Trump's administration embraces voter suppression laws, wants to remake the Census to undercount immigrants, is weakening anti-discrimination rules and is pushing for a border wall. Trump uses Twitter to personally attack African-American athletes, journalists and cultural figures.
Second, Trump and his plutocratic henchmen are vastly contemptuous of poor people. Trump has thrown the full might of his administration to destroy government programs that benefit tens of millions of low-income Americans.
The two obsessions are deeply intertwined. For Trump’s base, “poverty” is code for “non-white,” despite the fact that many white Americans are also desperately poor. Trump has mocked “s---hole” countries, and, by extension those black and brown immigrants from those nations. He has labeled inner cities as war zones and many of their residents as “animals,” and has repeatedly attacked immigrants for lack of education and skills, for criminal propensities and for enrolling in public assistance programs to scam hardworking American (read “white”) taxpayers.
For 50 years, Republicans have had the enormous audacity – what my grandparents would have called chutzpah – to label themselves the “Family Values” party.
It was always a political calculus with more than a dose of hypocrisy. But at least there was a time when many GOP leaders did seem to genuinely care for families – whatever their color or place of origin – and to promote the well-being of children.
No more.
Today the Family Values party is led by a serial divorcee who has openly bragged of sexually abusing women, who paid off a porn star and a Playboy model with whom he had affairs and who has made sexually provocative statements about his own daughter.
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