I firmly believe that the media drove Trump much farther into the racist right than he originally planned to go. Originally he was just anti-immigrant/nativist, just like every other Republican and many Democrats, and then he put his foot in his mouth when he tried to differentiate the character of illegal immigrants who come over the Southern border from illegal immigrants who fly in or come in on work and student visas. There is a difference, in that immigrants from the Southern border are very average people, from very near the U.S., and frequently have U.S. ties - it's just a cheaper process, paid for more in sweat and blood than in cash. Immigrants who come in on expensive visas to work and go to school, and who pay for expensive travel to and from the U.S. are more likely drawn from the middle and upper-middle classes of their countries of origin.
To him, that meant rapists, drug dealers, and murderers, because he's a rich Manhattan/Connecticut conservative, disgusted by and suspicious of people who work with their hands. "The wall" is something that has been added to in a bipartisan way by xenophobes from both sides of the aisle for a couple of decades at this point, and it was somehow used as evidence that he's more racist than the rest of Congress in combination with that remark.
Sadly, it turned out that the image that the media smeared him with was even more attractive to a majority of white American men than the "I make good deals" persona alone, he immediately became unstoppable, and leaned into it as far as he could. Not that I'm saying that he hasn't always been a bit racist (most libertarian conservatives are), but I don't think that it was a dominant part of his worldview, or that he would have ever dreamed of running for President on a primarily racist platform.
Hope I didn't say anything offensive here, I tried to be careful...
What do you mean by "libertarian conservative", and where do you get the idea that most are racist? Libertarians and conservatives might superficially seem to be aligned in many ways, but when you look at it, libertarians align with liberals in just as many ways... so "libertarian conservative" isn't really a meaningful term in the strict sense.
I guess you could say "conservative with some libertarian tendencies", but anyone who is actually a libertarian is pretty much not racist by definition, given that libertarianism is a pretty much a radically individualistic ideology in which skin color, ethnicity, race, religion, gender, etc. play no role at all.
Libertarians are advocates of the idea that protecting and maintaining current property assignments and their orderly transfer between consenting parties is the basis of civilization. In addition, they see this as a moral value that assures that people who are productive will have more, and people who are less productive will have less. Through this moral belief, it defines what people do who have as productive, and what people do who don't have as less productive. In this, it completely ignores primitive accumulation and the fencing off of the commons, and says that in a perfect capitalism, everything will have found its level. Therefore, if Africans are poorer than Asians, Africans are by nature less productive than Asians. If black Americans are poorer than white Americans, there is an intrinsic quality within them that is keeping them from being valued enough to be rewarded.
Libertarianism is a radically collective ideology that wishes to shrink government into a police force to protect property, and a totalitarian bureaucracy that catalogs the ownership of every object that its police force can reach. It is an ideology that insists that skin color, ethnicity, race, religion, gender or anything that ever happened in the past play no role at all in the present.
Or rather, that's how I feel about it. And in my experience, all libertarians that I've met have harbored ideas that I think of as racist (even the very nice ones, and very insightful ones), and I've observed that when you see libertarianism grow, you see overt racism grow within its protective bubble.
Yeah, I agree with this point. The media, the politicians, various elites in general have called people who disagree with things like globalisation, immigration, etc bigots and nazis so long that they're being drawn to extremists who don't constantly attack them.
