Having a President Who Constantly Spews Racist Conspiracy Theories Is Bad
By 
Trump’s legislative agenda is dead, but that’s not the whole story:
Donald Trump has warned the public that immigrants “violently changed” Europe’s culture — and will do the same to America’s, if they get the chance. He has said that Democrats “want illegal immigrants, no matter how bad they are, to pour in and infest our Country” because liberals “view them as potential voters.” He has insinuated that the Democratic Party’s leadership — including the Jewish megadonor George Soros — organized an “invasion” of the United States by Central American migrants last year, in a bid to steal the midterm elections through mass voter fraud.
Trump has also decried the mainstream news media as “THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE”; suggested that Central American immigrants are largely criminals who were expelled to the U.S. by their governments; and accused federal law enforcement of treasonously attempting to remove him from power.
In other words: The president has been using his bully pulpit to tell the American people that illegal immigrants threaten their lives today, and are on the cusp of irrevocably destroying their culture tomorrow; that Democrats are hell-bent on increasing illegal immigration; that it may not be possible to defeat Democrats at the ballot box because they are ready and willing to rig elections (and the media is eager to cover it up); and that those tasked with impartially enforcing the rule of law cannot be trusted.
Trump broadcasts these incendiary lies so incessantly, they’ve achieved a status similar to that of sirens and screeching tires in New York City — abrasive sounds so omnipresent, they barely register in one’s consciousness. Thus, the fact that our Republican president recently accused a Jewish financier of attempting to destroy the United States through unfettered immigration did not stop him — or congressional Republicans — from decrying Ilhan Omar as a vile anti-Semite for suggesting that AIPAC dictates American policy toward Israel.
Every once in a while, however, some psychopath will offer a reminder of just how dangerous the bile pouring out of our president’s gaffe-hole is. Last fall, Cesar Sayoc dressed up his van as the world’s worst comments section, and then (allegedly) tried to murder Soros, a wide swath of the Democratic Party’s elected leadership, and CNN employees with explosives. Shortly thereafter, Robert Bowers decided that a Pittsburgh synagogue was trying to destroy (white) America’s culture by flooding the country with nonwhite immigrants, and opened fire on its worshippers.
Just this week, federal prosecutors revealed that Christopher Hasson, a Coast Guard officer in Maryland, allegedly stockpiled weapons, while developing a plot to assassinate a long list of Democratic politicians, CNN anchors, and MSNBC hosts, as part of a grand plan to transform the U.S. into a white ethno-state. The suspect’s recent Google searches reportedly included “civil war if trump impeached” and “what if trump illegally impeached.”
Hasson’s arrest has triggered the same maddeningly misguided debate that occasioned Bowers and Sayoc’s. In each case, some of Trump’s critics suggested that he was directly responsible for the alleged crime, Trump’s defenders then scrounged for evidence that the suspect was unstable or racist before the mogul entered politics, and everyone missed the point.
Obviously, it’s impossible to determine the precise causal relationship between Trump’s constant racism — amplified by his house propaganda network — and any individual terrorist attack or plot, and the attacker and/or plotter is bears the ultimate moral culpability. But the fact that Trump has an influence on white nationalists already predisposed to violent fantasies is bad enough.
Since it apparently needs saying, in observing that “it’s really bad when Donald Trump keeps saying racist things, because it might influence his nutty white nationalist followers,” I am not arguing that Barack Obama could have gotten Joe Lieberman to vote to nationalize the health insurance industry by giving a BLISTERING speech from the back of a train in New Haven.