‘Trump has groomed us,’ says civil rights leader

Civil rights leader Sherrilyn Ifill suggested Wednesday that President-elect Donald Trump has “groomed” Americans into normalizing his false claims and inflammatory rhetoric.
Ifill, the president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., spoke with MSNBC host Rachel Maddow’s panel on Wednesday night about the outcome of the election.
“We are weaker now than we were in 2016 or 2015. … I hate to use this word, but Trump has groomed us. He has allowed us to accept more and more things that are off the table, to the point that we’ve actually shifted,“ she said.
“And I don’t mean just the people who support him or the MAGA people. We’ve all shifted because we’ve been compelled to accept things that would have been unacceptable,” she added.
She used the example of former Sen. Trent Lott stepping down as Senate Majority Leader in 2002 because he made a remark about supporting racism. She said something like that would not happen in today’s world.
“Does anybody think that would happen today? We’ve moved the line ourselves, and so we’re not the same people, myself included, who were able to stop many of the things that Trump did in that first term,” she said.
“Because the line has moved in terms of what judges think is unacceptable, what people who would sit on juries think is unacceptable, what that public popular opinion will be. And if we don’t recognize that, we will think that we have more strength than we have to counter him in the way that we need to,” she added.
Ifill said moments earlier that “ongoing racism and white supremacy” have been “the gateway drugs” for the MAGA movement.
“Trump couldn’t have come to power without it, without making appeals to our ongoing flirtation, encounter, embrace of racism and white supremacist ideology,” she said. “And every time he wasn’t stopped, every time we treat this as though it is not a deal breaker for leadership in this country, we open up the door to the danger that Trump has represented.”
“We let Trump flirt with David Duke and flirt with the Proud Boys, until we got to Charlottesville, and that was kind of a moment, and then this campaign has been fulfilled with racist vitriol, filled with misogyny, and none of those things have been deal-breakers,” she added.
She also said that the media has played a role in normalizing some of Trump’s harmful rhetoric.
“I lay a lot of this at the feet of the press, not because Americans can’t make up their own minds, but because the press is the curator. … We count on the media to sift it for us and tell us that this is out of the mainstream, this is out of bounds. And we didn’t get enough of that. We got a lot of stenography, and it didn’t help people understand what was off the rails here,” she added.
Trump won the election early Wednesday morning after sweeping key battleground states. There were shifts toward Republicans in nearly every state, representing a changing electorate that is not fazed by Trump’s rhetoric, his numerous criminal cases and his false claims about the 2020 election.
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