Donald Trump is not a racist. He just hopes that you are.

There are Democrats and Republicans alike who are condemning Donald Trump for saying that Muslims must be completely halted from entering the United States until the government can figure out what’s happening. His statement is being used to call him racist, bigoted, discriminatory, and any other adjective that can apply to the situation. The truth is that he’s not racist. One does not work so well with other races as Trump has done by harboring feelings of hate.

Instead, he’s hoping that there’s enough lingering (and in some cases, rising) prejudice among Republican voters to support his proposed policies. He’s counting on a plurality of Republicans being racist enough to propel him towards the GOP nomination. Then, the rest of us will have to decide between him and Hillary Clinton.

Racism is a powerful political tool. It has been wielded indiscriminately and with precision since President Obama took office. Now, the Republican frontrunner is using it to his advantage from the opposite perspective. There will be those who defend him by saying that he’s just using straight talk to say what others are unwilling to say, but that’s only part of the reason that he’s saying what he’s saying. The biggest reason is because he knows it will endear him to be the top choice for a number of Republicans. Whether that number is 5%, 20%, or 35% remains to be seen.

For any other candidate, this would be a risky move. He has a ton of supporters who believe in his economic policies and his ability to deal with the Islamic State. Many of these supporters are not racist, so he could be alienating some of them. The problem with this theory is that he’s done things in the past that should have alienated them but it didn’t work. He continued to keep their support and started garnering defenders who like one facet of his policies even if they weren’t racist at all.

This is the last piece of the puzzle to guarantee that he cannot win the general election, but it may have the opposite effect when it comes to the Republican nomination. He may be able to ride this to victory which means that he’s riding it to a Hillary Clinton White House.

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