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Smiley says Trump is appealing to those who are on the “dark side,” including a white supremacist group, who admitted to placing calls to get votes for the GOP presidential candidate.
Not content to simply call out Donald Trump for being an “unrepentant, irascible, religious and racial arsonist,” Tavis Smiley has called out the media, too.
Smiley first made the remarks Sunday on ABC’s “This Week,” and Trump responded by calling him a “hater & a racist.” The talk show host doubled down on his comments in an interview with CNN’s Don Lemon on Monday.
Racism underlies Trump’s high poll numbers, said Smiley, and the media is complicit in selling it.
“It wasn’t about calling him out, I tried to tell the truth — and I think that’s what you and I are supposed to be doing in this media business that we’re in,” Smiley said. “Donald Trump is an unrepentant, irascible, religious and racial arsonist.”
“And by religious and racial arsonist,” he explained, “I simply mean that when you go after people like Muslims, because of their faith … when you go after people like immigrants, and there’s a race issue involved here … I don’t know what else to call that.”
Smiley then argued the media must do a better job of connecting the dots between Trump’s popularity and support from the “night side” of America.
“What troubles me, quite frankly, is that we keep talking about … Trump rising in the polls as if somehow this is happening miraculously,” he said. “It’s happening in part because — as your lead-in shows with these now white supremacists supporting him — it’s happening because he’s appealing to a certain base voter in this country.”
READ MORE: HuffingtonPost.com
Article Courtesy of The Huffington Post
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