A racist tweet from a racist president – so why couldn't people call it out for what it was?

Soft soaping has allowed a poison to seep into political discourse. Legitimisation by inaction has ushered in the ugly climate that prevails today

Let’s take a look at one of the headlines that greeted Donald Trump’s latest dive into the sewer this week: “Republicans stay quiet over Trumps ‘racist’ tweets.”

Can you see what’s wrong with the BBC’s take? The word racist is in quotes. ITV did the same thing with its online reporting of the US president’s Twitter tirade. Sky did its best to avoid using the term at all, preferring to talk about a “race row”.

The problem with Auntie’s punctuation is that it implies there is some doubt about the use of the term; a debate over whether what Trump said was racist when he tweeted that four non-white Democratic US congresswomen should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came”. It hardly matters, given that they are all Americans, but three of them were, in fact, born in the US.

The broadcasters are needlessly sitting on the fence.

In fact, there was a backlash in the US to similar equivocal language – the phrases “racially charged”, “racially infused”, “denounced as racist” were all used. Columbia University’s Journalism Review found some even more tortuous formulations designed to avoid using what we should now perhaps call “the R word”.

Some outlets (CNN, the New York Times) subsequently toughened up, but the fact that many are still aligned with the Brits speaks volumes.

Describing racism as racism has become as much of a problem for some as Trump’s racist outburst itself.

Using the word for them is the equivalent of uttering one of Harry Potter’s unforgivable curses, punishable with a 20-year spell in Azkaban.

There shouldn’t be anything to debate with what Trump said. It was, by all objective criteria, racist. It drew upon a long-established racist trope that holds that if you’re not white you should “go back where you came from”.

If you’re going to put quote marks around something so blatant, so obvious, you’re denying there is such a thing as an objective truth. Hell, you might just as well give in to the kooks entirely and go with the headline “Claims world is ‘round’ criticised by Flat Earth Society”, the next time it crops up.

But, comes the cry: “Shame on you! You’re being politically correct. You’re crying racism to stop people telling it like it is.”

Variations on the above are commonly seen in online comment sections when racist dog whistles are blown by the usual suspects, people for whom Trump is the poster child, a hero at whose shrine they worship.

But that’s the thing: when those people indulge in racism, it’s hardly ever described as such. People are shy of calling out racism in part because of the media’s sensitivity towards the term.

Most of the time we don’t even get the quote marks the Beeb and its rivals (with the honourable exception of Channel Four) and many print publications chose to use. Instead you get “controversial comments” or some such.

People have to be almost as blatant as Trump was for the accusation even to surface.

The soft soaping has been noted. It has helped to encourage the “dog whistles” indulged in by the president and his unsavoury friends and allies on both sides of the Atlantic.

This same timidity is also, for the record, what allowed Boris Johnson to get away with describing burkha-wearing women as “bank robbers” and “letter boxes” and emboldened Nigel Farage to stand proudly in front of a poster bearing the legend “breaking point” over a picture of a queue of mostly brown-skinned refugees that evoked Nazi era antisemitic propaganda.

The cowardly reaction to these incidents has allowed a poison to seep into political discourse. A legitimisation by inaction has helped to usher in the ugly climate that prevails today.

The hardening response in the US to Trump’s outburst means that maybe, just maybe, some good will come from it.

There’s a grim postscript on this side of the Atlantic. Both Johnson and Jeremy Hunt, his rival prime ministerial aspirant, have criticised Trump’s comments. But they both stopped short of using the word racist. If that’s where British broadcasters and others are taking their cues from, then we should all be deeply troubled.