saying things that are verifiably untrue. That Trump keeps repeating them is all we need to know about his intentions.

What’s also undeniable is that when it comes to presidential campaign lying, Trump is simply following a path laid by other Republicans. Back in 2008, John McCain regularly made verifiably false claims about Barack Obama’s record, his statements, and his policy proposals, like the time he falsely claimed Obama supported “comprehensive sex education” for children in kindergarten. His running mate, Sarah Palin, pushed the envelope even further, like when she said she’d told Congress “thanks, but no thanks” on Alaska’s so-called “Bridge to Nowhere,” even though she’d lobbied for the infrastructure project. In 2012, Mitt Romney, embraced this strategy. He claimed that Obama’s stimulus created no private sector jobs; he accused Obama of raising taxes; of blowing up the deficit; of having gone before foreign audiences to “apologize” for “American misdeeds”; and of having passed Obamacare with the knowledge that it would slow down the country’s economic recovery. None of this was true.

This campaign cycle, it’s been more of the same. Perhaps the most pernicious lie told this time around is the one from Carly Fiorina, who invented out of whole cloth details from those Planned Parenthood tapes — and, when confronted with her lie, refused to back down. According to Politifact, 84 percent of Ben Carson’s statements that they’ve fact-checked are “mostly false,” “false,” or “pants on fire” untrue. But you get the sense with Carson that he truly doesn’t know what he’s talking about. With Fiorina, it’s seems more apparent that she knows she’s lying and doesn’t care.

But then again, why pick on her? Virtually every Republican candidate has accused the organization of selling or harvesting “baby parts” — a term allegedly uttered by the man accused of shooting up a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado last week.

Practically every GOP candidate has said something about Obamacare, climate change, the president’s foreign policy, Benghazi, or the federal government that is untrue. In some cases, politicians have misspoken when making these statements, but even when errors are pointed out, they are rarely corrected.

Of course, all politicians exaggerate, all politicians simplify and stereotype, all politicians mislead, and all politicians present arguments and images of themselves (and their opponents) in ways that are often parallel to the truth. Consciously lying is something else altogether — and for those who claim that everyone does, in order to be bipartisan, that too is dishonest. To go back to those Politifact rankings, 75 percent of what they’ve checked on Trump has been mostly false or worse. For Hillary Clinton, it’s 28 percent.

The fact is, one political party (Republicans) lies a lot more than the other major political party (Democrats).

Republicans have figured out that nonpartisan political journalists who adhere religiously to the notion of objectivity — in which all viewpoints, even made-up ones, are valid — are limited in their ability to point out when politicians peddle inconsistencies or shade the truth. They are less equipped to call lying politicians liars.

The more they lie and don’t get called out for it, the more every political incentive pushes them in one direction — to tell even bigger lies. In a polarized political era, in which Americans increasingly get their news and information from right-wing or left-wing echo chambers that merely reinforce preexisting beliefs, fact-checking this stuff goes in the ears of many Americans — and out the other.

So Trump’s behavior is just a logical continuation of these now well-worn Republican strategies. Where he’s different is that he has just taken things to a whole other level.

Objectivity in journalism was never intended to give these sorts of statements a pass. When someone says the sky is green — or Muslims in New Jersey were celebrating on 9/11 — you don’t “teach the controversy.” There’s a right answer and a wrong one; and there’s a motive for these lies that can’t and should not be ignored.

Trump doesn’t “transcend the truth,” as CNN suggested. He isn’t “indifferent . . . to facts” as The New York Times wrote recently. He is not continuing a “campaign of controversy,” as NBC described it.

He’s lying, and he’s spreading fear. Period. And he’s got lots of company.

None of us who work in journalism — whether opinion writers or reporters — do Americans any favor by failing to make this clear.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion...at/7QhiIZRJlUxQMTtpSzLodO/story.html#comments

 

His supporters get a little sandy down there when you call them lies, they prefer the term embellishments.

 

Trump said he saw 1000's protesting on his TV, the Post had an anecdotal story of a few people celebrating.

 

I agree with you but Trump doesn't apparently by this fake crime stat tweet he posted.



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https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/u...f_vicitm_by_race_and_sex_of_offender_2014.xls