RiverDog wrote:Huge difference between the environmental circumstances my dad was raised in vs. Donald Trump. My dad was born in 1925, in a nearly all white community in a remote part of southeastern Washington. That's not an excuse, it's simply some background. Conversely, Donald Trump was born a full two decades later, in 1946. He was a teenager-early 20's during the civil rights movement.
Not really much of a difference. New York is an incredibly racist city. Every New Yorker I talk to that grew up in the 60s, 70s, and 80s tells me about the "stay in your neighborhood" attitude of New York City. I still remember sitting with an Irish-German New Yorker about the same age as myself. This guy was telling me that the N-word needed to stay in their neighborhood. If they showed up in his neighborhood, that wasn't going to be tolerated. I heard this from all sides when meeting New Yorkers. Whites didn't go in the black neighborhoods, blacks didn't go in white neighborhoods. No one liked or trusted the cops, black or white. This Irish-German guy told me if the cops came around, they would harass him and his friends.
This is the New York Trump grew up in. So this idea that he didn't grow up with a lot of racial preconceptions is pretty false. New York was a very racist and segregated city. I'd bet money his father ensured he knew that you stayed with your own.
I'm also certain Trump learned to change as well. Trump has supported minorities in this nation with money and time. He was a known supporter of the NAACP in New York. This Trump is a racist is recent. In my nearly 30 years of following Trump's career since I read his book
The Art of the Deal at age 16, he was not known as a racist. He was in fact publically known as a very tolerant guy mingling with all manner of people of varying backgrounds. If he's a racist, why he is supporting so many black celebrities, athletes, and the like in various ventures and at his businesses? Explain this to me. Explain why Trump didn't become a racist until he started running for president? How does a man as public as Trump has been in one of the biggest cities in the world avoid being branded as a racist until the left wing liberals decided to do so because he was their opponent? Explain that to me.
I've followed Trump a lot more closely than you have. I have no reason to believe the man is a racist.
Much like George Wallace, my father changed his attitudes with regard to race relations prior to his untimely death in 1985. I see no resemblance between Donald Trump and my father with regard to the subject we're discussing.
Likely you see no resemblance because Trump was never known as a racist to begin with until he ran for president, thus didn't need to change.
I agree with some of Trump's immigration policy initiatives, but he has not made his case for his wanting to slash the number of overall immigrants permitted into this country. For one, I do not feel that the simple fact that an applicant has family in this country should be a basis for their acceptance. But his proposal to slash by some 50% the total number of immigrants admitted is not supported by any factual reasoning. IMO it should be proportional to population, and in line with other western nations, such as those in Australia and Canada, of which he's touting his reforms as having taken their roots from.
But most of all, I despise Trump because he is demonizing immigrants. Most illegal immigrants are scared to death of authorities, afraid that they'll be discovered and deported if they so much as get pulled over for a traffic offense, and are therefore less likely to commit crimes than are legal residents. They are not the crime ridden drug addicts Trump is making them out to be. I say this because at least 70% of my crew are immigrants, and consequently, nearly all of my close friends were not born in this country. I felt so badly for them when Trump was elected as they thought that the country was rejecting them, even though nearly all were legal residents. It was all I could do to convince them that they weren't hated.
Half my family is Mexican. My Mexican mother has seen first hand what Trump is talking about working in a public hospital. She watched Mexican immigrants coming across the border solely to have their children in American hospitals to get social benefits. The father of the baby would be standing by while the mother had the child not signing the birth certificate to ensure maximum social benefits and his income couldn't be tracked. This kind of stuff not at all uncommon.
I'm sorry it's come to this. But sometimes you have to take an extreme stance when something needs to be taken care of. You can't take a reasonable stance and get anything done in this country. I have never seen any president take a moderate stance and get anything done in this country. Even when Obama was pushing Obamacare, it was always how many poor people would be insured. How many Americans would be uninsured. There was no discussion about how many younger Americans voluntarily didn't buy insurance because they didn't feel they needed it and how large a portion of the uninsured were made up of people that voluntarily did not purchase insurance. It was all about helping the poor people.
You're always going take an extreme stance in this country to make something happen. It's how things get done. So of course Trump is going to take the bombastic approach to immigration to push the issue.
I work with a lot of immigrants myself. I told them to calm down, Trump is not going to deport you all or anything of the kind. I explained that you go over the top to hit the middle ground in this country. It's the only way to get things done. Trump's talk is to push a particular agenda. He'll hit hard, push it hard, make it seem far worse than it is, then strike middle ground at some point. So far I've been right. There's been some increase in enforcement, but Trump is now open to some discussion.
You're one of people I figured would get what Trump's angle was. He's a salesman. This is how he works when negotiating a deal. Push to get as much as he can, make it sound like he's getting screwed, then meet somewhere in the middle after negotiation. This is how he will do things. How he has always done things.
That travel ban was nothing more than a Saudi Arabia-Israel approved bone thrown to his anti-immigration supporters. I figured you knew those nations on that list were under economic assault by Saudi Arabia and were the enemies of Saudi Arabia. I knew it the first time I saw the list of nations on the travel ban. Somalia is being undermined by Saudia Arabia because of oil reserves in the nation Saudi Arabia doesn't want a stable Somalia to take advantage of. So they fund the Musliim Extremist movement in that nation to keep the place unstable. Iran and Syria Shia and enemies of Sunnia Saudi Arabia. Yemen is a small nation with insurgent activity as an add on. You didn't see any of the major Muslim nations other than Iran on that list. No Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan, or Afghanistan, none of the major terrorist creators and funders. You realized the travel ban was a token attempt to show action to stop Islamic militants? The most important supporters of Islamic militants weren't even on the list.
I don't get it on Mexica. Americans read stories about the Mexican drug cartel and murders on a level unheard of here, yet think we don't need to do something about cutting off Mexico? Latin America is in a bad way. We can't save them by taking them all in. We have to force them to fix the problem, not give them an out. We need a "wall" to cut off Mexico as far as I'm concerned. Not a literal wall, but some kind of effort other than a token effort to cut those nations off. When do you force a people to clean up their mess before they bring it to your house? My mother lives in El Paso, right next to Juarez. It's bad. The crime is very bad. She watched it grow worse with no other change than an increase in the number of Latin American (mainly Mexican) immigrants. This was a 2nd generation Mexican seeing Mexican criminals coming across the border when it used to be good, hard working Mexicans looking for a better life like her parents. Drugs have taken a terrible toll on Latin America. Until they choose a different path in Latin America, things are not going to go well and we need to close that off.