“Meghan McCain posted this week, ‘Stop Asian Hate,’ with three broken hearts emoji, which is a fine sentiment to throw up on Twitter after the fact,” he continued. “But there has to be an understanding that saying, ‘I don’t have a problem with calling it the China virus’ is very much giving space for hate to grow.”
According to NBC News, there has been a 150 percent increase in hate crimes targeting Asian people since 2019. The founder and director of demographic data and policy research for the nonprofit AAPI Data, Karthick Ramakrishnan, told NBC News that the steep increase in hate crimes cannot be exclusively attributed to Trump’s racist rhetoric, but he believes it was a factor.
Ramakrishnan explained, “Trump’s rhetoric helps set a certain narrative in place—and presidents have an outsized role in terms of shaping narrative. They don’t call it a bully pulpit for nothing, and especially Trump, the way he frequently used Twitter as well as press conferences and off-the-cuff remarks to campaign rallies to frame the narrative in a particular way, it likely played a role.”
