Monday, September 12, 2016

"A Politician Telling the Truth"

"The overwhelming majority of Trump aficionados support his proposed ban on Muslim immigrants—a policy many Republican elected officials opposed as an unconstitutional religious test—while two-thirds of them register unfavorable views of American Muslims. A plurality of Republicans supported Trump's claim that a Mexican-American judge was inherently biased and therefore unfit to preside over his fraud trial. (In the same poll, a huge majority of Republicans deemed Trump's comments not racist, despite Paul Ryan's admission that it constituted a textbook example of racism.) Two-thirds of voters who like Trump consider President Obama a Muslim, and three-fifths of them believe he was not born in the United States.
"There is a lively debate as to just what these poll findings tell us. Do Trump's supporters legitimately share all of his deranged beliefs, or are they merely signaling some kind of tribal affinity? It is a bit of a distinction without a difference. Trump's supporters are first and foremost authoritarians."
 
Jonathan Chait at The Atlantic reacts to Hillary Clinton's "basket of deplorables" comment.

No comments: