The article "One year after Charlottesville rally, Trump still flirts with racially tinged rhetoric" in the Aug. 14 edition skirted one conspicuous fact: Donald Trump is clearly a racist. Those reluctant to accept this should wake up — unless they enjoy being enslaved by the shackles of bigotry in the Trumpiverse.
Since his real estate days, the Divider-in-Chief's words and actions have revealed his core racist instincts. Examples are countless, but a brief refresher is telling.
In 1989, when four minority teenagers were found guilty of beating and raping a white woman, Trump called for reinstatement of the death penalty. In 2002, when DNA evidence exonerated the accused, Trump refused to accept their innocence.
In 2011, Trump popularized the "birther" conspiracy about Barack Obama being born in Kenya and thus being ineligible to be president. In 2016, he retracted the claim with laughable diffidence in a cockamamie written statement.
In 2015, Trump called for his flagrantly prejudiced "total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the U.S." In 2017, by presidential proclamation, he combatively pushed for what he himself called a "Muslim ban" on primarily Islamic countries.
In 2017, after a woman was killed by a car driven by an admitted neo-Nazi during a Virginia rally, Trump said there were "very fine people on both sides." His comment was jaw-dropping considering that neo-Nazi groups and white supremacists had initiated the rally.
In 2018, Trump introduced his barbaric parent-child separation policy at the Mexican border, based on the "no tolerance" deportation of anyone illegally crossing the border while looking Latino. U.S. law does not require such separations, but Trump charged ahead regardless.
If someone talks like a racist, equivocates about hate groups like a racist, and makes policies like a racist, then that person is a racist. Trump is today's George Wallace.
The opinions expressed in this letter to the editor are the writer's own and do not necessarily reflect the policies of The Japan Times.