Photo by Gage Skidmore and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

For Milwaukee, a city with the dubious title of being the most segregated community in the nation, what the leader of America says about racial issues has a direct local impact.

Critics of Trump point to numerous examples of his racist behavior. Defenders of him share talking points that his meaning was taken out of context. However, as David Leonhardt points out in his New York Times opinion:

No one except Trump can know what Trump’s private thoughts or motivations are. But the public record and his behavior are now abundantly clear. Donald Trump treats black people and Latinos differently than he treats white people.

And that makes him a racist.

As Speaker of the House Paul Ryan would say, “the textbook definition” of being a racist is someone who treats some people better than others because of their race. Whatever his internal thoughts or miscommunicated meaning, Trump routinely exhibited a pattern of behavior over a great length of time that meets that definition.

  • Trump’s real-estate company was sued twice by the federal government in the 1970s for discouraging the renting of apartments to African-Americans and preferring white tenants, such as “Jews and executives.”
  • In 1989, Trump took out ads in New York newspapers urging the death penalty for five black and Latino teenagers accused of raping a white woman in Central Park; he continued to argue that they were guilty as late as October 2016, more than 10 years after DNA evidence had exonerated them.
  • He spent years claiming that the nation’s first black president was born not in the United States but in Africa, an outright lie that Trump still has not acknowledged as such.
  • He began his 2016 presidential campaign by disparaging Mexican immigrants as criminals and “rapists.”
  • He has retweeted white nationalists without apology.
  • He frequently criticizes prominent African-Americans for being unpatriotic, ungrateful and disrespectful.
  • He called some of those who marched alongside white supremacists in Charlottesville last August “very fine people.”
  • He is quick to highlight crimes committed by dark-skinned people, sometimes exaggerating or lying about it, such as a claim about growing crime from “radical Islamic terror” in Britain. He is very slow to decry hate crimes committed against dark-skinned people, such as the murder of an Indian man in Kansas last year.
  • At the White House on January 11, Trump vulgarly called for less immigration from Haiti and Africa and more from Norway.

Trump would ban Jesus for being born in Sh*thole country.

As a Christian Nation, under Trump’s policy and with Evangelical Christian support, the Biblical Messiah would be forbidden from entry into America and shunned due to his place of birth. The Nazarene was born in a feeding trough among animals. He was exiled into Egypt as a refugee. And the man, who is the foundation of the faith named after him, disrupted the social norm at the Temple where money changers had corrupted a place of worship to a commercial enterprise.

Can anything good come from Nazareth?