After listening to Barack Obama’s “A More Perfect Union” speech I decided to see if I could find a speech by President Trump on racial issues to do some comparing. While Barack Obama’s eloquent 37-minute speech was filled with compelling ideas on how to come together as a nation, Trump’s 7-minute interview on “the O’Reilly Factor” was loitered with uncertainties, false equivalences and straight up absurd comments (the title was sarcasm if you couldn’t tell). To kick the interview off, O’Reilly asks trump if he believes that there is a problem with race relations in this country. The first thing he does is mention the shooter who killed five police officers in Dallas. While the shooter should be condemned, highlighting this instance when asked if there is a problem in the United States with race relations frames it as if black people are the problem. He uses this instance to push his white supremacist ideology that he espouses through dog whistle politics such as this and ignores the hundreds of years of oppression beforehand in an attempt to shift the blame to black people. O’Reilly goes on to ask him whether he believes that black people are systematically at a disadvantage in this country. “Well I’ve been saying even against me the system is rigged…” While the struggle of being born a white male into a millionaire family in the United States of America must be unbearable, talking about his “struggle” in a reply to a question about black disenfranchisement is an insult to the black community. When asked if whether he believes that it is a problem within the police department that facilitates discrimination towards black people, he responds in a convoluted, clueless manner. “I don’t know.” “It could be.” “I don’t know if whether its bad people, training….” “I think its training.” He then goes on to say he believes that “99.9 percent” of police do an “incredible job,” and that he is a “big fan” of the police. Not only does Trump bring nothing of value to the discussion of these critical issues, he undermines them and often ends up praising the perpetrator as we see not only in this example but in scenarios like the protests in Virginia when he said, “There were very good people on both sides” (The other side were Nazi’s). Make no mistake. He is not genuinely this clueless. Donald Trump is a white supremacist who distorts and undermines racial issues in order to tap into people’s inherent biases to garner support.
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The problem with Trump is that he doesn’t understand the need to choose a specific side, he is a crooked businessman, he goes on whatever side he is benefitting from at that time. He is very inarticulate but that is what makes him likable to a point because it makes him seem less as a politician and more of an everyday person, and some people view that as not getting hoodwinked. He said he was going to cut taxes and he did, he said he would ban Muslims and he did. So in that way, his supporters know that he may be a liar but at least he keeps his word. In that way, I think he is a master strategist because instead of focusing on his weaknesses, he ignored them completely and instead play up his strengths to succeed.