Alex Brandon/AP Photo fourth estate Donald Trump Is Who We Thought He Was Now everyone’s getting smeared in the argument over his racist tweets. That doesn’t mean his critics should stand down.

Jack Shafer is Politico’s senior media writer.

President Donald Trump blew the lid off hell on Sunday when he tweeted that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts—four progressive Democratic congresswomen who are among his biggest critics—should “go back” to the “broken and crime infested places from which they came.” Trump’s racist comments attracted sharp—and deeply deserved—reproofs from Democrats and the press.

But let’s not kid ourselves. Nobody was surprised. Trump didn’t give us any new data on who he is, only additional confirmation of the ancient data on who he is. We have every right to be shocked and amazed at what he said but not that he said it. Racist conduct has been a constant in his life as a recent Atlantic piece attests. It starts with the Trump family’s discriminatory rental practices throughout the 1970s and extends to his public campaign against the Central Park Five and continues through the “birther” claim he used against President Barack Obama. He sympathized with the neo-Nazis and white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, said a judge could not hear a civil case against him because he was a Mexican American, and recently asked why the United States couldn’t attract more immigrants from Norway and fewer from “shithole” countries.


If Trump were a stock traded on Wall Street, you would say that racism is fully discounted into his price. Asking Trump to abandon his racism is like asking Ford to stop building cars. It’s integral to his psyche. Asking him to apologize won’t work, either. He never apologizes because he thinks it makes him look weak. And criticizing Trump will only accelerate him in the direction he was already headed, as he showed Monday at a White House event.

“These are people who in my opinion hate our country,” Trump said of the four progressives. “All I’m saying is, if they’re not happy here, they can leave. There will be many people who will be happy.” The people who should be apologizing, Trump insisted, were the progressive members of Congress who used “foul language” and said “terrible things.” He also turned the tables on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who said Trump’s true motive was to “make America white again.” Bursting with umbrage, Trump said, “That’s a very racist statement, I’m surprised she’d say that.”

Trump welcomed the criticism he received from Democrats for his comments because he can use them to paint Pelosi and the rest of the party in the progressive hues of the Ocasio-Cortez faction. But that trick doesn’t work when the criticism comes from his own party, which arrived on Monday as journalists polled Republican leaders for their views on the kerfuffle. Several members of Congress, including Senators Pat Toomey, Tim Scott, Lisa Murkowski and Mitt Romney, and Congressmen Fred Upton, Will Hurd and Mike Turner, criticized Trump in unambiguous terms, calling his comments “wrong,” “racially offensive,” “way over the line,” “spiteful,” “really uncalled for,” “racist and xenophobic,” “demeaning,” and “racist.” That was a good start! Predictably, Senator Lindsey Graham hedged, offering a squishy defense of the progressives’ right to dissent but surely earning the president’s approval by calling them “a bunch of communists.”

But Republicans shouting “racism” probably won’t move the president much, either. During the 2016 campaign, Paul Ryan, the Republican House Speaker, called Trump’s comments about the Mexican America judge “the textbook definition of a racist comment,” and that rolled right off Trump’s back.

So what are Trump’s bipartisan critics to do? Just because words seem to have such a small effect on him doesn’t mean they should go silent. If we allow Trump to spout his racist views uncontested, the impressionable would have reason to read that as a tacit endorsement of the president’s views, leading some of them to echo and imitate the president. It might seem like a slog to engage Trump in the trench warfare of words that he’s arranged in which he calls everybody a racist who calls him a racist, but that’s the unfortunate price of doing politics these days.

Nobody is ever going to stop Trump from talking like Trump, but the failure of his critics to police his ugly talk doesn’t render the nation powerless in his wake. Trump, who fancies himself a winner, continues to lose in the courts, and since the midterms the Democratic House of Representatives has blocked him from using Congress as a rubber stamp. Like most loudmouths, his bark is his bite.

Meanwhile, if you hear something racist from Trump, say something.

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