He said what they’re all thinking

One of the saddest things about the latest disgraceful tweets from US president Trump is the signal failure of Republican lawmakers to come out and call them for what they were: racist and completely un-American. But it isn’t hard to see why. They know they are doomed if they say what I’m sure a lot of them are thinking, namely something like:

“I believe in the Republican Party and the conservative views it stands for, but I cannot support a president who persists in his racist tirades. This is not an America I want to part of.”

By telling those congresswomen to “go back where they came from”, Trump broke they rules of his own Equal Opportunities Commission, which cites on its website the kind of language that if used in the workplace could be deemed, not just deeply offensive to people of colour but actually illegal. And perhaps the most worrying aspect of this is that bigots can now shout at an ethnic minority person walking down the street to go back where they came from, and if challenged, they can now say: “Hey! if the President of the United States can say it, so can I!”

But those Republicans who have reservations about Trump’s racism know that if they go against him, he will not back them in the upcoming primaries, and put his support behind an alternative candidate who will toe the Trump line, right or wrong, whatever it takes. So it’s really about power. There is nothing new about politicians abandoning their moral sense in their quest for power. I just think it’s got worse than it has ever been, and this in a world that ought to be moving towards a better, more humanitarian future.

Trump knows he is tapping into an extremely rich vein of underlying racism in the United States, just as the Brexiteers here know they’re onto a good thing with the closet racists in our own country. You can’t go wrong appealing to the worst in people, it seems...