In an unsurprising result, a new poll found that most Americans believe President Donald Trump is racist, and they don’t think it will get better anytime soon.
According to an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, 57 percent of all adults believe the president is racist. Black Americans in particular agree, with 84 percent saying Trump is racist.
The overall opinion corresponds with Americans who disapprove of Trump, which Gallup currently pegs at 56 percent.
But in the AP-NORC poll, whites felt somewhat differently than Blacks. Only 47 percent said he is racist, while 51 percent believe he is not.
Even among whites who did say Trump is racist, only 35 percent felt strongly about it, compared to 77 percent of Blacks who do.
When measured against other results in the poll, this comes as less of a shock, as most Americans feel that minorities have been negatively affected by Trump’s presidency.
Overall, most Americans believe Trump has been bad for Blacks, women, Hispanics and Muslims. When broken down by race, whites were most likely to say he has been bad for Muslims, and Blacks were most likely to say Hispanics are worse off.
Just over half of Americans believe Blacks, Hispanics and LGBT people are at a disadvantage living in America. Fifty-nine percent and 60 percent believe immigrants and Muslims, respectively, have the odds stacked against them.
Close to seven in 10 percent of Americans feel the country is going in the wrong direction. But when broken down by race, almost 90 percent of Blacks feel this way, versus 63 percent of whites.
Experts say the results are not in fact surprising.
“I don’t think there’s really much question what’s going on here,” Michael Jefferies, an American Studies professor, told the AP. “You don’t have to look far back to see how inequality has been sustained and exacerbated in this country.”
The poll was conducted from Feb. 15 to 19, after Trump’s comments referring to Haiti and African nations as “shithole countries.”
The majority of Americans do not see this trajectory improving. Forty-one percent of Americans believe it will get worse over the next year — 37 percent of whites and 53 percent of Blacks.
Jeffries, the American Studies professor, also shared with AP that Trump’s hesitance to condemn white supremacists in Charlottesville, Va., had a large impact on how Americans — notably African Americans and immigrants — view Trump.
“He’s also setting a new standard in what is said in that office,” Jefferies said.
Trump’s racist views precede his presidency. He for years has questioned whether former President Barack Obama was born in the United States or not, fueling the “birther” movement.
In 1989 Trump publicly called for the death of five Black and Latino teens who were wrongly accused of raping a white woman. The teens, dubbed the Central Park Five, were the subject of four full-page ads Trump placed in New York City’s daily newspapers. He spent $85,000 on the ads and wrote, “Muggers and murderers should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes.”
Even earlier, in the 1970s Trump; his father, Fred; and Trump Management were sued for discriminating against Black people in their New York housing developments.
