‘It is unfair and untrue to call Trump and his supporters “bigots” ‘
Many here and elsewhere have made this claim. They claim it’s a tired liberal tactic, used to smear those that don’t agree with them, a way to silence other people’s views.

So why are so many on the left (and some on the right) so maligning Trump and those that support him?

Well, there is the fact that Trump- like his father- practiced racial discrimination in his real-estate dealings:

Trump Management had refused to rent or negotiate rentals “because of race and color.” It also charged that the company had required different rental terms and conditions because of race and that it had misrepresented to blacks that apartments were not available.

But that’s ancient history, right? Way back in the 70’s- people back then wore bell-bottoms and danced badly to disco, but we don’t hold that against people now, do we? no harm, no foul…

More recently he retweeted a white supremacist meme with fabricated statistics about African-americans and homicide:
But really, who among us HASN’T accidentally tweeted neo-nazi propaganda to millions of followers?

Marshall Kirkpatrick, of social-media analytics company Little Bird, took a look at the 21 people the Donald has blessed with his fantastic, luxurious retweets this week, and discovered that six of them follow major white-nationalist accounts, and 13 of them follow multiple accounts that have used the #whitegenocide hashtag.
Conclusion? “It turns out that Donald Trump mostly retweets white supremacists saying nice things about him.”

Perhaps the fact that he called Mexican immigrants rapists in a press conference? Everybody forgets that he finished his statement with “and some, I assume, are good people.”… would a bigot say THAT?

Or was it that he called for a ban on muslims travelling to the US- something so antithetical to US principles that even the other republicans running denounced it. But, as Trump himself pointed out: “What I’m doing is no different than FDR”- and who here would call Japanese Internment camps ‘bigoted’?

Similarly, YouGov data reveal that a third of Mr. Trump’s (and Mr. Cruz’s) backers believe that Japanese internment during World War II was a good idea, while roughly 10 percent of Mr. Rubio’s and Mr. Kasich’s supporters do.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/25/upshot/measuring-donald-trumps-supporters-for-intolerance.html?_r=0

Sure, he has made an astounding number of misogynist statements- but hey, even if he insults half the human population at least he isn’t ‘PC’.

Of course there is the troubling fact that white supremacist organizations are rallying to support Trump’s candidacy:

On Wednesday, David Duke, the white nationalist and former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard, encouraged his radio show listeners to volunteer for Trump’s campaign. “Call Donald Trump’s headquarters [and] volunteer,” he said on the “David Duke Radio Program.” At Trump campaign offices, he said, “you’re gonna meet people who are going to have the same kind of mindset that you have.”
In Minnesota and Vermont, a white supremacist super PAC called the American National Super PAC has begun circulating a robocall in support of Trump.
“The white race is dying out in America and Europe because we are afraid to be called ‘racist,’ says William Johnson, the leader of the white nationalist American Freedom Party. He goes on to bemoan “gradual genocide against the white race,” and how few “schools anymore have beautiful white children as the majority.” He signs off by telling recipients, “Don’t vote for a Cuban. Vote for Donald Trump.”

There is also the fact that a large percentage of his supporters think Lincoln freeing the slaves was a bad idea:

Mr. Trump’s coalition is also more likely to disagree with the desegregation of the military (which was ordered in 1948 by Harry Truman) than other candidates’ supporters are.
The P.P.P. poll asked voters if they thought whites were a superior race. Most Republican primary voters in South Carolina — 78 percent — disagreed with this idea (10 percent agreed and 11 percent weren’t sure). But among Mr. Trump’s supporters, only 69 percent disagreed. Mr. Carson’s voters were the most opposed to the notion (99 percent), followed by Mr. Kasich and Mr. Cruz’s supporters at 92 and 89 percent. Mr. Rubio’s backers were close to the average level of disagreement (76 percent).
According to P.P.P., 70 percent of Mr. Trump’s voters in South Carolina wish the Confederate battle flag were still flying on their statehouse grounds. (It was removed last summer less than a month after a mass shooting at a black church in Charleston.) The polling firm says that 38 percent of them wish the South had won the Civil War. Only a quarter of Mr. Rubio’s supporters share that wish, and even fewer of Mr. Kasich’s and Mr. Carson’s do.
Nationally, further analyses of the YouGov data show a similar trend: Nearly 20 percent of Mr. Trump’s voters disagreed with Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, which freed slaves in the Southern states during the Civil War. Only 5 percent of Mr. Rubio’s voters share this view.

Taking all these facts as a whole, I think we can see why some call Trump and those who support him bigots. It is because he IS and they ARE.
Some of his supporters may not consider themselves bigots, maybe they like the idea of Mexico paying to build a border wall – these people are Idiots.
It is not unfair to call Trump’s supporters idiots, bigots, and poorly educated- he has made all that his goddamn campaign platform. When he calls to ban Muslims he is counting on the bigots, when he says Mexico will pay for a wall he isn’t trying to reach people that are big on thinking.
He is COUNTING on the poorly educated.

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-key-to-the-gop-race-the-diploma-divide/

And as he said: “I love the poorly educated!”