If Trump's Comments Were Racist, Then So Is He

Lindsey Graham made the very unusual announcement today that he's not supporting Donald Trump for president. Then Illinois Sen. Mark Kirk un-endorsed him.

Trump's attacks on the judge overseeing the Trump University case, Gonzalo Curiel, triggered an outpouring of what is usually called "distancing" by the rest of the Republican Party. There's been a lot of that.

First, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said he didn't agree (and couldn't disagree more). House Speaker Paul Ryan said the comments were racist, but that he still backs Trump. Party chairman Reince Priebus is supposedly reaching out privately to get Trump to cool it, reports The New York Times.

In the case of Graham, though, he didn't distance, he outright dumped Trump.

Kirk revoked his endorsement, saying he worried about Trump leading the military and the nuclear arsenal. If you listen to Graham explain his dissatisfaction with the GOP nominee, though, it's a particular kind of parsing that might sound familiar to LGBT voters.

"I think his comments were racist," Graham told MSNBC's Hallie Jackson. "I don't think that Donald Trump personally is a racist person. You know he's not going to refuse to hire someone because of the color of their skin or their background. But he's playing the race card."

Graham is very careful to separate Trump from his comments. Only Trump's comments are racist, not Trump himself.

"It's pretty clear to me that he's playing the race card here," said Graham. "He's trying to detract from the substance of the lawsuit and talk about the background of the judge. And I don't want to go there."

Somewhere along the way as the media reacted to Donald Trump's attacks on the judge overseeing the Trump University case, it embraced the word "racist." There lasted a brief moment when Trump's comments were merely "racial." Even then, famed Washington journalist Mark Halperin wasn't on board.

"No, it's not racist," said Halperin on his show, With All Due Respect. "Mexico's not a race."

When co-anchor John Heilemann looked befuddled, Halperin clarified, "I was just making the point that Mexican is not a race."

So far no Republican is willing to say Trump himself is racist. By and large, the media isn't calling him a racist either. Maybe he just happened to accidentally do something racist that he refuses to acknowledge or apologize for?

Apparently, there's bigoted language. And there are bigoted people. But not everyone who says something bigoted is a bigot. Got that?

LGBT people have heard it all before. We're more often on the side of the protesters outside Trump rallies who would surely call Trump a bigot by now. The right-wing likes to say they're unfairly being called homophobic or transphobic. The media usually plays along, by carefully separating the person from their comments, which everyone agrees are terrible.

That is, everyone except the right-winger, who keeps on insisting there was nothing wrong to begin with. The thinking goes, You can't even say that being gay means you're going to hell these days, because the bonkers politically correct left will say you're a bigot.

Trump has turned a war on the PC police into a nomination. And he appears headed toward the same argument. Barry Bennett, a senior Trump adviser, told Tamron Hall during a tense interview on MSNBC that Trump is merely pointing out a person's Mexican heritage. "The facts," he calls them.

"Lindsey Graham has not heard what Donald Trump said, apparently," he claimed. "Donald Trump's problem with this judge has to do with the judge's judicial temperament. It has to do with the decisions he's made from the bench. It has nothing to do with his skin color. He's never even alluded to that."

Multiple Trump spokespeople are hitting cable news saying the PC left has gone out of control again.

"He's pointed out that one of the reasons that this judge might be biased against him is because Donald Trump wants to build a wall," said Bennett. "He's never said a racist thing about this guy. And it's outrageous that that's where they're going."