Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” The New York Times columnist David Brooks said President Donald Trump made it “very hard to be a Republican and not be somehow associated with something racially reprehensible.”
Brooks, said, “If you look at the Republican party and ask do you think there’s much discrimination against white people as anyone else, a large percentage say yes. How strong is white identity? Forty percent. The sense of being whiteness is a strong identity factor. So the other half, not so much a factor. They believe conservative ideas are good for everyone. And Donald Trump is playing for the white identity party. And therefore it’s becoming harder, operationally, to be a Republican without suddenly siding with that.”
“And so the other half of the party, can we side with a guy who’s constantly dragging us into racial identity politics over and over again in a way that becomes offensive?” he continued. “I’ve been a conservative 30 years; I never used to hear racial stuff at conservative gatherings, now it’s suddenly become very hard to be a Republican and not be somehow associated with something racially reprehensible.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
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