I kind of hate to say this, but I think your friends on the left don't care about you as much as they ought to, either. Or if they do, you don't need that kind of "care".
Trump's no angel. But he's the face of the Republican party. Politicians want support, and Trump is an enormous narcissist so he craves way more support than even your typical politician. Because he's more inclined to be on that side anyway, he's a natural for racists to support. And he's hardly going to turn away their support. So far, so bad.
But this has been true for decades. Republicans get the support of racists, maybe even are a bit racist themselves, and they disavow it mightily. Hey, even Trump disavows it. Sometimes.
And the reason wasn't hard to fathom. Being a racist was bad. Not quite I-murder-babies bad, but it was hanging out there with I-murder-puppies. What you had to do and believe to count as "racist" was pretty high, and the stricture against it was correspondingly high. So society kept embrace of racism under check. And by keeping the embrace of racism under check, it gradually eroded actual racism.
But then the progressive wing on the left got the bright idea to wield the power of the word "racist".
It doesn't seem like there was much thought to the work that the word and concept was doing to keep the ugliest and most dangerous fringe of ideas in check. The work that it was doing to help keep people like you safe (safer).
Maybe they thought noxious individual racism was completely dead and gone and would never come back. Maybe they didn't care, and power was more important. Maybe they didn't notice what was happening.
Words and concepts are not the same thing, but because we're so heavily linguistic in our declarative thoughts, it really does help to have words aligned with concepts.
When "racist" can mean "believes that merit and individual hardship should determine educational opportunity, not skin color", it kind of loses its sting. When "I don't see color" is supposed to be a bad thing, it's hard to foster a culture that avoids seeing-color-and-not-liking-what-you-see-in-a-color-that-isn't-your-own. People get scolded and scorned for quoting Dr. King's "I have a dream" speech instead of Letter from Birmingham Jail. When people keep throwing the word "racist" at Trump, who is far more teflon than Reagan ever was, over iffy and not-great but certainly not blatantly horrific things, and it keeps not sticking, the edge is dulled. "They'll call you racist," they can say, and honestly point to something trivial that provoked that charge to indicate that the charge isn't to be feared. But then the charge isn't to be feared ever, even when it's incredibly serious. Doesn't anyone remember The Boy Who Cried Wolf?
It's really hard to believe that people on the left couldn't have foreseen this if they cared.
Especially since there's an entire academic subdiscipline, Critical Discourse Analysis, whose job it is to think about exactly this sort of thing, peopled almost entirely by strong leftists. Maybe they're just really bad at their job?
My impression is that despite all the rhetoric of horror and shock, actually, everyone felt way too safe. The idea that noxious individual racism could come back and that organized ethnocentric superiority could regain any measure of legitimacy (c.f. Project 2025) was so preposterous that nobody acted as if one should take it seriously. You could use the words and strictures we'd carefully built up against this over decades and spend them on political ambition and a vision for better ways to organize society and redress ongoing systemic problems.
And yet increased white nationalism is exactly what we're seeing. It's increasingly dangerous, and our rhetorical swords formerly used to fight it were dulled to the sharpness of butter knives by using them to chop at other problems.
The support for Trump makes things worse, because a lot of bad behavior is accepted along with acquiescing to his personal flavor of narcissism and superiority complex. But the left has taken the brakes off by overusing "racist!" to try to defeat Trump, failing, and thereby weakening the societal pressure avoid the most overtly toxic thoughts and behaviors and by living in a culture that rejects such things to gradually and genuinely be better as people.
It is reasonable to avoid making oneself vulnerable by assuming the best in others. But we need to stand united against the most virulent behavior, and we need language we can use to talk about it.
Not your responsibility, of course. But this is a problem that is solved by more unity, not more divisiveness, and someone has got to help us find a way back on that path.