Is Every Trump Supporter a Racist? Does it matter?

There's been a lot of talk of whether Trump supporters are all racist.  The Right keeps saying this is nonsense, that you simply can't paint his supporters with that brush.  Perhaps we should start with some facts though.

Fact one: Trump is a racist, or at a minimum, he plays one on his reality tv show that he's going going on: "The President."  He plays one to such a degree that his rally-goers chant and proclaim racist statements all the time.  He plays one to such a degree that it's not a question of whether he knows what the dog whistles have underlying them.  And he has played one to this degree for well over a decade (go look up The Central Park Five, where, after the true murderer admitted his actions, Trump continues to say the 5 falsely accused were guilty).

Fact two: Racist acts and hate crimes have been on the rise since Trump became president.

Fact three: Trump's supporters are, for the most part, unwilling to say something about Trump's racism in public.

Fact four: When Obama was president, there were plenty of Obama supporters who called him out on a variety of issues.  The most common ones I saw were overseas military actions (bombings) and deportations (note, this is deportations, not separating children from their parents when they come asking for asylum).

Alright, so, for the non-fact-based portion of this thought experiment... let's acknowledge that you can support someone without supporting all of what they do and say.  Obama is a great example given the fourth fact, above.

There is the potential that people aren't willing to acknowledge that Trump is a racist because "racism" is such a negative by the general populace that they think they lose every argument attached to Trump if the acknowledge it.  In most cases, that identifies that the thinker of this feels that the racism being promoted IS THAT BAD.  I suppose there could be the idea that the general populace thinks racism is bad but that the thinking doesn't believe the general populace is right.  Certainly, there are many on the Left that feel that it is that bad and cannot be tolerated, though we haven't seen a scenario play out yet where we have someone on the Left being racist in this manner without being called out in any way by the Left.  We have had individuals be racist, but they tend to be called out as such.


All that said, one of the biggest tactics Trump uses is racism to divide the country.  He does this in so many different ways and so openly.  He sometimes tries to claim he's not using it, like when he initially claimed to the news that he had didn't like the "Send Her Back" chant at one of his rallies.  What's really amusing about these attempts is that he has nothing to stand on so when he makes these claims, anybody with a memory and access to the video of the earlier event or his twitter feed can easily see that he's lying.  In the case of the "Send Her Back" chant, he initially claimed that he tried to stop it by talking very quickly.  A few things about this claim:
1) It's false.  He didn't start talking quickly.  He in fact stepped back and let the chant wash over him like a victorious speaker appreciating the crowds cheers.  Only after the chant died down did he start talking again, and at that point he didn't talk quickly.
2) That's not how you stop a chant!  You only have to go back to when Senator McCain ran President Obama to understand what a dignified individual does in the face of a crowd throwing racism about.  Senator McCain, say what you will about him, and I can say a lot, on a number of occasions did not stand for the crowd bringing racism into his race for the presidency.  He would receive a question from the crowd and immediately take control and explain calmly but sternly that Obama was not whatever the crowd member was suggesting and explaining that while the two have differences of philosophies, Obama was a citizen of the US or was a dignified human being and not someone to be "scared of."  If you're going to try to say that racism is wrong, you say it.  You don't just continue with your rant trying to talk over a chant and you CERTAINLY don't just step back and listen to the chant.  You call it out.  You tell your supporters that they're wrong to use that language.  But Trump doesn't believe that they're wrong to use that language and he doesn't believe that the racism involved is reprehensible.

Sorry, went off on a bit of a tangent there.  Again, it's clear that Trump is racist or is, at a minimum, ok with playing the racist.  And his supporters are ok with his doing so as well.  So, back to the question, does being ok with your leader being a racist make you a racist?  I would suggest that it's a matter of degrees but that, if you are ok with your leader being a racist and you don't complain about it and point it out every time he does something racist, that makes you an accomplice at best.

I have yet to hear or read of a Trump supporter acknowledging the obvious racism publicly though.
 So, yeah, Trump supporters may not themselves be racist, but as long as they're not speaking up, they might as well be.

PS - Racism isn't the only dividing issue Trump plays on.  He also is very much a sexist and plays into anti-LGBTQ tropes.  The last bit is somewhat interesting to me because he pretended at the Republican National Convention in 2016 that he was proud of the party for being welcoming of his pro-LGB-rights messages.  So add these to the lists of things Trump supporters are buying into if they're not openly upset by. It's astonishing to see this culture war being pushed openly by the Right when they have been pushing most of it a little more descretely (though still obviously for those who could read between the lines and understood the tropes and dog whistles).