Criticizing Trump Is Not Enough

It’s nice that Trump saying the quiet parts through ten foghorns has motivated some prominent Republicans to object, but as long as they continue to pursue more genteel forms of white supremacy it won’t be that meaningful:

The mobilization of white supremacy is not incidental to Trump’s rise, but central to it. Remember, he became a major figure in the Republican Party by aggressively promoting the racist falsehood that Barack Obama was not born in the United States, and continued to engage in egregious race-baiting throughout the 2016 campaign. There’s a reason former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke declared after the Charlottesville rally that “[t]hat’s why we voted for Donald Trump, because he said he’s going to take our country back.” The “our” in that sentence is represented by the white nationalist and anti-Semitic groups that staged the hate rally this weekend. Trump’s lackluster response to such a rally was just another reminder of the very real particular dangers his naked appeals to white supremacy and xenophobia pose.

Trump’s pathetic speech was a bridge too far for some of the Republicans who made a devil’s bargain with Trump and have been ignoring his overt racism and corruption in the hope that he could serve as a vehicle to advance their unpopular policy agenda. Multiple prominent Republican senators, including Orrin Hatch (Utah), Cory Gardner (Colo.), Marco Rubio (Fla.), and Ted Cruz (Texas) did what Trump should have done but didn’t: They specifically called out the white supremacist hate groups and condemned their destructive ideology.

This is laudable as far as it goes, but it doesn’t let them, or the Republican Party, off the hook. The GOP has nurtured and harbored Trump’s explicitly racist appeals. And still quieter, less obvious forms of racism run through the party. After all, it was not Trump who wrote the 2013 opinion gutting the Voting Rights Act, therefore paving the way for various voter identification laws and dubious redistricting. That distinction goes to Chief Justice John Roberts, a man who has long been opposed to expanding voting rights.

And Roberts has a lot of company. As Eric Levitz of New Yorkputs it, “[t]here are plenty of Republican lawmakers who campaign with utmost civility, and then push legislation that objectively advances racial inequity.” Congressional Republicans have not acted to repair the Voting Rights Act or to guarantee access to the ballot. Instead, Republicans in state after state have enacted vote-suppression measures targeted at minority voters. As the Republican Party moves increasingly further to the right of the typical voter, the measures have only become more desperate. Trump’s fondness for voter suppression doesn’t make him an outlier — it makes him a typical Republican in 2017, and that is perhaps the scariest thing of all.

Calling out Trump’s white supremacy is necessary, and it’s good that some Republicans are finally doing it. But actions speak louder than words, and until Republicans start showing the American people, particularly those who aren’t white, that they care about their rights and well-being, too, the GOP’s condemnations of white supremacy will ring hollow.

By the same token, some Republicans implied during the campaign that Trump was unfit for office — and none of them support compelling Trump to release his tax returns.