It isn’t. Let me explain:
I think what’s going on is a lot of partisan people have this very thick mental folder of things trump said that prove he’s racist. The problem is that when you pull out any single example from this folder, its very ambiguous evidence of racism. That is, racism could explain it, but so could a million other things.
You can build one of these folders with anyone, and about almost anything. Obama is anti semitic. Why?
-Don’t you remember when a picture was taken of a smiling Obama next to known anti-semite louis farrakhan?
-Don’t you recall when Israeli spokesperson Ran Baratz pointed out Obama’s antisemitic response to Israel’s Prime Minister?
-Then there was the time Obama was “flattered” when Hamas compared him to Kennedy.
-And then of course the Washington Times reported that Obama’s refusal to veto an anti-Israel U.N. billas the most anti-semitic thing to happen in all of 2016!
It took me 20 minutes to dig up these examples, so imagine how much I could pack into this folder if I were deeply biased against Obama. And if you ever decided to get into the weeds with me over one of these examples, I could draw on all the others to help solidify my conclusion. One example crumbles under scrutiny, but once we’re trained to see a pattern, we can’t unsee it. So we read “overtones” and “dog whistles” into even crystal clear language to force the dots to connect.
People get trapped in this cycle of referring back to a folder of examples in order to justify all subsequent accusations. Giant leaps of logic become easy inferences. Reputation justifies the accusation, the accusation justifies reputation. It’s a self-attesting system of beliefs. Each of them individually can’t be justified.
But when you’re already sold on the whole bundle, even a stupid pocahontas joke looks like an overt racist slur.
