So, he's indifferent to the racism of his words, so he cannot be racist. Interesting.
Indifference, or more simply put apathy, on the subject of racism or word choice does not make a person racist. It means they simply don't care one way or the other. That is what indifference and apathy
mean after all.
While it takes two sides to communicate, if the speaker doesn't mean something, they don't mean it. How the other person
receives it is immaterial to the matter.
Now reading intent is near impossible at the best of times, we cannot read minds after all, so what you say(or type) is often a first level filter people use to decide things.
That's all well and good, and by that "first level filter" Trump
looks like he could be a racist. But that isn't enough to convict, or at least, it shouldn't be.
At least for me, I'm more about judging people by their actions/"works"/deeds, rather than their words. Plenty of people talk a big a game but when the chips are down, they're nowhere to be found. Which brings us to Donald Trump, sure the Trump organization probably did discriminate based on race as recently as the 1970's, but the reality is, practically everyone was doing much the same thing at that time. All that says about Trump is that he wasn't a trail blazer for Civil Rights in the 1970's, as he instead decided to do the "good business" thing and made sure that nothing happened which might upset existing customers at his properties. Which makes him boringly average, and somewhat mercenary in outlook.
But then we get into the 1980's, 1990's, and 2000's and we see Trump creating all kinds of shades of grey, including him bringing lawsuits
against city and country governments over the matter of discrimination on the basis of race and religious affiliation. Now we can attribute some of that to Trump being a mercenary again, because getting those road blocks cleared meant opening the doors to more customers for several of his businesses.
Then we have things like the Criminal Justice reform that Trump Championed, not Obama, not Biden, not Bush. Donald Trump championed a criminal justice reform bill which freed tens of thousands of non-violent
black inmates from imprisonment. He created the conditions for the most prosperous period in history that racial minorities in this country have ever seen in the 60-some years most of those metrics go back.
And yet Trump is somehow racist as he goes about creating new initiatives to help black schools and other black organizations get more support in providing more and better educational opportunities for minorities.
His words may sometimes indicate one thing, but what he's
actually doing is saying another thing entirely.