Trump’s election highlights racial divisions in US

Donald Trump won the US presidency despite extreme unpopularity among minorities, underscoring deep national divisions that have fuelled incidents of racial and political confrontation across the country.

Trump was elected to the White House with 8 percent of the African American vote, 28 percent of the Latino vote and 27 percent of the Asian-American vote, according to the Reuters/Ipsos Election Day poll.


Hispanics were the target of some of Trump’s fiercest attacks during the campaign.

Many Hispanic voters turned against the real estate mogul after he pledged to deport millions of undocumented immigrants. Trump did not stop there and drew more fire when he proposed to make a wall on the border with Mexico.

Among Asian-Americans, Trump's performance was the worst of any winning presidential nominee since tracking of that demographic began in 1992.

During his campaign run, Trump’s polarizing comments attracted notorious white supremacist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan.

His election victory over Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton set the stage for white supremacist victory celebrations, anti-Trump rallies and civil rights protests across the US.

Thousands of protesters held rallies in major US cities like Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Boston, calling on the Republican president-elect to step down over his divisive policies.

More importantly, there was an immediate spike in the number of hate crimes after the vote, according to the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

Attorney General Loretta Lynch warned last week that hate attacks against minorities, Muslims in particular, were rising at an “alarming rate.”

Trump’s proposals to ban all Muslims from entering the US and using special IDs to track them has been blamed as a possible reason for the Islamophoic attacks. Trump also made a case against accepting Muslim immigrants, saying they were linked to the Daesh (ISIL) terror group.

Meanwhile, the Loyal White Knights of the KKK has planned a rare event to celebrate Trump’s election in North Carolina on December 3.

Anarchist groups have called for their supporters to disrupt Trump’s inauguration ceremony on January 20 and thousands of women have staged a “Women’s March on Washington” the following day.