Miles Taylor was on All In to discuss this and said that when he was working for Bush, Cheney and McCain, anyone who made these types of comments would have been fired. He also said that people like the ones making these comments used to be the fringe of the Republican Party and now they're its mainstream. Still, even if both those things are true, the fact is that racism in the Republican Party goes back to at least Goldwater's opposition to the Civil Rights Act, which was quickly followed by Nixon's southern strategy and then by the Republican Party subsuming the southern Democrats over the rest of the 20th century. People on the fringe of the Republican Party may have been the only ones to express views this noxious publicly, but these views have long been part of the Republican id. Trump just gave Republicans permission to express them openly without having to worry about consequences.
Miles Taylor was on All In to discuss this and said that when he was working for Bush, Cheney and McCain, anyone who made these types of comments would have been fired. He also said that people like the ones making these comments used to be the fringe of the Republican Party and now they're its mainstream. Still, even if both those things are true, the fact is that racism in the Republican Party goes back to at least Goldwater's opposition to the Civil Rights Act, which was quickly followed by Nixon's southern strategy and then by the Republican Party subsuming the southern Democrats over the rest of the 20th century. People on the fringe of the Republican Party may have been the only ones to express views this noxious publicly, but these views have long been part of the Republican id. Trump just gave Republicans permission to express them openly without having to worry about consequences.