It makes no sense. You would think they came out in droves on Election Day, especially in 2016 when one candidate did everything to prove he hates racial minories and Muslims.
Have you given a thought about the possibility you might be equating disagreement over policy with failures of character?
The first point I'll make here is that Donald Trump never actually
explicitly endorsed racism, but he
explicitly attacked racism:
The only way you can convince yourself a guy who talks like that is a racist is if you make up some kind of excuse to put words he never said into his mouth. Every single Republican president going all the way back to Reagan have been called "racist" by people on the left. The same goes with the long-standing "dog whistle" argument. I have heard people make the claim that some words have a dual meaning. This implies that the same words should sometimes be used innocuously and sometimes be used as a sort of racist code.
I have never heard anyone make those conditions explicit and I'm sure you can see the problem: if I don't tell you when I am allowed to assign hidden meaning to your words, I have the freedom to do it every time it suits me. In practice, without the restrictions people never put, this means people on the left allow each other to equate conservative policies and conservative arguments with moral failures.
Here is another story about what Donald Trump is doing that requires a lot less faith in your power to divine personal intentions. Every time you write something that violates the norms of political correctness online, you are almost guaranteed to generate a public scandal if you are a public figure. You can even get in trouble over using the wrong euphemism like Cumberbatch when he used the more British "colored people" instead of the more American "people of color" in an interview. What if Donald Trump says asinine things
because he wants people like you drowning the news cycle and social media with outrage? I know for a fact that he made a few key policy changes, namely to immigration, during controversies
he initiated. I also notice he seems to pick his time to force Democrats to rally behind radical members of their own party. Remember the Pelosi-Squad feud? It stopped when Trump said the Squad should "go back" to their countries and fix them. Pelosi was
forced to align herself behind AOC, Omar and Tlaib, even if she wanted to attack them.
As for the policy positions, there are many ways to look at them. It is true that a xenophobic person would push for stricter immigration control. However, you can legitimately believe people should not break the law without being xenophobic. It is true that an islamophobic person cheered when Donald Trump restricted access to people from the Middle East. However, you can legitimately believe there were security concerns. As it happens, there are Muslim majority countries outside of the Arabic world -- and nobody in the Republican party has any problem with them. Have you heard a conservative rant about Indonesia or Malaysia? No.
The fact of the matter is that it's too easy to paint him as being supported by evil groups. The truth is rarely that convenient. As Tulsi Gabbard pointed out, a sizable chunk of his voters used to vote Democrat. Many of them were Obama supporters and some of them were disaffected Sanders voters. Assuming the guy is evil and everyone hates him obscures the fact he actually address real concerns real people have in their day-to-day life. It's a bad strategy -- and that might just cost Democrats in 2020 if they don't wake up.
A funny tweet someone posted after the debate in Missouri, where one Middle Eastern student was dressed in religious clothing, was, "How can a Muslim be undecided?" (Only undecided students were allowed to attend.)
That is the problem I am talking about: some Muslims were undecided and you cannot make sense of that. Not everyone who disagrees with you is bad, stupid or uninformed.