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Modern (American) politics is essentially a game in which politicians say and do whatever they possibly can to persuade people that they are an ideal leader deserving of a vote.

But you already know that. Hopefully.

Most of us are pretty cynical about politics and straight-up expect politicians to lie to us. We understand that posturing, over-promising, tricky rhetoric, and psychological manipulation are par for the course in the political arena.
Interestingly, though, I've been hearing some claims regarding the current presidential race that contradict the typical cynicism with which most people view political candidates.
Specifically, I've heard many people expressing the belief that Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are refreshingly different from typical political candidates.

Why?

Because they say what they really feel and think, supposedly. They aren't just talking heads. They're real people who will let their real views and ideas be known, for better or worse.

That might be true, to some extent. Trump and Sanders might be more authentic than most politicians (which wouldn't take much). It's almost impossible to say.

The Truth
But even if they are, make no mistake: They are still playing the game like everyone else.
I'm not saying anything about their merits as candidates or people, and I'm not making any kind of moral judgment. I'm just saying that they too are posturing, over-promising, and employing tricky rhetoric and psychological tactics to win over their audiences. Don't think for a second that they're not. No one would have a prayer of winning a presidential race without doing those things.
But people are viewing them as utterly genuine. People are taking them at face value.
Sanders has this effect on people because he's so fiercely passionate about the issues. I actually believe he sincerely cares about the things he wants to change, and so he exudes an earnestness while speaking that captivates many people, especially people in my generation.
Nonetheless, I assure you that Sanders is self-aware of his grandiose, fiery style and his calls for revolution.
He knows he's over-promising, and he's consciously trying to create a tsunami of unrealistically high hope for a better world and ride that wave into the White House, like Obama did. It's a good strategy, though if he gets elected, many people will probably be upset when the revolution doesn't arrive, when the billionaire class continues to exist, and when big money continues to influence politics.¹

Trump, on the other hand, is perceived as honest because he says and does so many ludicrous things, compared to traditional candidates. Trump's behavior is so ridiculous that people can't fathom that most of it could be an act, a strategy, a role he's learned to play. But it is. And whereas Bernie is trying to ride a wave of hope into the White House, Trump is trying to ride a wave of fear and anger.

Trump's appeal is downright frightening because we are at a rather precarious moment in the history of the United States and the history of the world. The planet is filled with nuclear warheads; environmental crises are occurring/looming; the largest refugee crisis since World War II is taking place. The 21st century is a time in which the countries of the world need more than ever to cooperate with one another, consider a global perspective, and devise strategies that will make the human enterprise sustainable through the 21st century and hopefully far beyond.

But Trump isn't much of a cooperator. He's explicitly stated that he wants to build a wall around much of the United States, and he's made comments that reveal a frighteningly uncritical and violent approach to international relations (on ISIS: "I would bomb the shit out of 'em," and " ... you have to take out their families. "). From my vantage point, a leader like Trump is more likely to help bring about World War III than a more sustainable, equitable, and unified human enterprise.²

Many people don't see it this way, though. Many believe that Trump's aggressive and America-centric approach to politics will be our saving grace.

This may have something to do with the hypothesized psychological divide between people who lean Left versus people who lean Right. Some fascinating studies have suggested that there are neurobiological differences between liberals and conservatives. One study found, for instance, that conservatives tend to respond to threatening situations with more aggression than liberals.

If one wanted to appeal to conservative-minded people, it follows then that one could paint a picture of the world as One Giant Threat to America and propose an extremely aggressive plan to ameliorate the situation. As we'll see, Donald Trump is a master of this persuasive tactic.
He's a master of a number of other tactics as well, and the cumulative effect of these tactics is that he's gone from being considered a joke candidate to having a decent chance of becoming the next leader of one of the most powerful countries in the world.
12 Psychological Tactics That Make Donald Trump a Master Manipulator

Let's take a closer look at the various tactics Trump has used to climb into his present position. The following points were gathered primarily from two YouTube videos³ created by Charlie Houpert, which provide an excellent analysis of Trump's various psychological strategies. You'll find the videos embedded at the bottom of this article, if you'd like to watch them, but that isn't necessary, as I'll thoroughly summarize the 12 strategies they discuss.

1. Sowing Seeds of Fear

Trump has said, "You're going to have more World Trade Centers. It's going to get worse and worse, folks," and "When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're bringing drugs; they're bringing crime; they're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people."

These are blatant instances of fear-mongering. Trump deliberately hones in on frightening statistical rarities - terrorist attacks against the US and immigrants who are dangerous rapists - and acts like they've become the norm. Violence has actually declined over recent decades and centuries, but Trump makes it seem like the opposite has happened.

Why does he do this? Charlie Houpert, the creator of the videos I mentioned, explains it well:

"Fear is an incredibly powerful emotion. It captures our attention like no other emotion can. We focus intensely on the thing that is giving us that fear. Secondly, it shuts down higher thinking. When we're terrified by a bump in the night, we don't focus on the probability that it's just the wind. Our critical thinking skills dip as we focus solely on protecting ourselves. Thirdly, it feels crappy, so the fastest way to get out of fear and move toward a powerful emotion is to move into anger."

Major news outlets portray the world as a terrifying place because doing so captures people's attention. Trump is doing the same thing. Fear ensnares our attention like nothing else can, while simultaneously short-circuiting our higher cognitive functioning. This is unsettling because our natural response to fear is to escape or destroy whatever is threatening us as quickly as possible.

2. Provoking Anger and Hostility

It is quite natural for humans to cope with fear by becoming angry and aggressive. Trump fuels this fire of fear-driven rage and hostility as much as he possibly can and directs it toward non-American outgroups.

He says things like "China is taking our jobs; they're taking our money," and "Syrians are now being caught at the Southern border; we don't know who they are; could be ISIS."

He sets up false dichotomies between the interests of Americans and the interests of other humans of the world, such that if you disagree with him, you appear to be anti-American. This leaves many credulous viewers with one obvious response: to be an angry, aggressive, Trump-supporting American who views the rest of the world with suspicion and aggression!

3. Playing the Big Strong Messiah Figure

This potent combination of fear-, anger-, and aggression-mongering then sets Trump up for one of his most effective lies: that he is the only big, strong man tough enough to do what needs to be done to kick everyone else's ass and "make America great again."

Trump makes unrealistic claims such as "No one else will keep you safe," and "No one is going to mess with us." He presents himself as the most dominant and strongest-willed candidate - the only candidate capable of returning the US to its rightful position as Imminent, Dominant Global Superpower.

But again, do we need America to dominate other countries/entities at this point in history? It's likely that some amount of military action is advisable, as certain groups (e.g. ISIS) are committing brutal crimes against innocent people.

However, if one looks at the bigger picture, it becomes clear that cooperation rather than conflict must become the rule in the human enterprise, if the human species is to persist into the deep future. On a planet now laced with nuclear warheads, unbounded aggression is no longer an option. And in a biosphere facing various environmental crises, our species must recognize the collective goal of devising sustainable systems to avert catastrophe.

But, as I mentioned earlier, research has suggested that conservative-minded people respond more aggressively to threatening situations than liberal-minded people. Instinctively aggressive people respond favorably to Trump's call for a return to an Ultra-Dominant America.

That some people are more instinctively aggressive than others is not a "bad" thing. Clearly, this arrangement was beneficial in our primal past, or we would not have evolved this way. However, we don't live in the world of our distant ancestors anymore. We live in a world in which excessive aggression/conflict is a potential threat to the entire biosphere and all sentient life. Thus, we need leaders who are capable of taking calculated aggressive measures after a thorough analysis of all available courses of action, not leaders whose default response to problematic circumstances is to use hyper-aggressive military force, as Trump wishes to do.

4. Painting Everything as Black and White

The world is a damn complex and ambiguous place, but admitting this reality is not a good political strategy. It's much more effective to paint the world as a simple place where things are either X or not-X. To do so is to commit the 'false dilemma' fallacy. A quintessential example is a much-cited statement made by George W. Bush in 2001:

"Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists."

It comforts people to tell them that things must be either this or that because it makes them feel that they understand the insanely complex bramble of global affairs that no individual human actually understands en toto.

Trump is brilliant at reducing the complexity of the world to black-and-white narratives. One of his favorites is the narrative of Winners vs Losers. In Trump's story, America has been unambiguously losing in recent memory; America is becoming a perma-loser before our eyes, and we're just getting used to it.

Of course, with Trump as president, America is going to start winning again in all regards. "We're going to start winning so much that you're going to get used to winning instead of getting used to losing," he has said.
Does it even make sense to conceive of individual countries as "winners" or "losers" in a world where the future of our entire species and all life on Earth is potentially at stake? Probably not.
Yet Trump's black-and-white narrative appeals to our desire for simple, digestible stories and our American hyper-competitiveness. And again, when people are afraid and angry, they are primed to accept whatever convenient narrative promises to allow them to escape their fear, and thus the absurdly vague and reductive America is Going to Start Winning So Much Again That We'll Have Nothing to Worry About story begins to seem quite alluring indeed.

5. Deflection Via Humor

One downside of portraying yourself as the Big Strong Man is that there will still always be situations in which someone gets the best of you, making you appear foolish or weak.

Donald Trump has found himself in this situation on a number of occasions. One of the most notable was a situation in which Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly confronted Trump about past comments in which Trump had called women he disliked "fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals."

This question was a potential landmine for Trump, but he interrupted Megyn Kelly halfway through her question by saying, "Only Rosie O'Donnell." This comment caused an uproar of laughter in the audience and all but derailed the inquiry into Trump's juvenile and dehumanizing remarks. Trump has perfected this strategy of deflecting potential threats through the use of humor. As Charlie Houpert put it:

"So that is the power of laughter. It is a pattern interrupt[ion]. You can't stay booing and upset and angry when somebody makes you uncontrollably laugh. It also makes you more receptive to whatever comes next that somebody has to say because they've already started to lead you emotionally. So what Donald Trump is doing is using laughter to take control of situations where he's starting to lose control. And what that does for him is it effectively helps him dodge any points that you make against him because he can almost erase them with a laughing crowd. "

6. Acting Superior to Opponents

Humor isn't Trump's only strategy for avoiding discussion of some of the more contentious issues in his record. Another favorite strategy of his is to simply act superior to all opponents and criticisms.

In one of the GOP debates, Jeb Bush attempted to point out that Donald Trump had completely changed his stance on ISIS in a matter of two months. As Jeb was saying this, Trump didn't even pay him the courtesy of looking in his direction. Instead, he looked only at the audience with an expression of disbelief and disgust that said, "Who is this guy?"

This maneuver indicates to the audience that Bush's attack is ridiculous, laughable, not even worthy of attention, allowing Trump to bypass any sort of rational discussion. By contrast, when Trump attacked Bush, Bush looked directly at Trump with an expression of distress and disconcertedness, playing perfectly into Trump's game. Jeb appeared to be something of a confused and insecure novice looking to Big Daddy Trump for answers.

7. Doing Whatever Possible to Make it His Game

This point is related to the previous two, but it deserves emphasis. Trump's power plays - whether making jokes in the face of criticism or acting superior to other candidates - are all aimed at making him appear as the leader of a game in which everyone else is merely a player.

In social dynamics, this is referred to as "frame control." Trump frames every interaction as if he is unquestionably superior to those around him, as if everyone else is in his world. When it comes to politics, whichever politician has the strongest and most unflinching frame will make that frame a perceived reality. And Trump is very good at unflinchingly selling his frame. As a billionaire, thick-skinned businessman, he's been practicing this tactic for decades.

Combine this with his fear-mongering, anger-mongering, and presenting himself as the One Great Strong Solution to Loser America, and you've got a potent combination of factors coming together to make Donald Trump appear to be an untouchable, iron-willed leader in comparison to his opponents.

Read this: George Orwell on the 7 Ways Politicians Abuse Language to Deceive You

8. Creating Double-Bind Situations

Another of Trump's favorite tactics (and another form of frame control) is to trap other candidates in double-bind situations. Essentially, this means that he puts them in positions where it doesn't matter what they say or how they react to him - however they respond, he will come out looking better and they will come out looking worse.

Charlie Houpert cites the example of Trump taunting Jeb Bush about having low energy during one of the GOP debates. Trump says, "I know you're trying to build up your energy, Jeb, but it's not working." In the face of such a statement, Jeb Bush has two options: to try to ratchet his energy up or keep it where it is/take it down a notch. If he chooses the former, he appears to be reacting to Trump, making Trump look like he's in control. If he chooses the latter, he remains low-energy and Trump can just steamroll him throughout the debate. It's a lose-lose situation for Jeb Bush, and this is the power of a double-bind.

9. Repetition

Donald Trump repeats emotionally provocative words like "strong" and "win" over and over and over. The second of Charlie Houpert's videos shows one absurd clip in which Trump manages to say the word "win" 12 times in about 15 seconds.

This tactic subtly conditions people to associate strength and victory with the Trump campaign. You might think that this tactic is silly or would only be effective on unintelligent people, but you'd be wrong. There's a reason large companies pour millions of dollars into ad campaigns with catchy taglines and jingles: through sheer repetition, certain associations become embedded in the mind, if only on an unconscious level. Watch the documentary Century of the Self sometime if you don't believe me.

10. Social proof

Trump loves to hammer social proof. He repeats over and over and over that he's ahead in the polls or that people agree he won a particular debate. As social creatures, we have a distinct and sometimes malignant tendency to do and believe whatever we think everyone else is doing and believing. Trump understands the importance of this fact, and so at every turn, he acts as if he has an army of people behind him.

Trump is also very careful to avoid negative social proof. For instance, at one point Trump appeared on the O'Reilly Factor, and Bill O'Reilly suggested that people had seen Trump as a "buffoon" when he first announced his campaign. Trump outright rejected this statement, acted as if it was outrageous, and assured the audience that people did not feel that way. He was very deliberate and forceful about this because he knows that what people think other people think is one of the most potent forces driving human belief and behavior. His decades in business almost certainly ingrained that lesson into his mind.

11. Appeals to Authority

Trump loves to assert that authority figures approve of him and disapprove of other candidates. The second video of Charlie Houpert's cites Trump saying, "Larry Kudlow likes my tax plan," and "Experts wonder if Cruz can run the US because he was born in Canada."

Trump understands that especially in our uncertain postmodern world with its endless sources of competing information, people look to experts to form their opinions. There is also a cognitive bias known as the Asch effect that is relevant here. From Wikipedia:

"In repeated and modified instances of the Asch conformity experiments, it was found that high-status individuals create a stronger likelihood of a subject agreeing with an obviously false conclusion, despite the subject normally being able to clearly see that the answer was incorrect.

Further, humans have been shown to feel strong emotional pressure to conform to authorities and majority positions."

So not only do we tend to feel pressure to conform with the herd, but we also feel pressure to agree with high-status individuals.

Here's an off-the-cuff armchair-evolutionary-psych explanation for this phenomenon: When our ancestors lived as bands of hunter-gatherers, it was beneficial to have an extraordinary level of cohesion of belief and action in a given tribe; it was often a matter of life or death. Thus, tribes in which people unquestioningly accepted the worldview passed on by wise elders and readily conformed to the herd mentality would be more likely to survive.
Anyway, for whatever reason, we're much more likely to believe something if an authority figure or expert tells us it's true. Trump understands this and takes advantage of it at every turn.
12. Appealing to Irrational Parts of Our Brains

This might come as a surprise, but humans actually suck at making rational decisions and are much more likely to make emotion-driven decisions. This is a great thing a lot of the time because in many areas of life, our emotions and feelings are excellent indicators of an appropriate course of action.

But when it comes to choosing the leader of one of the most powerful countries in the world, it might be a bad idea to vote for a guy because his smile gives you the warm fuzzies. Unfortunately, it's damn difficult for humans to use rationality, especially if they haven't been trained to think critically or haven't researched the various cognitive biases that result in inaccurate thinking.

Donald Trump knows that most people make their decisions on the basis of emotion rather than reason. He also knows that there are certain methods of manipulating people's emotions to get them to do what you want. Most all of the items on this list - from fear-/anger-mongering and deflection via humor to repetition, social proof, and appeal to authority - are effective methods of making people feel very confident about a position, despite the fact that they haven't considered any statistical evidence or rational arguments.

Donald Trump understands this, and that's why you'll never see him engaging in a rational discussion of the issues or of the criticisms levied against him. When challenged to do so, Trump will deflect via humor, appeal to vague authorities or social proof, or utilize some sort of half-relevant anecdote to appeal to emotion and distract from his shortcomings.

In Conclusion

As I said before, Donald Trump isn't the only one playing the manipulation game. Other candidates also understand that people are emotional creatures, and any candidate who wants to have a chance of winning must use some or all of these tactics. Such is the nature of American democracy in 2016.

What's frightening about Trump is that he's so damn good at playing this game. He's spent decades learning the subtle art of being a dominant social presence and persuading people to do what he wants them to do. His actual values and ideas could be egregiously ill-conceived. Hell, they could be a recipe for World War III. But because he's such a talented hypnotist politician, his actual values and ideas don't matter that much. If he wins the race, it will be because he effectively encouraged and harnessed the fear, anger, and emotion-driven decision-making of a large portion of the American public.

Personally, I would prefer not to find out what happens to America after electing one of the most effective fear- and anger-mongers since, uh, Adolf Hitler. I would prefer not to find out if a man who has spent the last 30 years plastering his name on everything he could put his name on gives two shits about the interests of most Americans. I would prefer not to find out if a businessman with no political experience is prepared to approach the challenges of the presidency with wisdom and acumen. I would prefer not to find out if Trump's hard-ass, violence-friendly approach to political problems is as dangerous for planet Earth as I think it is.
If you found this article educational or important in any way, please pass it on to your friends.
1. Don't get me wrong: I like Bernie and would likely vote for him if he were to get the nomination. All I'm saying is that he's playing the game too, and that in reality, he had no choice but to play the game if he wanted to have any chance of winning.

2. One could also argue that an extremely passive or pacifistic US President could inadvertently cause a World-War-III situation by failing to take action to neutralize dangerous groups or leaders who are gaining power. Some argue that this is essentially what happened pre-World War II. My view is that we need leaders who are capable of taking aggressive measures after a thorough analysis of all available courses of action, not leaders whose default response to problematic circumstances is to use hyper-aggressive military force.

3. The two outstanding videos that inspired this post and provided many of the insights:

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12 Psychological Tactics Donald Trump Uses to Manipulate the Masses

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Modern (American) politics is essentially a game in which politicians say and do whatever they possibly can to persuade people that they are an ideal leader deserving of a vote. But you already know that. Hopefully. Most of us are pretty cynical about politics and straight-up expect politicians to lie to us.

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58% of white voters - 37% backed Clinton

8% of black voters - 88% voted for Clinton

29% of Hispanics - 65% supported Clinton

EPA

Donald Trump has beaten Hillary Clinton in the race to be president of the United States.

Much of the narrative ahead of the election had been that Mr Trump was supported by angry, white men. To get an insight into which groups actually voted for him, you can look at the exit poll conducted across the country by Edison Research for the National Election Pool, a consortium of ABC News, The Associated Press, CBS News, CNN, Fox News and NBC News.

It is very difficult to get a genuinely representative sample of how more than 120 million people have voted. It is a big survey - of almost 25,000 voters - and they are the best figures available, but they should be used with caution.

It throws up some odd results, such as that 10% of people who support the idea of a wall along the Mexican border nonetheless voted for Mrs Clinton, while 5% of people who thought the next president should continue the policies of Barack Obama voted for Mr Trump.

Bear in mind that the proportions are unlikely to add up to 100%, because not everybody answered all the questions and there were other candidates standing in the election, who received about 5% of the votes.

The poll suggests that 53% of men voted for Mr Trump, with 41% voting for Mrs Clinton - those proportions are almost exactly reversed for women.

Among white voters (who made up 70% of voters), Mr Trump won 58% to Mrs Clinton's 37%, while the Democratic candidate won the support of a huge majority of black voters - 88% to Mr Trump's 8% - and Hispanic voters - 65% to his 29%.

Looking specifically at white women, they favoured Mr Trump, with 53% supporting him compared with 43% for Mrs Clinton.

It has been widely reported that the 29% of Hispanic voters who supported Mr Trump was greater than the 27% who voted for the Republican candidate Mitt Romney in 2012, despite Mr Trump's comments about Mexicans and plans to build a wall on the US's southern border.

Mrs Clinton had the majority of voters on lower incomes, with 52% of those on incomes below $50,000 (£40,000) a year supporting her compared with 41% voting for her opponent. Among those earning more than $50,000, it was 49% to Mr Trump compared with 47% to Mrs Clinton.

Mrs Clinton's support among those on incomes below $30,000 was well down on President Obama's in 2012. He had 63% support from that group compared with 35% voting for Mitt Romney, while Mrs Clinton had 53% support to Mr Trump's 41%.

There was also a big swing for voters without a high school diploma, with Mr Trump leading 51% to Mrs Clinton's 45%. Four years ago, President Obama had 64% support from this group compared with Mitt Romney's 35%.

Mr Trump won the rural vote by 62% to 34% and the suburban vote by 50% to 45%, while Mrs Clinton won the urban vote by 59% to 35%.

And he had a clear majority among those aged 45 and over, while Mrs Clinton was more popular with younger voters.

There were stories before the election of Republicans planning to vote for Mrs Clinton because they did not like their own candidate, but the exit poll actually suggested that 7% of people who identified themselves as Republicans had voted for Mrs Clinton, while 9% of those who identified as Democrats had voted for Mr Trump.

Of people who gave their opinion of the candidate they voted for, 41% strongly favoured them, 32% had reservations and 25% said they disliked the opponents.

Also among the slightly odd findings of the poll, 18% of respondents who felt that Mr Trump was not qualified to be president nonetheless voted for him, as did 20% of those who felt he did not have the necessary temperament.

And 2% of respondents who said they would feel scared if Mr Trump won, still voted for him, compared with 1% who voted for Mrs Clinton, despite saying they would be scared if she won.

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Reality Check: Who voted for Donald Trump?

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58% of white voters - 37% backed Clinton 8% of black voters - 88% voted for Clinton 29% of Hispanics - 65% supported Clinton EPA Donald Trump has beaten Hillary Clinton in the race to be president of the United States.

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Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump may have failed to disavow the Ku Klux Klan in late February, but he'll have you know he is not racist. In fact, he claims to be "the least racist person that you have ever met," and last summer he pulled out the old standby about not having a racist bone in his body.

But he hasn't given us a lot of reason to believe that. In fact, despite Trump's protests to the contrary, he has a long history of saying and doing racist things. It's not really surprising that he's won the support and praise of the country's white supremacists.

Here's a running list of some of the most glaringly racist things associated with Trump. We're sure we'll be adding to it soon.

He attacked Muslim Gold Star parents.

Trump's retaliation against the parents of a Muslim U.S. Army officer who died while serving in the Iraq War was a clear low point in a campaign full of hateful rhetoric.

Khizr Khan, the father of the late Army Captain Humayun Khan, spoke out against Trump's bigoted rhetoric and disregard for civil liberties at the Democratic National Convention on July 28. It quickly became the most memorable moment of the convention.

"Let me ask you, have you even read the U.S. Constitution?" Khan asked Trump before pulling a copy of the document from his jacket pocket and holding it up. "I will gladly lend you my copy," he declared.

Khan's wife Ghazala Khan, who wears a Muslim head scarf, stood at his side during the speech but did not speak.

In response to the devastating speech, Trump seized on Ghazala Khan's silence to insinuate that she was forbidden from speaking due to the couple's Islamic faith.

"If you look at his wife, she was standing there. She had nothing to say. She probably, maybe she wasn't allowed to have anything to say. You tell me," Trump said in an interview with ABC News that first appeared on July 30.

Ghazala Khan explained in an op-ed in the Washington Post the following day that she could not speak because of grief over her son.

"Walking onto the convention stage, with a huge picture of my son behind me, I could hardly control myself. What mother could?" she wrote. "Donald Trump has children whom he loves. Does he really need to wonder why I did not speak?"

He claimed a judge was biased because "he's a Mexican."

In May, Trump implied that Gonzalo Curiel, the federal judge presiding over a class action against the for-profit Trump University, could not fairly hear the case because of his Mexican heritage.

" He's a Mexican," Trump told CNN of Curiel. "We're building a wall between here and Mexico. The answer is, he is giving us very unfair rulings - rulings that people can't even believe."

Curiel, it should be noted, is an American citizen who was born in Indiana. And as a prosecutor in the late 1990s, he went after Mexican drug cartels, making him a target for assassination by a Tijuana drug lord.

Even members of Trump's own party slammed the racist remarks.

"Claiming a person can't do their job because of their race is sort of like the textbook definition of a racist comment," House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said in a reaction to Trump's comments, though he clarified that he still endorses the nominee.

When asked whether he would trust a Muslim judge, in light of his proposed restrictions on Muslim immigration, Trump suggested that such a judge might not be fair to him either.

The Justice Department sued his company ― twice ― for not renting to black people.

When Trump was serving as the president of his family's real estate company, the Trump Management Corporation, in 1973, the Justice Department sued the company for alleged racial discrimination against black people looking to rent apartments in Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island.

The lawsuit charged that the company quoted different rental terms and conditions to black rental candidates than it did with white candidates, and that the company lied to black applicants about apartments not being available. Trump called those accusations "absolutely ridiculous" and sued the Justice Department for $100 million in damages for defamation.

Without admitting wrongdoing, the Trump Management Corporation settled the original lawsuit two years later and promised not to discriminate against black people, Puerto Ricans or other minorities. Trump also agreed to send weekly vacancy lists for his 15,000 apartments to the New York Urban League, a civil rights group, and to allow the NYUL to present qualified applicants for vacancies in certain Trump properties.

Just three years after that, the Justice Department sued the Trump Management Corporation again for allegedly discriminating against black applicants by telling them apartments weren't available.

In fact, discrimination against black people has been a pattern in his career.

Workers at Trump's casinos in Atlantic City, New Jersey, have accused him of racism over the years. The New Jersey Casino Control Commission fined the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino $200,000 in 1992 because managers would remove African-American card dealers at the request of a certain big-spending gambler. A state appeals court upheld the fine.

The first-person account of at least one black Trump casino employee in Atlantic City suggests the racist practices were consistent with Trump's personal behavior toward black workers.

"When Donald and Ivana came to the casino, the bosses would order all the black people off the floor," Kip Brown, a former employee at Trump's Castle, told the New Yorker for a September article. "It was the eighties, I was a teen-ager, but I remember it: they put us all in the back."

Trump disparaged his black casino employees as "lazy" in vividly bigoted terms, according to a 1991 book by John O'Donnell, a former president of Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino.

"And isn't it funny. I've got black accountants at Trump Castle and Trump Plaza. Black guys counting my money! I hate it," O'Donnell recalled Trump saying. "The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day."

"I think the guy is lazy," Trump said of a black employee, according to O'Donnell. "And it's probably not his fault because laziness is a trait in blacks. It really is, I believe that. It's not anything they can control."

Trump has also faced charges of reneging on commitments to hire black people. In 1996, 20 African Americans in Indiana sued Trump for failing to honor a promise to hire mostly minority workers for a riverboat casino on Lake Michigan.

He refused to condemn the white supremacists who are campaigning for him.

When asked by CNN's Jake Tapper if he would condemn Duke and say he didn't want a vote from him or any other white supremacists, Trump claimed that he didn't know anything about white supremacists or about Duke himself. When Tapper pressed him twice more, Trump said he couldn't condemn a group he hadn't yet researched.

It's preposterous to think that Trump doesn't know about white supremacist groups or their sometimes violent support of him. Reports of neo-Nazi groups rallying around Trump go back as far as August.

His white supremacist fan club includes the Daily Stormer, a leading neo-Nazi news site; Richard Spencer, director of the National Policy Institute, which aims to promote the "heritage, identity, and future of European people"; Jared Taylor, editor of American Renaissance, a Virginia-based white nationalist magazine; Michael Hill, head of the League of the South, an Alabama-based white supremacist secessionist group; and Brad Griffin, a member of Hill's League of the South and author of the popular white supremacist blog Hunter Wallace.

A leader of the Virginia KKK who is backing Trump told a local TV reporter earlier this month, "The reason a lot of Klan members like Donald Trump is because a lot of what he believes, we believe in."

He questioned whether President Obama was born in the United States.

Long before calling Mexican immigrants "criminals" and "rapists," Trump was a leading proponent of "birtherism," the racist conspiracy theory that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States and is thus an illegitimate president. Trump claimed in 2011 to have sent people to Hawaii to investigate whether Obama was really born there. He insisted at the time that the researchers "cannot believe what they are finding."

Obama ultimately got the better of Trump, releasing his long-form birth certificate and relentlessly mocking the real estate mogul about it at the White House Correspondents' Association dinner that year.

But Trump continues to insinuate that the president was not born in the country.

He treats racial groups as monoliths.

Like many racial instigators, Trump often answers accusations of bigotry by loudly protesting that he actually loves the group in question. But that's just as uncomfortable to hear, because he's still treating all the members of the group ― all the individual human beings ― as essentially the same and interchangeable. Language is telling, here: Virtually every time Trump mentions a minority group, he uses the definite article the, as in "the Hispanics," "the Muslims" and "the blacks."

In that sense, Trump's defensive explanations are of a piece with his slander of minorities. Both rely on essentializing racial and ethnic groups, blurring them into simple, monolithic entities, instead of acknowledging that there's as much variety among Muslims and Latinos and black people as there is among white people.

How did Trump respond to the outrage last year that followed his characterization of Mexican immigrants as criminals and rapists?

"I'll take jobs back from China, I'll take jobs back from Japan," Trump said during his visit to the U.S.-Mexican border in July. "The Hispanics are going to get those jobs, and they're going to love Trump."

"The Hispanics are going to get those jobs, and they're going to love Trump." Donald Trump, July 2015

How did Trump respond to critics of his proposal to ban Muslims from entering the U.S.?

"I'm doing good for the Muslims," Trump told CNN in December. "Many Muslim friends of mine are in agreement with me. They say, 'Donald, you brought something up to the fore that is so brilliant and so fantastic.'"

Not long before he called for a blanket ban on Muslims entering the country, Trump was proclaiming his affection for "the Muslims," disagreeing with rival candidate Ben Carson's claim in September that being a Muslim should disqualify someone from running for president.

"I love the Muslims. I think they're great people," Trump said, insisting that he would be willing to name a Muslim to his presidential cabinet.

How did Trump respond to the people who called him out for funding an investigation into whether Obama was born in the United States?

"I have a great relationship with the blacks," Trump said in April 2011. "I've always had a great relationship with the blacks."

Even when Trump has dropped the definite article "the," his attempts at praising minority groups he has previously slandered have been offensive.

Happy #CincoDeMayo! The best taco bowls are made in Trump Tower Grill. I love Hispanics! https://t.co/ufoTeQd8yA pic.twitter.com/k01Mc6CuDI
- Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 5, 2016

Former Republican presidential candidate and Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R) had a good breakdown of everything that was wrong with Trump's comment.

"It's like eating a watermelon and saying 'I love African-Americans,'" Bush quipped.

He trashed Native Americans, too.

In 1993, when Trump wanted to open a casino in Bridgeport, Connecticut, that would compete with one owned by the Mashantucket Pequot Nation, a local Native American tribe, he told the House subcommittee on Native American Affairs that "they don't look like Indians to me... They don't look like Indians to Indians."

Trump then elaborated on those remarks, which were unearthed last year in the Hartford Courant, by saying the mafia had infiltrated Indian casinos.

He encouraged the mob justice that resulted in the wrongful imprisonment of the Central Park Five.

In 1989, Trump took out full-page ads in four New York City-area newspapers calling for the return of the death penalty in New York and the expansion of police authority in response to the infamous case of a woman who was beaten and raped while jogging in Manhattan's Central Park.

"They should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes," Trump wrote, referring to the Central Park attackers and other violent criminals. "I want to hate these murderers and I always will."

The public outrage over the Central Park jogger rape, at a time when the city was struggling with high crime, led to the wrongful conviction of five teenagers of color known as the Central Park Five.

The men's convictions were overturned in 2002, after they'd already spent years in prison, when DNA evidence showed they did not commit the crime. Today, their case is considered a cautionary tale about a politicized criminal justice process.

Trump, however, still thinks the men are guilty.

He condoned the beating of a Black Lives Matter protester.

At a November campaign rally in Alabama, Trump supporters physically attacked an African-American protester after the man began chanting "Black lives matter." Video of the incident shows the assailants kicking the man after he has already fallen to the ground.

The following day, Trump implied that the attackers were justified.

"Maybe [the protester] should have been roughed up," he mused. "It was absolutely disgusting what he was doing."

A black protester at Trump's rally today in Alabama was shoved, tackled, punched & kicked: https://t.co/Aq0wuaAtax pic.twitter.com/cTRDMtjuBl
- Jeremy Diamond (@JDiamond1) November 21, 2015

Trump's dismissive attitude toward the protester is part of a larger, troubling pattern of instigating violence toward protesters at campaign events that has singled out people of color.

He called supporters who beat up a homeless Latino man "passionate."

Trump's racial incitement has already inspired hate crimes. Two brothers arrested in Boston last summer for beating up a homeless Latino man cited Trump's anti-immigrant message when explaining why they did it.

"Donald Trump was right ― all these illegals need to be deported," one of the men reportedly told police officers.

Trump did not even bother to distance himself from them. Instead, he suggested that the men were well-intentioned and had simply gotten carried away.

"I will say that people who are following me are very passionate," Trump said. "They love this country and they want this country to be great again. They are passionate."

He stereotyped Jews and shared an anti-Semitic meme created by white supremacists.

When Trump addressed the Republican Jewish Coalition in December, he tried to relate to the crowd by invoking the stereotype of Jews as talented and cunning businesspeople.

"I'm a negotiator, like you folks," Trump told the crowd, touting his book The Art of the Deal.

"Is there anyone who doesn't renegotiate deals in this room?" Trump said. "Perhaps more than any room I've spoken to."

But that wasn't even the most offensive thing Trump told his Jewish audience. He implied that he had little chance of earning the Jewish Republican group's support, because his fealty could not be bought with campaign donations.

"You're not going to support me, because I don't want your money," he said. "You want to control your own politician."

Ironically, Trump has many close Jewish family members. His daughter Ivanka converted to Judaism in 2009 before marrying the real estate mogul Jared Kushner. Trump and Kushner raise their two children in an observant Jewish home.

Then in July, Trump tweeted an anti-Semitic Hillary Clinton meme that featured a photo of her over a backdrop of $100 bills with a six-pointed Jewish Star of David next to her face.

"Crooked Hillary - - Makes History!" he wrote in the tweet, which also read "Most Corrupt Candidate Ever" over the star.

The holy symbol was co-opted by the Nazis during World War II when they forced Jews to sew it onto their clothing. Using the symbol over a pile of money is blatantly anti-Semitic and re-enforces hateful stereotypes of Jewish greed.

"The sheriff's badge ― which is available under Microsoft's 'shapes' ― fit with the theme of corrupt Hillary and that is why I selected it," he said in a statement.

Mic, however, discovered that the the meme was actually created by white supremacists and could be found on a neo-Nazi forum more than a week before Trump shared it. Additionally, a watermark on the image leads to a Twitter account that regularly tweets racist, sexist political memes.

He treats African-American supporters as tokens to dispel the idea he is racist.

At a campaign appearance in California in June, Trump boasted that he had a black supporter in the crowd, saying "look at my African American over here."

"Look at him," Trump continued. "Are you the greatest?"

Trump went on to imply that the media conceals his appeal among African Americans by not covering the crowd more attentively.

"We have tremendous African-American support," he said. "The reason is I'm going to bring jobs back to our country."

In fact, Trump has the lowest level of African-American support of any Republican presidential nominee since 1948, according to FiveThirtyEight. As of the most recent polling, just 2 percent of black voters plan to vote for him ― fewer than the percentage who plan to vote for Green Party candidate Jill Stein or Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson.

It may not be surprising that Trump has brought so much racial animus into the 2016 election cycle, given his family history. His father, Fred Trump, was the target of folk singer Woody Guthrie's lyrics after Guthrie lived for two years in a building owned by Trump pere: "I suppose / Old Man Trump knows / Just how much / Racial hate / He stirred up / In the bloodpot of human hearts."

And last fall, a news report from 1927 surfaced on the site Boing Boing, revealing that Fred Trump was arrested that year following a KKK riot in Queens. It's not clear exactly what the elder Trump was doing there or what role he may have played in the riot. Donald Trump, for his part, has categorically denied (except when he's ambiguously denied) that anything of the sort ever happened.

BEFORE YOU GO

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Here Are 13 Examples Of Donald Trump Being Racist

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Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump may have failed to disavow the Ku Klux Klan in late February, but he'll have you know he is not racist. In fact, he claims to be "the least racist person that you have ever met," and last summer he pulled out the old standby about not having a racist bone in his body.

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If you download chrome as your server and then add  word tranlator you can hover over a word and see the translation!

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It looks like the page you are looking for has moved, is no longer available, or never existed.

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also rather difficult...

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Here are three policies Trump advanced that he ought to stick with in the White House

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also rather difficult...

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"I genuinely believe that if Trump wins and gets the nuclear codes there is an excellent possibility it will lead to the end of civilization." - Tony Schwartz, ghostwriter of Donald Trump's "The Art of the Deal," speaking to Jane Mayer in The New Yorker.

You know who I am. I don't need to tell you. That's the point. Everyone knows. That schmuck Schwartz, I made him a pile of money, didn't have a cent before, and he thinks he wrote my book, but he couldn't have written it without me. That's O.K., but honestly he doesn't even write good.

Never had a problem with the press. They don't get it. I've crashed the system. I'm using the press, every one of them! Schwartz did have one phrase I really loved in my book. He said "I play to people's fantasies" by using "truthful hyperbole." What he meant is I make stuff up.

Sure. Nobody cares. They want to dream. They want a spectacle. They want gold and towers. They want me to get tough. Fact-checkers! Is that even a job?

By the way, Schwartz was surprised I asked him to write my book. He'd written a negative cover story about me for New York Magazine in 1985. Give me a break! I was on the cover. That's all that matters. The surface. I stuck the cover up in my office.

You know who I am. Of course you do. You can't get enough of me. The press has given me a couple of billion dollars in free publicity. Honestly. That's a good deal. People can't do without me. You seen the ratings for CNN when it's about me?

Take that baby the other day. In Virginia, I think. The baby was crying and I said, don't worry, I love babies. Then I turned on the mom: "Actually I was only kidding. You can get that baby out of here."

Show authority. Keep people on their toes. Bully them a little. Contradict yourself. Remind them you can get nasty. "You're fired!" Terrific line.

Keep your options open. Always. Consistency is dull. You think I got to be one of the richest guys in the country by being consistent?

The media loved it. Look, he even hates babies! Nobody hates babies. Same way he hates Muslims and Mexicans! Big story everywhere. Just as the story of the Muslim dad with his quiet wife who wants to teach me the Constitution began to fade. Perfect timing, really.

All the press that hates me, Washington Post, New York Times, full of me. Twitter, too. The whole world! Honestly, sometimes it makes me laugh. Especially when they say he's gone too far now, he's peaked! I love that. I tell you, can't remember how many times I've "peaked" - and usually in a story on Page One.

By the way, you may be wondering why I'm writing this diary. I don't read books. Don't have time. I don't like planning or consultants. Or reflection. It's all gut with me. But I figure some day people may wonder how I got to be president of the United States.

That's easy. I know what Americans want. They don't want truth. They want excitement, disruption. They want to be led. They want authority. They want victories. They want parades. They want a wall at the Mexican border - so let them think I really might build one! You think they're happy with Obama's managed decline? Give me a break!

All I have to do in the next 96 days is make Hillary seem dull. You know, yesterday's news. Used goods. Rigged, crooked establishment. Americans want change. She's more of the same.

And, honestly, she's no more honest than I am! Truth is over. Attention spans are over - and I never had one anyway. That's what the press doesn't get.

That Schwartz, he was a journalist when I proposed the book. He did get one thing right. My book says: "I like thinking big. I always have. To me it's very simple: If you're going to be thinking anyway, you might as well think big."

That last line sounds familiar. Maybe my daughter Ivanka borrowed it in Cleveland. But it came from my book, which, in truthful hyperbole, I wrote.

Thinking big! We've been way too predictable. What's wrong with having Denmark or even China think that if they insult me they might wake and find they've been nuked? You've got to maximize flexibility. And all the freeloaders out there who've gotten used to us not using our leverage, they are going to have to think again. Personally, if Putin eats Estonia, I'm not going to lose sleep over it. But I'm not going public with that yet.

I see that schmuck Schwartz says he'd call my book "The Sociopath" if he was writing it today. Not a bad idea! I'm thinking of renaming it. I like it. Bet it would sell millions of copies. Especially when promoted from the Oval Office.

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"I genuinely believe that if Trump wins and gets the nuclear codes there is an excellent possibility it will lead to the end of civilization." - Tony Schwartz, ghostwriter of Donald Trump's "The Art of the Deal," speaking to Jane Mayer in The New Yorker. You know who I am.

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For English learners with a very good command of English!

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As Eric Kaufmann, a political scientist at London's Birkbeck University, told me for a previous story, rapid increases in ethnic diversity trigger corresponding rises in support for anti-immigrant politics.

In recent years, immigrant communities in the United States have moved beyond their traditional enclaves near borders and in large cities, reaching many states at the center of the country. Just as Mr. Kaufmann's research suggests, those places turned out to be strongholds of support for Mr. Trump, who has promised to build a wall along the border with Mexico and to begin mass deportations of undocumented immigrants.

Some people are especially sensitive to social change. Mr. Hetherington and other social scientists have identified a group they call "authoritarian voters": people who have a strong desire to maintain order and hierarchies, along with a powerful fear of outsiders.

Research shows that authoritarians find social change very threatening. When they are scared, they seek out strongman leaders and support harsh, punitive policies against immigrants and other outsiders - much as Mr. Trump has done.

Threat of physical attacks

The second factor is a fear of a different kind: the visceral threat of physical attacks.

Research by Mr. Hetherington and Elizabeth Suhay, a political scientist at American University, shows that fear of physical threats, like terrorist attacks or violent crime, can compel people to desire leaders who will prioritize security above all else, including, if necessary, civil liberties and democratic institutions.

That kind of fear is widespread: For the past two decades, most Americans have believed that crime is rising, even though crime rates have fallen dramatically during that period.

More recently, the threat of terrorist attacks has added a new layer, even though terrorist assaults on American soil remain very rare.

Mr. Trump has played on those fears, declaring falsely during his campaign that America's homicide rate was at its highest level in 45 years. He also asserted that Muslim immigration needed to be halted in order to prevent terrorist attacks.

He described the Black Lives Matter movement as a "fuse-lighter" for assassinations of police officers, further stoking a sense of looming chaos.

In doing so, he has followed a playbook that is commonly used on the other side of the Atlantic, where populist politicians have accused immigrants and Muslims of bringing crime and violence.

Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary, for instance, has said that accepting Muslim refugees would mean importing terrorism, crime, anti-Semitism and homophobia. In Britain, Nigel Farage, a central figure in the UK Independence Party and a major player in the campaign to take the country out of the European Union, has warned of a "Romanian crime wave" that he called the "dark side of immigration." In France, Marine le Pen, the leader of the far-right National Front, has accused immigrants of bringing crime and terrorism.

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Thank you for your submission.

Collapse of white identity

The third factor is the most difficult to measure quantitatively, but it may well be the most important: the collapse of white identity.

White, in this context, does not merely mean those with white skin. Rather, it means the majority group that has traditionally enjoyed the privilege of being considered "us" rather than "them," both culturally and politically.

Although the boundaries of whiteness have always been blurry, they have traditionally excluded many who had white skin, including Jews, who were the targets of anti-Semitic attacks from many of Mr. Trump's supporters during the campaign.

Demographics and longstanding elevated status once ensured that white Americans were socially dominant and had numbers on their side. That began to change decades ago, thanks to the civil rights movement and a more diverse immigration policy. But for a long time, economic progress meant that many working-class whites, not just in the United States but across the West, could still feel secure and successful, and be confident that their children would do even better.

That matters, experts say, because a sense of progress and achievement can, in itself, underpin a kind of identity. As industry and manufacturing in the West have declined and blue-collar jobs have disappeared, hitting many small cities and towns hard, that identity has been lost. People who live in such places can no longer feel confident in their future, and they see younger generations struggling or moving elsewhere in search of better opportunities.

People who lack opportunities for achievement-based identity, experts say, tend to become more attached to identities based on innate characteristics like race. But those who turn to white identity now are finding that it no longer offers the status it once did.

That can feel like a deeply painful loss, which perhaps explains why Mr. Trump has enjoyed consistently strong support in heavily white areas where children are likely to be less well off than their parents. It is in such places that those lost identities would be felt most keenly.

Those three factors have led to a new kind of populism: not the rage of the long-marginalized poor, as is typical of left-populist governments in Latin America, for instance. Rather, it is the majoritarian backlash; the rage of those who now are slightly less powerful against the gradual erosion of their privilege.

That backlash fueled Mr. Trump's candidacy. And now, against all predictions, it has sent him to the White House.

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Trump's Victory and the Rise of White Populism

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As Eric Kaufmann, a political scientist at London's Birkbeck University, told me for a previous story, rapid increases in ethnic diversity trigger corresponding rises in support for anti-immigrant politics. In recent years, immigrant communities in the United States have moved beyond their traditional enclaves near borders and in large cities, reaching many states at the center of the country.

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U.S. presidential election 2016/17 explained (explainity® explainer video)

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diese deutschen firmen unterstützten trump im wahlkampf

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Diese deutschen Firmen unterstützten Trump im Wahlkampf

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Wie konnten die Amerikaner so einen wählen? Das fragen sich seit gestern viele Deutsche. Doch deutsche Großkonzerne sind an Trumps gelungenem Wahlkampf nicht ganz unbeteiligt.

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The Campaign and Reactions to the Result

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The Campaign and Reactions to the Result