Trump is at 48 percent. How could this be possible but for widespread racism?

At this point, the racism is obvious. How else does it make sense that 48 percent of registered voters in last week’s Fox News poll say they have no problem putting Donald Trump back in the White House?

Who are these people who look the other way when their candidate tells a bold lie about Black immigrants eating a mostly white Ohio town’s cats and dogs?

How can it be that not a soul among the 48 percent cares that Trump’s vice-presidential pick, JD Vance, says it is okay to “create” racist lies about immigrants eating pets “so the American media actually pays attention”?

How can 48 percent of voters back a candidate who says immigrants coming from “infested” places are “poisoning the blood of our country?”

Is it just snowflakes who notice when one of Trump’s close allies says, “The White House will smell like curry” if Vice President Kamala Harris, the daughter of an Indian immigrant, wins the presidency?

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R- Ga.), no snowflake, condemned the comment as “appalling,” “racist” and “hateful.”

Do these voters also prefer to sail past Trump once calling a Black woman and former aide a “dog”? And he called Alvin Bragg, the Black Manhattan district attorney who successfully prosecuted him for business fraud, an “animal.”

Maybe Trump’s 48 percent don’t excuse his racism so much as get the message. They are inside a Republican Party that is 82 percent white. Most of those white Republicans are in small towns and rural areas.

“Beginning in the early 2010s — and accelerating during the presidency of Donald J. Trump…” The New York Times noted earlier this year, “white voters without a degree, increasingly moved toward the Republican Party. Nearly two-thirds of all white, non-college voters identify as Republicans or lean toward the Republican Party.”

This is the heart of Trump supporters who told YouGov pollsters they believe Trump is telling the truth about Haitian immigrants “abducting and eating pet dogs and cats.”

The YouGov polls also found that 80 percent of Trump supporters also buy his lie that Venezuela is “deliberately sending people from prisons and mental institutions” into the U.S. I wrote a 2018 book about Trump’s history of racism. Vice President Harris echoed the book’s research in talking last week of Trump’s racist past. She pointed back to his participation in the “birther” lie, the incendiary claim that the first Black president, President Obama, had not been born in the U.S.

Harris said Trump can’t be trusted to serve as president after “engaging in…hateful rhetoric that, as usual, is designed to divide us as a country…to have people pointing fingers at each other.”

In this year’s campaign, one of Trump’s regular dog-whistles at his rallies is his false claim that big cities, full of racial minorities and immigrants, are scary places full of crime and failure. Last week he flatly lied at a rally when he said a parent who leaves a child alone on the New York subway has “about a 75 percent chance that [they’ll] never see [their] child again. What the hell has happened here?”

Trump’s use of racism to stir up his white supporters was called out by writer Fran Lebowitz back in 2018. Trump, she wrote, has “allowed people to express their racism and bigotry in a way that they haven’t been able to in quite a while and they really love him for that…It’s a shocking thing to realize people love their hatred more than they care about their own actual lives.”

There are real consequences to all these racist lies. Last week, a Trump-supporting sheriff in Ohio encouraged people to report their neighbors who displayed Harris-Walz lawn signs. This incident called to mind parallels with police in Nazi Germany.

Widening the racial and political divide leads to alarm over possible violence. USA Today recently reported that more than one-third of Republicans who have a favorable view of Trump “say political violence is acceptable.”

According to a new Deseret News-HarrisX poll, 77 percent of U.S. voters say they are “very” or “somewhat” concerned about political violence before Election Day, including 80 percent of Republicans and 82 percent of Democrats.

“We are seeing an unprecedented and extremely disturbing level of threats of violence and violence against public officials,” Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said last week in a speech.

The 48 percent backing Trump try to move away from his racism by talking about the need for a better economy. But Trump’s main economic plan is to impose tariffs that will drive up prices. He has no plan to improve health care or provide more affordable housing.

It was less than 30 years ago when Bob Dole, the 1996 Republican presidential nominee, stared down racism in the GOP. “If there’s anyone who has mistakenly attached themselves to our party in the belief that we are not open to citizens of every race and religion…,” Dole said at the 1996 convention, “the exits, which are clearly marked, are for you to walk out of as I stand this ground without compromise.”

Where are those Republicans now?

Juan Williams is an author and a political analyst for Fox News Channel.