MENKEN/HENDERSON: Donald Trump Is Healing The Country

From the moment President Donald Trump launched his run for office in 2016, the media and the Left have claimed that he has used racially-charged language and exacerbated ethnic tensions in this country. A pair of sociologists at the University of Pennsylvania, Daniel Hopkins and Samantha Washington, recently set out to measure the result of what they described as President Trump’s “explicit, negative rhetoric targeting ethnic/racial minorities.”

What they discovered was, to them, astounding. Though they expected racism to be flourishing under Trump, “white Americans’ expressed anti-black and anti-Hispanic prejudice declined after the 2016 campaign and election”. After carefully studying the evidence proving the media’s claims to be false, they came to the sort of truly-learned conclusion only possible in the ivory towers of academia: This demonstrated a “thermostatic response,” in which people move in the opposite direction from their leaders.

The possibility that their underlying assumption might be as faulty as their hypothesis never seemed to cross their minds.

Writing in the Spectator, Ross Clark offered a second option: