The 2016 Presidential Election cycle has been unique in its level of controversy and public interest. No other race for the White House in recent memory has been afforded the level of public attention that the 2016 race has had, and it can be almost exclusively attributed to Donald Trump.

His brash style and willingness to disregard political correctness has allowed him to dominate news coverage of the election ever since he entered the race back in June of last year. The bulk of all of this attention has been arguably negative. The largest and most frequent criticism of Donald Trump is that he is a racist. Trump has been attacked by media and the public alike over his remarks that Mexicans are rapists and Muslims are all terrorists. There is just one problem with these criticisms: Trump never actually said those things.

The accusation of racism began early in the campaign when he announced his plan to combat illegal immigration by building a wall along the US-Mexico border to prevent illegal immigrants from crossing, as well as deport the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants already living in the United States. There is a misconception regarding what he said in that speech. Many people are under the impression that Trump thinks that all Hispanics are rapists and drug dealers. However, he in fact never said that. The exact quote by Donald Trump is “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people”. It’s clear that what he actually said in this speech was that a portion of the illegal immigrants crossing the border into the United States are criminals. He referenced Mexico’s “best”, thereby acknowledging that many Mexicans are upstanding citizens, but that those upstanding citizens are underrepresented among the people illegally immigrating to the United States. He also acknowledged that some of the illegal immigrants crossing into America are “good people”. Whether it is true or not that a large portion of the illegal immigrants coming to America are criminals is irrelevant. The point is that at no point did he refer to Mexicans or Hispanics as being criminals in general.

The other commonly cited example of Trump’s supposed racism is his remarks about Muslims. In the wake of the Paris attacks almost a year ago, Trump proposed that we temporarily halt all Muslim immigration into the country as a precautionary measure. There is nothing inherently bigoted about this proposal. It is derived from the fear that ISIS fighters could sneak into the country by posing as Syrian refugees. This is a fear that in part comes from the fact the ISIS threatened to do exactly that. It is arguable whether Trump’s proposal is necessary or would actually help reduce the risk of terrorism, seeing as how the current refugee vetting process is thorough enough, but that is again beside the point. The fact is that Trump did not at any point declare all Muslims to be terrorists, or anything along those lines. He merely proposed to take counter terrorism efforts a step further.

Donald Trump is arguably the most disliked Presidential candidate in history. I fully acknowledge that many of the criticisms of him are fair, such as those regarding his inexperience, speaking patterns, his inability to demonstrate anything beyond a surface level understanding of most political issues, etc. Whether Trump can adequately perform the duties required of the President of the United States is questionable in my opinion. However, despite all of Mr. Trump’s shortcomings, I still think that he has been treated somewhat unfairly by the media. They have frequently twisted his words and misrepresented him as being racist and morally lacking. Now I don’t know for a fact the Donald Trump is not racist. I have no way of knowing what is in his heart. I can however say that no actual hard evidence of racism on the part of Donald Trump has been presented.