Rachel Maddow: Republican Dog-Whistling Has Been Overtaken By Trump’s Overt Racism

During Wednesday night’s broadcast of The Rachel Maddow Show, host Rachel Maddow devoted a segment to Republican nominee Donald Trump’s racial attacks on Gonzalo Curiel, the judge overseeing the Trump U fraud case. The former reality TV star has taken to lengthy tirades against the judge during campaign rallies as of late, claiming Curiel is biased against him because he’s “Mexican” (Curiel was born in Indiana) and Trump is very strong on the border.

As Maddow highlighted in the segment, Republican politicians have a long history of ‘otherizing’ non-white people, specifically when they are in front of their base. She featured two memorable instances — the George Allen ‘Macaca’ incident and Rick Santorum complaining about “blah” people. In both cases, while it was obvious the two conservatives were making racially-charged critiques, both of them at least tried to be semi-subtle about it. In other words, dog-whistling.

But Trump has just blown that facade to shreds. While this has been obvious for some time, he’s generally gone after large groups of people, and not individuals based on their ethnicity. However, with Judge Curiel, he’s crossed over previously untread territory. The GOP standard-bearer has given the signal to the party that it is now perfectly acceptable to personally attack citizens solely on the color of their skin. And now that the line has been crossed, we can only assume how much worse it will get moving forward.

After noting how Trump has made the GOP’s racism overt, she informed her audience of the recent news that the director of the party’s Hispanic outreach had just quit, obviously due to having to work with Donald Trump. It is now clear that the Republican Party has lost the Hispanic vote for generations to come, just like how the Southern Strategy pushed away the entire African-American community.

Below is video of the piece, courtesy of MSNBC: