Donald Trump is not the cause of division. Donald Trump is the result of division.
Every day I hear about how Donald Trump has divided this country. Here’s a news flash. It wasn’t him. He didn’t do it. He wasn’t even there when it happened.
If Trump was elected because the United States is a divided country, it’s not because he divided it. Somebody else did that long before he entered politics. The country was divided long before anyone outside of his family had ever heard of Donald Trump and the national Democratic Party has contributed more to that division than Donald Trump could ever do in one lifetime.
President Lyndon Johnson is famous for a couple of quotes.
Here’s one: "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."
He and other Democrats like Orval Faubus and Jim Eastland played that angle into decades of reelection. Mississippi Democrat Governor Ross Barnett famously stood in the doorway of the Lyceum in scripted defiance of Democrat President John Kennedy to bar Republican James Meredith from enrolling at Ole Miss. Then-Lt. Governor Paul Johnson used that incident and Barnett’s endorsement to bolster his successful 1963 gubernatorial campaign.
But that happened in the sixties! Things have changed since then!
In 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden told Charlamagne tha God and his radio audience “Well I tell you what, if you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.”
The Democratic side of Congress is flush with caucuses based on race. Ftor starters, here’s a Black Caucus, a Hispanic Caucus, and an Asian Pacific Caucus.
All members of the Congressional Black Caucus are Democrats. In 2021 Representative Tim Scott (R-FL) was denied membership.
The Congressional Hispanic Caucus currently has 40 members. All are Democrats. GOP reps Carlos Curbelo (2017) and Mayra Flores (2022) were denied membership.
There are 74 members of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus. Yep. 74 of them are Democrats.
Various activists and the media regularly refer to women’s rights, black rights, LGBTQ rights, and other sorts of group rights based on race or some sort of other perceived difference.
One that confuses and amuses me is the push for “Latinx” rights. A former student asked me about that word when it came up in a class discussion. He’s a first generation child of immigrants from Mexico. He’d never heard that word before and didn’t know what it meant.
We looked it up. It turns out “Latinx” is a made-up word that ignores Spanish-language rules of gender (Latina/Latino) that replaced “Hispanic”, a word that lumps together Portuguese speakers from Brazil, French speaking Haitians, and Guatemalan Mayan-language speakers.
A 2019 survey of 173 colleges and universities by the National Association of Scholars found that 40% offered housing segregated by race. Nearly half had orientation programs segregated by race and nearly ¾ offered segregated graduation ceremonies.
Surveys of political leanings of college faculty regularly show a decided liberal/Democrat tendency. These divisions by race or gender or sexual orientation or national origin didn’t happen since Donald Trump started campaigning in 2015. He’s not responsible.
Donald Trump is not the cause of division.
If anything, President Donald Trump is the result of division.
