The Trump Exception
We are living in truly remarkable times. A never-ending series of eminently preventable tragedies have made it impossible to deny the existence, insidiousness and pervasiveness of institutional and systematic racism, particularly in regards to how people of color are treated by law enforcement.
People everywhere are waking up to some of the brutal realities of race and racism that non-whites have known about for ages but that white people have often been too privileged or too oblivious to understand or acknowledge. Even more remarkably, we’re suddenly gripped with a culture-wide desire to do something about racism, to take direct action to try to make the world a better, more equitable place by donating money to worthy charities or marching in the streets or publicly asserting that our upscale cupcake boutique supports Black Lives Matters.
There are exceptions of course. As always, the biggest, most frustrating and maddening exception is Donald Trump. If you are Donald Trump then it is VERY possible to deny the existence, insidiousness and pervasiveness of institutional and systematic racism, just as it is EXCEEDINGLY possible to deny the existence, insidiousness and pervasiveness of police brutality.
It’s not just possible for Trump to deny the existence and pervasiveness of the overlapping evils of racism and police brutality: it’s absolutely imperative. It’s something that must be done, publicly and repeatedly until a gaslit public that knows in their bones just how real and evil racism is begins to doubt itself and its convictions.
If you’re Trump, you can stick your fingers in your ears and close your eyes and scream at the top of your lungs, “LAW & ORDER! Support the police! Antifa THUGS! Protesters will be met with vicious dogs and the most ominous weapons! When the looting starts, the shooting starts!”
Trump has been the exception in other ways as well. #Metoo spelt the personal and professional end of countless awful men creditably accused of sexual harassment and assault by multiple women over a period of decades, but not for Trump. We live in hyper-sensitive times where it’s not terribly unusual for some low-level government employee to get fired for writing something sexist or racist or hateful on social media. But when Trump writes something sexist or racist or hateful or rooted in paranoid conspiracy-mongering on social media his poll numbers improve.
African-Americans are telling Trump and white America that the time for profound systematic societal change has come, that we are at a crossroads in our nation’s history and that it is incumbent upon us to do the right thing and take a long, hard look in the mirror and come to terms with the role that we play, individually and collectively, in perpetuating toxic and deeply destructive cycles of racism and oppression.
Trump’s answer to this eloquent and righteous rage is to insist that he, Donald Trump, the face of the Birther movement and high-profile arch-enemy of the Central Park 5 has been the greatest president for African-Americans since Abraham Lincoln.
It’s as if black America is in a toxic marriage with Trump and they’re continually telling him that they feel abused and mistreated, ignored and scapegoated and that their always difficult and tenuous connection has been damaged beyond repair and his defense is to say that they’re making more money with him and that he consequently is the single greatest husband in the history of the world and it is incumbent upon them to prove otherwise.
You can’t come to an understanding when your mindsets are that far apart. You also cannot come to an understanding if you have no interest in coming to an understanding. It is achingly apparent that Trump has no interest in healing racial wounds when his entire electoral strategy is rooted in enflaming racial tensions by depicting white America as under siege by ominous others, with his administration and his acolytes as the only barrier between white, Christian civilization and the forces of destruction and anarchy.
Trump was elected largely as a backlash to racial and societal progress. He was the unanimous choice of people who wanted to pretend that racism didn’t exist anymore, or that it did but its true victims were good-hearted white folks unfairly maligned as racist just because of their words, actions, deeds, tweets and support for him and his racist ideas.
My fear is that Trump will be able to once again spin racial fear into votes and get re-elected by bucking the forces of progress with an unmistakably race-based play to white fear and white rage.
Trump’s rage-tweeting only looks tone-deaf and half-insane to the other side. To his supporters, regularly taking to Twitter to scream LAW & ORDER or babble about Nixon’s Silent Majority is the kind of crude but effective dog-whistle that will tragically probably go down in history books as the kind of primitive and unhinged political tool Trump used to defeat opponents who were too dignified and sane to stoop to his level somewhere deep below the sewer.
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