Quote Originally Posted by Loki View Post
He had his supers (people in charge of day-to-day operations in an apartment building) to refuse to rent apartments to African Americans, and encouraged them to find Jews instead. He's made statements back to the '80s that could be interpreted as racist. He clearly judges people on the basis of their race/ethnicity. This all predates his presidential run.

And wig, I disagree that someone like Trump can't permanently poison the political atmosphere. He's already legitimized racist discourse. People knew it was wrong to discriminate against people, whether blacks or Muslims in the past. Now those people are being told by one of the mainstream parties that it's ok. And those who had a predisposition to be racist now have no problem with saying and doing racist things in public. The kind of policies that would never have been suggested let alone passed in the past are now part of the political discourse. This is how democracies decline. It's how the seeds for civil war are sown. I'm not saying both are guaranteed to happen after a Trump presidency, but we'd go from 0% to something higher. And the longer this kind of a cancer sticks around, the harder it will be to operate without destroying the social fabric of this country.
He's racist yes, as was almost every President the US has ever had. There is a difference between racism and fascism. Racism is bad enough without needing to rebrand it.