One of the many bad legacies of the Donald Trump presidency was hate crimes reaching a 12 year high during his final year in office.
The report, released on Monday, found more than 7,700 criminal hate crime incidents were reported to the FBI in 2020, an increase of about 450 incidents over 2019. The increase comes even as fewer agencies reported hate crime incidents in their jurisdictions to the FBI than in previous years.Last year had the highest tally of reported hate crime incidents since 2008, when 7,783 incidents were reported to the FBI.The data released on Monday showed that bias against African Americans overwhelmingly comprised the largest category of reported hate crime offenses pertaining to race, with a total of 56% of those crimes motivated by anti-Black or African American bias. Asians have been targeted during the Covid-19 pandemic amid online and political rhetoric stigmatizing them, though this category of hate crime is often underreported.
Trump’s legacy is not just vast amounts of crime and corruption or killing hundreds of thousands of Americans with pandemic management negligence. Trump also remade parts of America into his own bigoted and hateful image.
No president has been viscerally associated with hate more than Donald Trump. The former president didn’t invent hate. There has been bigotry and racism in the country long before it was the United States.
Trump took the hate out of the nation’s darkest corners, gave it a stamp of approval, and made it mainstream.
Hatred is who Trump is, and his mentality was reflected in the federal hate crime statistics.
Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.
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