Editorial: Trump Plays to His Racist Base

President Trump’s characteristically vulgar denigration of Haiti and African countries during a meeting with senators about immigration last week was, as so often is the case with him, essentially unanswerable. That is, no proportionate response is possible because decency cannot trump indecency, at least not in a single news cycle. Sen. Richard Durbin of Illinois came closest, perhaps, when he called the president’s comments “hated-filled, vile and racist.” Even that did not quite do justice to the subject, although it was a considerable improvement on the pathetic denials by two Republican senators that Trump had used the offending language.

One group, at least, was not at a loss for words — white supremacists. Perhaps that’s because they are among the few who truly understand and appreciate what Trump is all about.

The New York Times reported that a neo-Nazi website called The Daily Stormer applauded the president’s comments in this fashion: “This is encouraging and refreshing, as it indicates Trump is more or less on the same page as us with regards to race and immigration.” And Richard Spencer, a prominent white nationalist, said conservatives should stop trying to defend the Trump presidency by contending that it is about economics and the legal system. “It’s obviously all about race, and to their credit, liberals point out the obvious,” Spencer said.

Well, yes, they do, but too many are still saying that Trump’s views on race are the result of ignorance or misinformation or insensitivity. This is nonsense.

Almost lost in the storm unleashed by Trump’s references to places from which the United States should not accept immigrants was his stated preference for a country from which they should be welcomed — Norway, which is overwhelmingly white and where about 83 percent of the population is of Norwegian ethnicity. The echoes of the Nazis’ Nordic-master-race ideology are hard to miss, and we doubt that Trump wanted his fervent admirers to miss them.

Since he began running for office, the president has repeatedly used crude, incendiary language in public and private to describe immigrants, Mexicans and Muslims variously as criminals, rapists and terrorists, thereby pushing such views from the dark fringe into the mainstream. This has not only emboldened far-right nationalists at home; it also is of a piece with a rising tide of right-wing populism in Europe, where migrants have become scapegoats for economic stagnation and rising inequality rooted in technological change. From the Czech Republic to Poland to Hungary, political leaders are echoing the kind of language used by Trump about immigrants. Just last week, according to the Times, Austria’s new interior minister broached the idea of “concentrating” migrants in asylum centers.

How far is it from “concentrating” to “concentration” camps? The progression from thought to word to deed is not inexorable, of course. But when odious racial views, once held privately, are expressed openly by political leaders, they inevitably become legitimized. When those views are aimed at dehumanizing whole groups of people, as in Germany during the rise of the Nazis, the stage is set for the kind of mass persecution that made the mid-20th century such a horror. No wonder America’s neo-Nazis are thrilled with their president.