Dan Hopkins of the University of Pennsylvania, published in FiveThirtyEight –
The issues of racism and racial divisions in politics are front and center again in the wake of President Trump’s tweets and comments about four congresswomen of color. But a key question is whether Trump’s behavior in recent years has led to an increase in racism in the U.S.
Last week, Trump tweeted the freshmen lawmakers should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came,” even though most of them were born in the U.S. Many saw parallels to Trump‘s comments on Charlottesville, Virginia, when he said there was “blame on both sides” after a violent white-supremacist and neo-Nazi rally in 2017 resulted in the death of one woman.
Clearly, these and other Trump’s statements and actions have shaped Americans’ views of him, to the point that a majority of Americans say Trump is a racist.
