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53% to 43%
A new Survey Monkey poll finds most Republicans support President Trump’s view of the violence in Charlottesville. When presented with a verbatim quote from President Trump on Tuesday — “You had a group on one side that was bad, and you had a group on the other side that was also very violent” — more disagree than agree, 53% to 43%. However, Republicans agreed, 87% to 11%.
16
ThinkProgress notes that just 16 of 292 Republicans in Congress have released statements that call out Trump directly by name or title for his comments.
I regularly speak to groups across the political spectrum because my constituents deserve access to their congressman. I can’t remember ever turning down an opportunity to speak to a group based on the group’s political ideology.
— Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-S.C.), the ultra-conservative congressman tapped by Donald Trump to run the Office of Management and Budget, in response to South Carolina Democrats who criticized Mulvaney for appearing before the John Birch Society, reports Mother Jones.
Donald Trump’s presidential campaign bludgeoned modern norms about the acceptability of racism. The candidate proposed a religious test for immigrants, and called a federal judge unfit on the grounds of his heritage. Trump could have decided to put the racial demagoguery of the campaign behind him, and it could have been remembered as a divisive ploy to win that did not define his administration, like George Bush’s manipulation of white racial panic to defeat Michael Dukakis in 1988. But Trump, perhaps predictably, is making a different choice. His early staffing choices are redefining the boundaries of acceptable racial discourse in Republican politics.
If you’re a white southerner, you know exactly what it means. … I’m old enough to remember the good old days. And they weren’t all that good in many ways.
— Former President Bill Clinton, asserting that Donald Trump’s promise to “Make America Great Again” is a racist dog whistle, according to RealClearPolitics.
We’re losing our country. Look at the Super Bowl salute to the Black Panther cop killers. It’s time to stand up and vote for Donald Trump for president and vote for me, David Duke for the U.S. Senate.”
— A new robocall from former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke.
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Number of blacks among the 2,472 delegates at this week’s Republican National Convention, reports the Washington Post: “Although that handful includes some of Trump’s most vociferous backers, the overall lack of ethnic diversity at the convention illustrates one of his greatest challenges: how to court black voters after four decades of controversy over his racial views, including campaign-trail rhetoric that has alienated many minorities.”
This whole business does get a little tired… I would ask you to go back through history and figure out where are these contributions that have been made by these other categories of people that you are talking about, where did any other subgroup of people contribute more to civilization?
— Rep. Steve King (R-IA), challenging MSNBC panelists to name a “subgroup” that contributed more to civilization than white people.
So if you want to deal with this on the black side, you’ve got to teach your children to be respectful to the police, and you’ve got to teach your children that the real danger to them is not the police. The real danger to them, 99 out of 100 times, is other black kids who are going to kill them; that’s the way they’re gonna die.
— Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, quoted by Politico.
65%
Of likely 2016 Republican primary voters favor Donald Trump’s call to temporarily ban Muslims from entering the U.S., while more than a third say it makes them more likely to vote for him, according to a new Bloomberg/Purple Strategies poll. “This indicates that, despite some conventional wisdom expressed in the last 48 hours, this is unlikely to hurt Trump at least in the primary campaign,” said pollster Doug Usher.
