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ICYMI: “Donald Trump Will Be the Republican Nominee for President. Don’t Ever Get Used to It.”

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New Pieces from Jamelle Bouie and Gabe Ortíz Underscore Dangers of Normalizing Trump Candidacy

As the chances of a Trump nomination seem increasingly likely, many in the GOP establishment have admittedly “warmed” to the idea of Trump as the party’s standard bearer.  Jamelle Bouie at Slate offers a stark reminder to the American people that we cannot let Trump’s candidacy become the “new normal.” Per Bouie:

It’s not even that he’s racist or nativist or violent in his rhetoric. So were presidents Andrew Jackson and James K. Polk. So were candidates George B. McClellan and George Wallace. It’s only in the last generation that American politics has filtered out the explicitly prejudiced, Trump notwithstanding.

No, what makes Donald Trump something new in American political life is that he’s all of these things at once: a racist, nativist demagogue with few ties to government, no experience in public office, no service in the armed forces, and little to no knowledge of anything involving governance, from policy to basic questions like, “What is the Supreme Court, and what does it do?” If you conjured all the ignorance and arrogance in America and gave it human form, you would have Donald Trump, give or take a spray tan.

Americans have never chosen someone like him to lead one of their two major parties. And now that he’s the presumptive nominee, Americans will—for the first time in their history—have a choice of whether they’ll put him in the Oval Office, to lead the country for four years.

There’s certainly one group for which the Trump candidacy will never be normal—and that’s Latino voters. As Bouie highlights in his piece, and recent polling by Latino Decisions demonstrates—Trump is one of the “most unpopular figures in recent memory, if not the most unpopular presidential candidate in modern American history.” Per Latino Decisions, 87% of Latino voters have either a “very” or “somewhat” unfavorable opinion of Donald Trump.

While Bouie’s piece makes the point (and the Latino Decisions numbers indicate) that Trump “almost certainly won’t” be elected President, he has run one of the most racist and xenophobic campaigns in recent history.  This fact is further underscored by America’s Voice’s Gabe Ortíz in a recent Medium post, “24 Of The Worst Things Donald Trump Has Ever Said.”

Both pieces ask the question, is this the country we want to live in?  If not, we need to show up in November and make sure we don’t become a country where Trump’s dangerous embrace of prejudice and misogyny is prized and rewarded.