Donald Trump's supporters would like to be clear: They are tired of being called racists. Leave it to the president's eldest son to set the tone. Last night at the 17,500-person-capacity U.S. Bank Arena downtown here, Donald Trump Jr. strode onto the stage two hours before the president was scheduled to speak. The venue was already brimming.
It had been a rough week for his father. On July 28, President Trump was once again deemed racist after lashing out at House Oversight Chairman Elijah Cummings, whose district includes part of Baltimore. Trump referred to the city 40 miles north of Washington as "a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess" in which "no human being would want to live." Those comments came shortly after the president suggested that four progressive congresswomen of color "go back" to the "totally broken and crime infested places from which they came," prompting the crowd at his July 17 rally in Greenville, North Carolina, to chant, "Send her back!" Trump—though he later disavowed the chant—did nothing to stop it. Last night, Trump supporters in Cincinnati were eager to defend their man. "It's amazing that when Donald Trump makes a comment about Baltimore, it's racist, it's terrible, it's this. But when the mayor of that town, when the congressman from that town, says the exact same thing, 'Oh! No problem!'" Trump Jr. boomed, referring to a statement that Cummings made in 1999, calling Baltimore "drug-infested."
"It's sad," he continued, "that using 'racism' has become the easy button of left-wing politics. All right? Because guess what? It still is an issue … But by making a mockery of it by saying every time you can't win a fight—'Oh! We're just gonna push the button! It's racist'—you hurt those that are actually afflicted by it. People hear it, they roll their eyes, and they walk on. And that's a disgrace, and that's what you've been given in the identity politics of the left."
The crowd erupted in jeers and boos. It was a segment of Jr.'s speech that in many ways echoed that of a speaker who'd appeared before him, Brandon Straka, a gay Trump supporter who founded the WalkAway movement to encourage people to leave the Democratic Party. "Insinuations of bigotry and racism," Straka claimed, were "divisive tactics" used by the "liberal media to control minorities in this country." "This is a president who serves minorities," he said, "because he loves minorities."
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"We're all tired of being called racists," a 74-year-old bespectacled white man named Richard Haines told me. "You open your mouth, you're a racist. My daughter is a liberal, and she's [using the word] all the time. We don't talk politics; we can't—all the time she always accuses me of hate."
