WASHINGTON -- I was traveling with candidate Trump during the 2016 campaign, and we spent a night at the Trump National Doral Miami. I had to leave early to get back to Washington, so I took a taxi the next morning from the hotel to the airport. In the course of that ride, I answered a call from my colleague Wlady Pleszczynski, who reported that Trump was apparently braving charges from the Democrats that he was a racist. What did I think? I told Wlady that there was no evidence that Donald was a racist, and we hung up.
But my confrontation over Donald's alleged racism was not over. My driver wanted to comment. He was a gentleman of color. He had heard me talking about racism as it related to Donald Trump, and he fervently objected to talk of Trump being a racist. He argued that the workforce at the Doral was heavily staffed with African Americans, and his piece de resistance was that the head of security there was an African American. "All right, all right, already," I responded, and I tipped him 30% as we shook hands at the airport. Not everyone in America is neurotic about skin color. Many of us yearn to get along peacefully. Unfortunately, after this election it is going to take a while for average Americans to get back to normalcy about race relations. There are too many in the Democratic Party and in the media who want to talk about race, and their talk is always one way: They talk, and we listen. It has been going on this way for 60 years.
I have a tenet that I stand by on the subject of race. The person who raises the subject first is usually the racist. And my addendum is the person who talks about race the longest is almost certainly the racist.
Donald Trump has been fending off charges of racism since the beginning of the campaign, and it obviously makes him angry. He also has been fending off charges of anti-Semitism, which probably makes him angrier still. After all, some members of his family are Jewish. One converted! She converted to Orthodoxy! That is no small thing. Then, too, there have been charges of xenophobia, misogyny, homophobia and, if I am not mistaken, anti-alcoholism. The Democrats episodically try each charge out. They see if it discredits the president. When it does not, they try another slander. Their cycle is endless. I predict their next attempt will be the claim he is anti-alcoholic. Can you imagine the Democrats running with the Woman's Christian Temperance Union? Not if it is truly Christian.
Yet historians such as I -- that is to say, presidential historians; remember Bill Clinton -- will note one thing: Donald Trump's occasional over-the-top counterattacks are always provoked by an over-the-top attack. The Democrats always attack first. Moreover, it is the Democrats who have coarsened debate in this country. They have been campaigning on slurs and scurrilous language. Remember Beto O'Rourke's or Kamala Harris' or Kirsten Gillibrand's use of the F-word, and forget about Maxine Waters' or Ilhan Omar's X-rated usages. As I see it, Donald Trump is saving our mother tongue from the barbarians. Thank you, Donald.
In the present furor over white supremacists, Donald Trump did not begin hurling insults. It was the Honorable Rep. Veronica Escobar, a Democrat who, hours after the attack in El Paso, stood onstage with Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, and said the shootings were "fueled by hate, and it's fueled by racism and bigotry and division." You know whom she was alluding to. Of Trump she told CNN, "he put the target on our back. He needs to peel it off." The Hon. Escobar also told the president not to come to El Paso. You can imagine what the Democrats' reaction would have been if he had stayed home.
Well, it will all be over in some 14 months. In the meantime, look forward to what the Democrats have to say about alcohol.