Dan Nowicki

The Republic | azcentral.com

As Donald Trump supporters gathered inside a Phoenix arena for a campaign rally last week, the more heated rhetoric was happening outside.

A line of anti-Trump protesters leaned across a metal barricade. Beyond it, a few Trump supporters jeered them in a video that has since gone viral.

"Our country!" shouted the loudest one, tattooed with a variety of symbols including a stylized version of the Arizona flag. "Our country!"

Then, jabbing a finger at one Latino man: "Cook my burrito!" he shouted amid a shower of profanity. "Make my tortilla!"

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Since launching a campaign for the White House a year ago, Trump has routinely faced charges of racism in response to his comments (on border-crossers and judges, for example) and his policy proposals (for a border wall and a Muslim travel ban, to name a couple).

But as Trump has become the presumptive Republican nominee, concerns about his influence on the political discourse — like the action on that scorching Saturday in Phoenix — not only include the speeches inside his rallies but also the dialogue outside the campaign.

More critics now say Trump's combative, emotionally charged rhetoric has shifted the boundary of acceptable public discussions about race and, in the case of Muslims, religion. They say his tone and his stances inflame racial tensions and embolden more Americans to espouse and voice nativist views.

In short, some say, Trump's rise has made overt racism OK in America.

Trump has consistently denied that he is racist.

In a now-famous Cinco de Mayo message on Twitter that has been retweeted 84,000 times, Trump included a photo of himself eating a taco bowl. "The best taco bowls are made in Trump Tower Grill. I love Hispanics!" Trump said.

As for his supporters, spokeswoman Hope Hicks told The Arizona Republic this week, "Mr. Trump has disavowed all groups associated with a message of hate."

Disavowed or no, others see messages of hate on the rise in the political sphere that surrounds Trump's march toward the nomination.

"Not every supporter of Donald Trump is a racist, but ... the fact that Donald Trump has come out and blatantly made statements about Mexicans and Muslims have emboldened people to express their own views about those groups," said Marilyn Mayo, a research fellow at the Anti-Defamation League's Center on Extremism in New York. "And often those views have come out in racist terms or bigoted terms."

Mitt Romney, the Republicans' 2012 presidential nominee, told CNN this month that he fears the effect of Trump's language on the nation.

"I don't want to see trickle-down racism," Romney said. "I don't want to see a president of the United States saying things which change the character of the generations of Americans that are following. Presidents have an impact on the nature of our nation, and trickle-down racism, trickle-down bigotry, trickle-down misogyny, all these things are extraordinarily dangerous to the heart and character of America."

At Trump events, like Saturday's at Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix, many supporters say they appreciate the candidate's blunt talk. It may not be politically correct, they admit, but it isn't racist.

"We need someone who's going stop dancing around political correctness and worrying about hurting people's feelings and needs to say it how it is. Unfortunately it might hurt some people's feelings," said Andy Tomasko, a Chandler resident who attended Trump's rally Saturday at Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix. "But sometimes you need to hurt a little feelings to get where you need to go."

Supporter Jarrod Hallman acknowledged many Americans may previously have been uncomfortable airing their beliefs in public the way they do in a Trump era.

"Everyone else is talking the same way," Hallman said outside the rally. "But they're saying it behind closed doors."

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On social media

The anonymity of social media platforms such as Twitter has magnified White supremacist and anti-Semitic individuals' advocacy for Trump's election using racist hashtags such as #WhitePride, #WhiteLivesMatter and #WhiteGenocide.

"#Trump gonna clean out #AntiWhite#Scumbags," one account tweeted earlier this month.

Another pro-Trump account, using a Confederate battleflag as its avatar, responded to a Black Twitter user's criticism of a Trump speech: "Maybe you would understand if the speech was given in 'Jive' not English."

"#GOP denounces #Trump's racism for same reason white girls twerk: to ingratiate themselves to blacks for #BlackBrowniePoints. # WhitePride ," tweeted a third.

While denying the candidate holds or sympathizes with such views, the Trump campaign's response has at times been muddled.

Trump's official Twitter account has retweeted to his 9,2 million followers messages from White supremacist accounts.

During a February CNN interview, Trump bungled his response to a question about support from David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan leader, and other White supremacist organizations; he later blamed his seeming refusal to disavow them on a faulty earpiece.

A California White nationalist was initially approved as a Trump delegate to next month's Republican National Convention in Cleveland. An Illinois Trump delegate called herself "whitepride" on Twitter.

Some say Trump should condemn the hatemongers in a full-throated and definitive way.

"The Trump campaign has really, really energized the White-supremacist movement," Mayo said. "People who have been hesitant in the past to openly express racism, feel like they can more boldly express the racism now because they put it as they are rejecting political correctness. What we see on social media is that there has just been an explosion from people who support Trump of anti-Semitic and racist vitriol."

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At the rallies

It is impossible to know how widespread extremist sentiments and attitudes, such as those reflected in the Arizona man's tirade against the protesters, are among Trump's rank-and-file supporters.

Many voters are attracted to his patriotic, economic and law-and-order messages or are backing him out of partisan loyalty to the GOP.

Prior to the start of Trump's recent Phoenix event, the Secret Service and Arizona Department of Public Safety officers removed a man who was wearing a shirt with a profane anti-Islamic message.

Other Trump fans pushed back against suggestions that they or Trump are racist.

"Everybody thinks he's a racist — he's not a racist," Kevin Fillmore, 26, of Phoenix, said Saturday on his way out of the rally. "... You know, I'm not a racist, I grew up in the most Mexican part of town. I support Trump."

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Tahnee Gonzales, 30, of Yuma, cradled her 3-week-old son at the Phoenix arena while wearing a red trucker hat with Trump's campaign slogan, "Make America Great Again." She and her mother, 70-year-old Mercedes Martinez of Yuma, who also attended the rally, said they did not consider Trump to be racist against Mexicans.

“He loves Mexicans. He employs them and he friends Mexicans," Gonzales said. "We're Mexicans and we're for Trump.”

"We are the silent majority," Martinez added. "We stand with Trump and I know a lot of us do.”

Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, a high-profile Trump supporter whose own Sheriff's Office was found by a federal judge to have racially profiled Latinos, said it's unfair to blame Trump for any followers who may be racist because "you don't screen everybody."

But the outburst on the Phoenix sidewalk is hardly an isolated example.

In Iowa last year, a Trump supporter taunted Students Against Bigotry demonstrators on the campus of Iowa State University by repeatedly saying, "If it ain't White, it ain't right."

An Austin high school valedictorian this month was harassed on Twitter by Trump supporters after she revealed she was an undocumented immigrant.

This week in Tennessee, an independent candidate for Congress caused a furor with a billboard influenced by Trump's campaign motto. It said: "Make America White Again," a phrase frequently used online by racist Trump boosters.

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'Playing to a crowd'

Others say Trump shouldn't get a pass for his role in stoking anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim sentiments.

Trump and his supporters have been criticized by Democrats, by fellow Republicans and the mainstream, conservative and liberal media. National Journal asked: "Are Donald Trump's supporters racist?" A Washington Post columnist used polling data to expose "Trump’s many racist supporters." A writer for the conservative website RedState.com cited another poll that indicated Trump backers were "more likely to self-identify as racists." The liberal Salon.com ripped Trump supporters as "hideous, disgusting racists."

Yet, so far, Trump has paid few, if any, of the consequences any other 21st-century candidate could expect under similar circumstances as he has steamed toward the GOP nomination.

"He's dancing much closer to the line of what is considered acceptable and socially permissible," said Kareem Crayton, a political scientist and visiting professor of law at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee. "In some ways, he seems to be playing to a crowd that finds these views either consistent with what they believe or non-objectionable."

For supporters, though, there can be consequences for racist outbursts if their identities are made public. For example, Zack Fisher, the Arizona man videoed on Saturday, later had his identity and place of employment, Fikes Brace and Limb, publicized by the Smoking Gun website. Within days, he had taken down his Facebook and Instagram social-media accounts.

Ray Fikes, Fisher's stepfather and owner of Fikes Brace and Limb, told The Republic his Mesa custom orthotics and prosthetics business was reeling from the backlash to the viral video.

"We don't condone anything that was said," said Fikes, who took The Republic's call for Fisher. "We are under attack like you wouldn't believe. ... Death threats, bombs, you name it. ... We can't let this go any further, I'm sorry. We're going to have visit with some professional that tells us how do we separate a racist rant of a young man from a very honest and 25-year-old business."

Fikes added: "We don't agree with what was said. The big story is going to be how the father is going to have fire his stepson for the good of the many, and a lot of innocent people are getting hurt here."

M. Zuhdi Jasser, a Muslim conservative Republican and physician from Scottsdale who opposes Trump, compared Trump's campaign style to "the populist demagoguery" of historic and current Middle Eastern dictators such as Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, Saddam Hussein of Iraq and Bashar Assad in Syria.

Jasser, and others, lamented that the media did not do more to vet Trump during the GOP primaries.

"If there's one skill set that he should take seriously, it is the power of words and the platform," Jasser said. "Arguably the largest platform on the planet is the president's bully pulpit, and the candidates for both parties' bully pulpits. To say that he doesn't want to be politically correct, I mean ... for crying out loud, he should be correct. He is notoriously inaccurate. He is completely off-base."

Trump's rhetoric is harsher than previous nominees

U.S. Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., has been a vocal GOP critic of Trump's rhetoric and policy proposals, such as the wall Trump has promised to build on the southern border.

Flake, who has thus far refused to endorse him, said the Trump campaign's bad reputation is alarming to him and many fellow Republicans.

"It's a problem for how the party is perceived by the vast majority of Americans," Flake said. "You don't want to be associated with those whose currency is racist rhetoric. That's not who we are as a party, and that's what's so worrisome."

Republic reporters Rebekah L. Sanders, Macaela Bennett​, Dianna M. Náñez and Paul Giblin contributed to this article.