Say Its Name

“With ‘kung flu,’ ‘thugs,’ and ‘our heritage,’ Trump leans on racial grievance as he reaches for a campaign reset” 

So reads the headline of a Washington Post analysis of the president’s self-defeating rally in Tulsa yesterday. While it’s great that the Post has zeroed in on the truckloads of racism Donald Trump wove into his speech, the idea communicated in the headline that the president “leans on racial grievance” is baffling and misleading.  The president did far more than “lean”; when the president slurs Asians, attacks African-Americans, implies that Mexicans are sex criminals, and describes taking down monuments to the Confederacy as attacking “our” heritage, he is actively asserting a white supremacist and white nationalist vision of America, all the more so when he is not just a candidate but the actual president of the United States of America.  And when the Post notes that Trump intends to “build on the darker themes of a previous campaign notable for its attacks on Hispanic immigrants and Muslims,” “darker themes” only obscures what these actual themes are: overt white nationalism and white supremacism. Presenting this president’s statements as unrelated fragments rather than as parts of a coherent world view that can be named does a disservice to the newspaper’s readers.

No Trump Supporter Deserves to Die for the Sake of His Re-election Campaign

Donald Trump’s decision to hold an indoor mass rally in Tulsa today, amidst a growing covid epidemic in Oklahoma, reveals that we are in the slash-and-burn, horror show stage of the Trump presidency.  Many thousands may contract the virus; many hundreds may die, whether directly from being at the rally, or through transmitting the disease to other people afterwards.  The lack of a requirement that participants wear masks and the absence of social distancing make clear that this rally is also intended to be a tribute to the self-serving president’s lie that the pandemic is behind us.  He is willing to sacrifice the lives of his supporters for political gain.  This is a moral abomination, the modern-day equivalent of a bloody sacrifice to the gods.

I have seen some comments on Twitter and elsewhere from opponents of Trump attacking the Trump fans who have decided to attend this rally.  There has been a sometime overt assertion that these supporters deserve whatever illness or death befalls them.  I can’t overstate how sick and misguided this line of thinking is.

There is no conceivable meaning of a democracy worth defending that countenances violence or death upon fellow citizens as part of the political process.  Rejection of this bedrock premise is in fact one of the key reasons why Trump and his Republican political allies must be driven from office.  It doesn’t matter if we disagree with Trump fans, or if we think they’re racist, or misogynist, or even white supremacists — they simply don’t deserve to die for the sin of supporting the president or for their immoral beliefs.  The idea that political opponents deserve physical harm is not democratic politics, it’s authoritarian politics.  It’s fascist politics.  It is not our politics.

Confusion about this point only serves to obscure Trump’s and Republican elected officials’ culpability for the crimes and misrule of this administration.  The president obviously wants us fighting amongst ourselves, wants his supporters to think of Democrats as treasonous race traitors and ungrateful minorities who want to burn and loot and rape and pillage American cities and towns.  To take his bait, to let our anger get the better of us and mirror this undemocratic and hateful attitude, to say that our fellow Americans deserve to die for their politics, is a victory for Trumpism and a defeat for liberal values.

The overriding story of the Tulsa rally is that, for reasons tied to his personal pathology and dwindling political prospects, Donald Trump is engaging in behavior sure to sicken and kill Americans.  No opponent of Trump should see this as anything but an unacceptable assault on our fellow citizens, no matter their political beliefs.

Trump's Betrayal of His Own Supporters Requires Deeper Consideration

The biggest coronavirus news in Oregon this week is of a large outbreak in Union County, in the eastern part of the state, where 236 members of Lighthouse Pentecostal Church have tested positive.  According to Oregon Public Broadcasting, the state epidemiologist suspects that the transmission was potentially at a service or other church event.  Apart from an atypical Trumpian thought that these folks have really screwed up Oregon’s numbers — though infections have been increasing, we’re still among the least hard-hit states — I also felt a flash of schadenfreude that this had happened in rural Oregon, where resistance to Governor Kate Brown’s coronavirus restrictions has been far stronger than in Portland and other urban areas.

This may be an understandable, human reaction, but it’s certainly also shameful.  I don’t know how these churchgoers acquired the virus; no matter what, none of them deserve to have it.  More importantly, we are all at a point where we need to redouble not only our efforts to remind friends, neighbors, and fellow citizens about the urgency of basic social distancing steps like, well, social distancing, but also to insist on where responsibility for this health crisis truly lies: a president who has failed us every step of the way.

I strongly urge everyone to read this Amanda Marcotte piece on this very point.  She reviews the inexcusably incompetent choices that got us here, so that we now face an “untenable choice between indefinite lockdown and the coronavirus spreading unchecked.”  The lockdown, she says, “was never supposed to be the solution.  It was an emergency measure, meant to buy time to come up with a real solution,” which the federal government has failed to do.  As Marcotte notes, the president’s incompetence continues to the present; just this week, he floated the idea (not for the first time) that the number of coronavirus cases would plummet if we just stopped testing.

In light of the failure to develop a plan in the time we all bought via mass adherence to lockdowns, Marcotte advocates for a strategy of harm reduction, such as was used in the AIDS crisis.  Arguing that people can’t be expected to put off basic pleasures forever, she advocates for measures like outdoor socializing and the widespread wearing of masks; since we can’t keep doing the strict measures guaranteed to stop the virus, we can at least do what we can (absent a government plan) to protect our health, our sanity, and our livelihoods.

But just as Marcotte urges a spirit of tolerance and understanding toward our own basic needs while placing the blame for this situation on the proper parties, we should all start thinking more about the way Trump and the Republican Party have, in the matter of the coronavirus, utterly betrayed not just the country at large, but their own voters and constituents.  If so many people insist on ignoring the most basic social distancing guidelines, refuse to wear masks, even deny the danger of the virus, they do so in part because some of the most powerful people in our nation, from the president on down, have urged them to ignore scientific reality, social obligation, and common sense.  In combination with influential right-wing media outlet like Fox News, the effort to downplay the threat of the coronavirus — for, let’s face it, the sake of the president’s re-election effort and the ability of his big corporate donors to keep making a buck — has constituted the most sustained and deadly domestic disinformation campaign of our lifetimes. 

This betrayal opens up another moral perspective for how we might think of political conflict and alignments in the U.S.  Without wishing away their agency or personal responsibility, it’s useful to bear in mind how many Americans have been failed by those in whom they placed their trust, as it opens a door to engaging with our own responsibility towards those we might otherwise consider as unreachable and unpersuadable political opponents.  While we may never be able to find common ground with some citizens, this doesn’t excuse us from responsibility for their welfare — even in circumstances where they’re engaging in behavior that threatens not only their own health, but the well-being of their larger community as well.  I’m not talking about pity or condescension, but something closer to a regard for their lives and dignity that I think most of us are out of touch with as a part of everyday politics.  It is of a piece with the principle that all Americans deserve health care, education, housing, and employment, only with a more liberationist spin.

The coronavirus, with its mortal threat to us all, makes this particular perspective combining compassion and liberation easier to grasp and engage with.  Under Trump, many millions of Americans have entered into a very dark place, full of delusion and rage and racism; while it is hardly our job to save their souls, I guess I’m arguing that it is still our job to save their lives, as much as possible.  No American deserves to die because their president failed them, even when they voted for that president; the degree to which any of us hesitate to agree with this idea is a sign of both the corruption of our politics, and of our bad need for a redemptive spirit.  While Donald Trump and the Republican Party require annihilation at the polls for the good of our collective future, no analogous casting out or punishment is due to or deserved by anyone who voted for them.

Cutting Through the Chaos Talk

Mother Jones’ David Corn nails what Donald Trump’s re-election strategy is likely to be: a full-on assertion that the United States is beset by chaos, and that the president is the only one strong enough to prevent the total destruction of America.  As Corn describes it, “Trump and his campaign want voters to believe their homes are about to be overrun by mobs associated with the ongoing protests against police violence and social inequities.”  Corn correctly notes that this is actually pretty much the president’s strategy from 2016, an assertion of a country beset by foreign invaders and internal enemies that only strongman rule by Trump can redeem.

But Trump’s decision to use the current social justice tsunami as a foil for his re-election effort means that he is not so much putting law and order at the center of his campaign as white nationalism and white supremacism — only without the efforts at plausible deniability that he and his campaign deployed back in 2016.  When the president deliberately ignores that the protests are overwhelmingly peaceful and aimed at defending the rights of minority Americans, and instead asserts that they are about mysterious leftist forces violently trying to take over America, he is relentlessly promoting a vision of white nationalism; under the guise of supporting repressive visions of law and order against civil rights protestors, he is in fact asserting a vision of white supremacy.

Moreover, the massive protests and burgeoning social movement that have followed the killing of George Floyd have by now become interwoven with the president’s own attempts to deny their legitimacy and mischaracterize them as wholly violent and destructive.  In this way, Trump has ensured that this justice movement is seen by most Americans as intimately connected to his own malignant role as president.  In other words, the racist messaging of Trump’s 2016 campaign has now been replaced, by dint of the fact of Trump being president, by the reality of Trump’s actual racist response as chief executive to an actual justice movement.

The difference is between abstract promises of white nationalism, and white nationalism concretely enacted at the highest levels of government.  The most visible manifestation of Trump’s white nationalist (and authoritarian) rule has been in the president’s clear aim to violently suppress the protests in Washington, D.C. and elsewhere; the connection between this white nationalist approach and his re-election effort was made seamless when he released a campaign video of his walk through Lafayette Square after it had been violently cleared of peaceful protestors.

It’s true that the Trump campaign, at a superficial level, is seeking to hide its overt racism by trumpeting lies about antifa and anarchists being an existential, riotous threat to the United States, and the true movers and shakers behind the protests.  Yet it would be hopelessly naïve to think that Trump’s decision to make war on a movement that’s so clearly about racial justice isn’t in fact all about his own opposition to racial justice, not to some abstract and exaggerated chaos in the streets as he claims.  The veneer of deniability has all but come off in the last few days, as the president has stepped in to stop the US Army from re-naming facilities named for Confederate generals, while also decrying the destruction and decommissioning of Reconstruction-era monuments to the Confederacy.  To top it off, we then learned that he planned to resume his campaign rallies in Tulsa, Oklahoma, site of one of the worst racial pogroms in U.S. history, on June 19, the day of the Juneteenth holiday recognizing the freeing of American slaves.  According to a million persuasive Twitter takes, it defies belief that this white nationalist president, advised by white nationalists like Steven Miller, isn’t aware of the dire symbolism of such a locale and such timing (the Tulsa rally has now been pushed back a day in the face of massive criticism).

I don’t doubt that Trump’s decision to fully rip off the mask and pretty much crown himself King of the Racists won’t thrill and delight some minority of the voting population, but this seems like a reckless political decision given the widespread public support for the George Floyd protests and the need for racial justice that they represent.  The president seems blind to the definite role he’s played in bringing this moment about, and to the fact that still more overt racism on his part might well catalyze further rejection of him among previous supporters, while stiffening the resolve of his enemies.  It almost feels as if he’s just given in and let his freak flag fly — only in this case, his freak flag is a tattered Confederate battle standard raised by a man in a KKK hood.

Trump’s full-on white supremacist re-election strategy is all the more self-destructive in light of how his efforts to militarize the response to the protests have largely failed.  In particular, it appears that the military leadership has overwhelmingly recoiled from the president’s attempts to enlist it in his race war, which means that his overt racism is no longer so easily wrapped up or diffused by patriotic-militaristic-fascistic appeals.  This is why his simultaneous recent defense of the Confederacy strikes me as such a self-inflicted wound; having symbolically lost his claim to wave the American flag as the army brass edges away from him, Donald Trump seems to be reaching for another flag discredited in the eyes of all but a relatively few Americans.  As the Lincoln Project folks are saying, Donald Trump is the second Confederate president — a taunt that feels more like a credible accusation by the day.

Method and Madness in the Slurring of a Septuagenarian

By now, millions of Americans have watched the video in which Buffalo police officers shove 75-year old protestor Martin Gugino, causing him to fall and crack his head on the sidewalk, where he then lay prone and bleeding as multiple cops marched by him without offering assistance.  The city suspended the two officers directly involved in the incident, spurring 57 others to resign their positions from the city’s Emergency Response Team.  This past Saturday, prosecutors charged the pair who pushed Gugino over with felony assault charges. Gugino remains hospitalized.

According to the New York Times, Gugino is a long-time activist on issues including “military drones, climate change, nuclear weapons and police brutality,” and is described by friends as “mild-mannered.” However, today President Donald Trump tweeted unfounded speculation that Gugino might actually be a member of antifa who staged the whole bloody and grotesque episode.  His tweet has provoked widespread derision and mockery, as so many of his tweets deserve, but the particular outlandishness of this one deserves a closer look (even as we bear in mind the possibility that this lopsided encounter in Buffalo simply caught the president’s attention through a random misfiring of synapses in the mausoleum of pudding and vomit that constitutes his brain).  The video is such a clear demonstration of police brutality, and against a white person, no less, that its unmistakable lesson is that no one of any station is safe from the police; this, surely, is not a welcome message for our authoritarian president.  For him, the police can never be wrong, which means that muddying the waters around Gugino’s affiliation and actions is necessary to preserve the unholy fiction of immaculate policing.

But just as it’s hard to look away from the bare cruelty depicted in the video, I also can’t look away from the self-defeating and revealing stupidity of Trump’s comments.  The president, and indeed much of the right-wing propaganda apparatus, has spent years demonizing antifa, building up this loose agglomeration of antifascist activists into a modern-day domestic equivalent of al Qaeda, ISIS, and the Black Panthers rolled into one.  And as I wrote yesterday, this propaganda has been effective, providing fertile ground for rumors of marauding antifa banditos to burn through small towns across the land.  But now the president has turned this fearsome narrative on its head: antifa are actually fragile septuagenarians who the police can knock over as easy as one-two-three.  What horrors will this Senior Brigade unleash on an unsuspecting America next? Compulsory bingo?  Might they seek to infuse our water supply with high levels of fiber?

Donald Trump may have stepped on his own anti-antifascist (or, to simplify the verbiage, fascist) propaganda due to personal stupidity, but I think it reveals once again the basic method behind the madness.  He and his ilk want Americans to be scared of everything, so that they turn to his strongman rule out of fear.  I mean, if Donald Trump could make us afraid of literally all our fellow Americans, that would indeed be a net win for him.  But trying to pin a terror rap on a 75-year old peaceful protestor show the desperation and hollowness at these attempts to scare and divide us.  At this point, Trump can’t even decide who we should be frightened of; he just knows that he wants us to be scared!

I also can’t help speculate that there might be some relation between Trump’s demonization of Gugino and recent polls showing senior Americans turning against his re-election in a pretty significant way.  To Trump’s reptilian brain, it probably feels pretty good to see the police drawing blood from a member of a demographic that appears to be in the process of stabbing him in the back. 

Paranoid Vigilantes Shadow Small Town Racial Justice Protests

As reports like this one from the Washington Post are documenting, the United States is currently undergoing a mix of widespread and sustained protests unmatched for half a century.  Particularly heartening for those of us hoping for a true sea change in attitudes toward civil rights is how marches and demonstrations are hardly confined to large urban centers; hundreds of events have now taken place in all 50 states, including small towns in solidly conservative states and regions.  Not only are these evidence of a shift in the present moment, they may also presage increased future support of civil rights and police reform efforts; as the Post notes, “the closer someone lives to a protest, the more likely it is to change their vote.  Protests influence not just election turnout, but also what types of issues rise to the top of party platforms, and who gets elected to state, local and federal offices.”

This phenomenon of small-town participation has been happening here in Oregon, with demonstrations in support of justice for George Floyd taking place not just in Portland but locales like Monmouth, Medford, and Pendleton.  But these peaceful protests have been sometimes shadowed by a less progressive counterpoint.  Even as small-town Oregonians rallied against systemic racism, others were being driven to paranoia and fear via what appear to be coordinated efforts via Facebook to foment civil strife and right-wing violence.  And so in communities like Klamath Falls and Grants Pass, armed vigilantes turned out to fight off phantom buses rumored to be filled with antifa members aiming to kill, loot, and plunder these small towns; as one Facebook commentator put it, antifa were “going to burn everything and to kill white people, basically.”

Klamath Falls in southern Oregon saw the most fraught outcome of this fear-mongering; according to reporting from NBC News, as a diverse group of some 200 protestors rallied downtown, another group of hundreds formed a sinister response to their protest:  

They leaned in front of local businesses The Daily Bagel and Rick's Smoke Shop wearing military fatigues and bulletproof vests, with blue bands tied around their arms. Most everyone seemed to be carrying something: flags, baseball bats, hammers and axes. But mostly, they carried guns.

They said they came with shotguns, rifles and pistols to protect their downtown businesses from outsiders. They had heard that antifa, paid by billionaire philanthropist George Soros, were being bused in from neighboring cities, hellbent on razing their idyllic town.

A police presence between the two groups continued for the four hours the George Floyd protestors were present; but it is easy to imagine events having gone another way, with a group of unarmed protestors confronted by heavily armed vigilantes amped up on paranoia and adrenaline.  And as NBC points, this basic scenario, of small town residents driven by wild rumor to prepare for violence, was repeated in many other locales around the U.S.  In Forks, Washington, for instance, such paranoia led locals to harass and threaten a multi-racial family visiting from Spokane, after their bus was mistaken for one of the mythic antifa assault vehicles; in a scene out of a community theater, cinema verite re-enactment of Deliverance, the family was followed by cars containing armed individuals, and was later trapped at a campsite after some of their antagonists apparently cut down trees to prevent their exit (friendlier locals ended up clearing their path).

The juxtaposition between peaceful protests in favor of justice, and violently-minded posses spurred to do battle against imaginary enemies, is uncomfortably stark.  While we should keep the nationwide groundswell of support for racial justice in the forefront of public discussion, it’s not helpful to sweep under the rug this parallel right-wing, racist, and anti-Semitic response (some rumors held George Soros to be funding the antifa buses); in important ways, the under-the-radar nature of the rumors and Facebook messaging made it invisible to much of the media, and so to the mass public consciousness and light of reason that might have quickly exposed the falsity and absurdity of the claims.  At the same time, it’s invaluable to realize that great numbers of Americans are so susceptible to being worked up into an armed frenzy, even if to an objective observer their fears are nonsensical.  This realization can’t be separated from the way that Donald Trump and Attorney General Bill Barr have essentially been party to a dangerous incitement of hate, as both men have grossly exaggerated the extent of violence among protestors over the last week, while also stating without evidence that much of it is being caused by antifa and anarchists.  

What’s also notable are the multiple examples of these small-town folk resorting to vigilante-type preparations for violence, rather than relying on their local police forces to keep them safe.  Again, this speaks to a definite paranoia mixed with an eagerness to take up arms against phantom enemies.  While such instincts are pitiable, they are also highly dangerous.  As observers like Jared Yates Sexton have being arguing, such readiness to engage in militia-style violence against left-wing enemies represents a frightening fascistic strain in American society.  We must hope that enough of these citizens witness actual peaceful demonstrations by their neighbors, so that reality might pierce their mass hallucination of persecution and vengeance.

Criminal Power

Over at The Nation, Jeet Heer homes in on a central element of the grotesquely disproportionate governmental response against largely peaceful anti-police violence protests around the country: the basic weakness of President Trump’s political position as the November elections draw inexorably closer.  Heer argues that the president has been drawn to a hyper-militarized response to protests in Washington, D.C. to compensate for his humiliating retreat to the White House bunker last week, and more generally as an effort to show strength as his standing with his base shows signs of fraying.

The president’s effort to deploy maximal levels of the U.S. armed forces to the streets of D.C., on top of the presence of thousands of members of various other security agencies, is so disproportionate to the actual threat — overwhelmingly peaceful protestors making their voices heard on the issue of police violence and systemic racism — that it inherently turns into a display of fearfulness, in the same way that a mobster who pulls a gun on a grandma who accidentally bumps into him says less about his fantastic draw speed and more about his psychotic overreaction. 

Of course, the president and his team have endeavored to validate their moves as a true show of strength by pumping up the threat in the streets to fantastical and mendacious levels.  Despite the fact that we saw last week the administrations’s cold-blooded willingness to tear gas peaceful protestors to provide the president with a campaign photo-op, the president and his defenders insist that they are beset by an unholy alliance of anarchists, antifa, and other malcontents who should collectively be considered as domestic terrorists, bent on relieving the republic of life and property, starting with the White House silver — a threat that they mysteriously seem unable to substantiate.

In other words, the president’s effort to appear strong relies almost entirely not only on the most paranoid and deluded lies imaginable about a nation besieged, but on simultaneously denying the import of the actual protestors and the issues they’re fighting for.  The inability and unwillingness to cope with urgent issues of justice surely count as a deep ineptness on the part of the president.

But it isn’t totally crazy for Donald Trump and his advisors to think that displays of military might and the infliction of violence on protestors can make him look powerful, and even be powerful — if power is thought of as the ability to impose your will on others without consequence.  But this is a crude notion of power completely incompatible with a democracy and its requirements of public participation, consent of the governed, open debate, equality under the law, and respect for human rights.   If the United States were to be invaded and occupied by a foreign power, we would all certainly consider that invader to be powerful — but powerful in a way wholly divorced from notions of justice, freedom, or our common good.  Such is the conceptual territory the president and the GOP are beginning to embrace.  It is the criminal power of strength through terror and authoritarianism.

The GOP's Shaky Bet on White Identity Politics

In a recent post at The Editorial Board, John Stoehr suggests that Donald Trump’s handling of the fallout of the George Floyd murder is spurring white Americans to view this administration, and American politics, through the perspective of African-Americans.  I think he’s 100% right, not least because this aligns with the argument I’ve tried to make here that Donald Trump has, since the 2016 campaign, effectively been forcing millions of white Americans to choose decisively for or against the explicit white supremacism that the president embodies.  But Stoehr’s reference to a shifting “point of view” among many white Americans — a point of view in which they are learning to see the United States more through the perspective of black Americans, with all the disheartening and enraging results that brings — helped crystallize my sense of a “meta-perspective” that can help us understand our current moment.

First, we can see how very much Donald Trump essentially embraces a viewpoint according to which nothing has really changed since 1968 and Nixon’s law and order backlash election, and in which nothing will ever change.  He believes that by identifying himself as the leader of white America, and the enforcer of racial privilege, he will win over enough white Americans to repeat his electoral college victory in 2020 (the fact that the president has apparently given up on winning a majority of votes is an important detail of our politics that is not often enough taken note of).  Trump, and his GOP confederates, seem to be betting their political future on a grandiose idea that nothing ever changes in the fundamentals of American politics — that white identity politics is a thing of such majestic gravitational pull that it can always be relied on.

But Donald Trump was only able to eke out a victory because for decades, the GOP had not only relied on mostly dog-whistle appeals to racism, but had also fought a scorched earth, anti-democratic campaign to deny Democratic Party-leaning African-Americans and other minorities the power of their votes, whether through outright voter suppression or dilution of such groups’ influence through precision gerrymandering.  That is, even as they acted as if the world had not changed, their very actions were reflecting the great degree to which it had changed, and continued to change – the United States was growing more diverse, and these GOP actions were an acknowledgment that without such ratfuckery, the Republican Party would inexorably become the smaller and less powerful of our two major parties.

And now this counter-revolution has gotten to the point where the president makes more or less explicit appeals to white supremacism.  But I think this discounts the important degree to which America’s growing diversity has made such appeals unpalatable to an ever-growing number of white Americans, who have had an increasing likelihood of living with, working with, or marrying minorities.  Trump is essentially betting that enough Americans are just as racist as he is to guaranty success through his white nationalist strategy — but he neglects to factor in the degree to which prolonged exposure to an explicitly white supremacist president might now cause millions of white Americans to take a look in the mirror, and say, Fuck that shit.  But the clincher is that many of these white Americans had already been changing their perspective before Trump came along, to use Stoehr’s helpful phrasing.  Trump is in many ways speeding along the process already under way (even as, tragically, plenty of other white Americans are indeed energized and inspired by his normalization of white nationalism).

Battlespace America, or, Crackdown as Crack-Up

Paul Waldman makes a very good point that helps show how Donald Trump’s support of white nationalism and police violence are not confined to attitude and moral support.  Since becoming president, not only has Trump encouraged police at multiple times to abuse the rights of Americans, but has “taken actions to encourage the militarization of police forces and remove accountability from departments with histories of abuse.”  In this white supremacist presidency, such actions are where the racist rubber hits the road, and why the current protests and police violence in response cannot be disentangled from Trump’s enthronement by a minority of voters in 2016 as their anointed King of the Racists.

The president’s announcement today that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, is now in charge regarding the nationwide protests (the president was vague on what he actually meant), alongside the president’s insistence to governors that they “dominate” the protestors, his call to name antifa as a terrorist organization (despite the lack of any legal framework to do so), and the Defense Secretary’s reference to the “battlespace” of American cities, are all frightening and infuriating, but also reveal the basic weakness and illegitimacy of this administration.  It has taken less than a week of civil unrest to spur Trump and his coterie to explicitly name protestors as terrorists, and to openly discuss a mindset that views the American people not as citizens but as a subject population to be brutalized into submission.

But I am wondering if this quick escalation to what has to be considered massively disproportionate threats of violence, and the calling out of antifa as a terrorist group largely behind the violence, might reflect incipient tectonic changes in American white supremacy.  First, it’s notable that the president has refrained from identifying African-Americans, or the Black Lives Matter movement, as the main mover behind the violence we’re seeing.  Even Donald Trump sees a political cost to seeming too overtly racist, of course — but what to make of singling out antifa instead. At the most basic level, naming antifa as a terrorist threat, but not white supremacist organizations, is an explicit tell of where the president’s sympathies lie; designating as terrorists a movement that is effectively an enemy of white supremacists and their ilk will be correctly interpreted by the latter as the president’s official seal of approval.   Beyond this, though, my theory is that Trump and his ilk are starting to grapple, consciously or not, with a potentially fatal challenge to the appeal and power of racism for politicians evil and unscrupulous enough to make it central to their appeal: the fact that increasing numbers of white people have turned, and continue to turn against, the very notion of white supremacism.  

Now, I don’t want to overstate the progress that’s been made.  The fact that African Americans continue to suffer from both structural and overt racism in American society, even as many white Americans in good faith believe themselves not to have a racist bone in their body, demonstrates the need for conscious, sustained, and self-critical efforts by white Americans in helping move us all towards an egalitarian state.  But it is too cynical to say that nothing has been changing.  The BLM movement has broken through to the conscience of many millions of white Americans, and partly as a consequence, we are seeing diversity in the current protests that we haven’t seen before.  At The Nation, Jeet Heer notes this fact as a crucial reason why the outcome of the present movement for racial justice — of which the current protests are only one thread — stands a chance of achieving a breakthrough that was not possible in say, 1968, the year to which many commentators are beginning to compare 2020. 

My somewhat speculative notion is that the president’s singling out of antifa, alongside the willingness of his advisers to seem to want to declare war not just on the protestors but on the American people more generally, is something of an admission that this is not just a crisis in which white people must be rallied against black people, but in which some white people must now also be considered as the enemy.  To me, this would explain at least somewhat the deranged notion that American cities are to be thought of as military “battlespaces,” akin to Baghdad or Fallujah.  One basic concept that haunted US efforts in Iraq was the idea that it was exceedingly difficult to tell a civilian from a terrorist — all those damned Arabs look alike, and plus, terrorists are devious and hide among the people!  In a way that seems analogous, racists like Trump must now contend with a reality in which to see a white person is not necessarily to see a like-minded racist soul.  Such people are deemed traitors. . . terrorists. . . antifa! 

I am wondering if what seems to be fratricidal threats against fellow Americans — which are on their face insane, and I think politically self-destructive — might reflect this addled calculation playing out among the president and his advisors.  A message must be sent not only to African Americans but to all who question the white supremacist mindset — and since we don’t know who those people are, a massive, over-awing show of force is necessary.  After all, federal agencies know that, despite the president’s attempts to whip up hysteria, antifa isn’t powerful, or even an organization at all; to act like it’s an existential threat to domestic security is absurd.

But the idea of white people abandoning white supremacy, even standing in active opposition to it and its defenders?  THAT would be the very definition of an existential threat — not to the United States, but to white supremacists like Donald Trump.

A Nation Without a President, But Only a Racist-In-Chief

In sifting through the nearly overwhelming amount of news in the past several days — protests in dozens of cities, police unleashing mayhem on their fellow Americans, lack of clear information about the number of peaceful protestors versus those engaged in violent acts, including white supremacist instigators — it’s best that we orient ourselves with some basic facts.  Donald Trump ran and was elected on an agenda of unapologetic white supremacism; he all but crowned himself King of the Racists, without shame.  When the murder of George Floyd led to demonstrations nationwide, Trump showed himself to be incapable of anything but placing the presidential bully pulpit, and the vast resources of the federal government, at the disposal of the same structures of racism and repression that lay behind Floyd’s killing.  There can be no doubt that his example and moral support have supercharged the worst tendencies in American law enforcement, so that across the country too many police sworn to protect and serve are unleashing violence against Americans protesting. . . police violence.

Donald Trump has made a reckless wager that he can incite a sufficient number of white Americans to fear and hatred of minority Americans to overcome the death spiral of his disastrous presidency.  This is reckless not only because of the vast evil of inflaming racist hate, but because the killing that sparked the current protests makes clear the wages of racism in spectacularly grim fashion.  The president is gambling his presidency on getting enough white Americans to explicitly agree that it’s fine for white police officers to murder an African-American in cold blood, when as clear a record as could be exists of this killing.  In embracing such a visceral, stripped-down assertion of the white supremacist vision — the arbitrary infliction of horrifying death on an African-American at the hands of whites — he is betting the farm on the hope that enough white Americans share his sociopathic sentiments.

It is the very embodiment of justice for Americans to engage in their right to protest and to demand that the police be held accountable for their actions and be purged of their role as enforcers of America’s racial hierarchy.  Against this, the president has sought to escalate the governmental response to murderous levels, urging that protestors be shot and suggesting that the US military be sent into American cities, as if the U.S. is just another Middle Eastern nation in need of a good invasion.  In a remarkable tweet, he also intimated that the Secret Service acts as his own racist police force, with his reference to attack dogs summoning images of Southern sheriffs assaulting Civil Rights-era protestors.

The fight for police reform necessarily involves action at the local level, but President Trump’s explicit interventions into this nationwide protest movement hammers home that there is no way forward against dismantling white supremacy that doesn’t involve removing from office the racist in the White House and the party that enables him.  He gives material aid and comfort to the worst people and most destructive forces in American society; without conscience, he incites American law enforcement to commit violence against not only protestors, but also against members of the press risking life and limb to document events for all Americans.  

The president’s promotion of a deranged fantasy in which African-Americans are violence-prone automatons who only understand the lash of a whip could not be more repugnant.  His attempts to bury the true purpose of the great majority of the protests — equality of all under the law — under racist hysteria that dark-skinned natives are coming for our lives is a particular moral test for every white American.

Given that defeat of the president in November would be the single greatest blow against white supremacy possible, whether this wave of protests helps or hurts that effort is a completely reasonable question.  The president obviously thinks he has much to gain, both from helping fuel them and stepping in as a strongman protecting the American people from chaos.  I think it’s far too early to tell what impact they’ll have, but taking a passive stance towards the answer would be irresponsible for anyone who wants Trump and the authoritarian GOP swept from power.  Ideally, enough Americans would turn out in peaceful protests to both overwhelm the hostile police response and the small factions of demonstrators inclined to violence, and help put to rest the president’s lie that protests for justice threaten the nation.  As we’re in the age of covid-19, it seems likely we’ll have to find other ways to press the fight, which extends beyond rolling back police violence and white supremacy to restoring the nation’s health and economy under the double blows of coronavirus and recession/depression.

Nearly all of us have an understandable preference for calm over conflict, but this inclination can be malignant when enforced at a societal level to paper over conflicts rooted in injustice and cruelty.  We’re at one of those phases in our history when such is undeniably the case.  There is no common ground to be found between police officer who murder citizens, and citizens protesting against those police officers.  One party is absolutely in the wrong; the other is absolutely in the right.  The party in the wrong must be defeated to as great an extent possible if we are to have anything that we might consider a civilized country.

You can get a sense of the destructive role that that Donald Trump plays in our national crisis in this hapless Washington Post article that puzzles over the president’s unwillingness to play the role of unifier in our current crisis even as it describes, without being able to name outright, that he’s made a conscious choice to divide the nation in support of his white supporters.  Even the title of piece captures the absurdity of pretending that the president isn’t the central player in our crisis: “As Cities Burned, Trump Stayed Silent – Other Than Tweeting Fuel on the Fire.”  By tweeting, Trump has certainly not “stayed silent” — he’s chosen the side of white supremacists and violent cops, even as he claims to advocate for “LAW & ORDER.”  The article goes on to describe how the “nation seemed to cry out for leadership,” but that “Trump made no attempt to provide it.”  That there is a discernible “nation” that might “cry out for leadership” is an unhelpful fiction, obscuring the way in which Trump has in fact provided leadership — in his promotion of state violence against largely minority protestors, he has confirmed his role once again as the King of the Racists, leader of the rump faction of Americans who quake at the thought that non-white Americans should be treated as equals.  To look to Donald Trump to unify Americans is to put aside the choice he made years ago: to be not the president of the American people, but the president of the 90%-white voting block that put him in office.

In Face of Racist Murder, Trump Doubles Down on White Supremacy

The GOP’s silence in the face of Donald Trump’s threats to slaughter Americans protesting the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers is a chilling reminder that there’s no limit to what the Republican Party will accept from this president.  While Donald Trump may be unfit for office, the GOP is unfit for America.  The president’s need to instigate and celebrate violence is in direct proportion to his foundering presidency, an attempt to project strength where there is only panic, moral emptiness, and a grotesque commitment to white supremacy.  Standing by their man, the GOP signals that its vision for America is a future of racism, repression, and authoritarianism.

In tweeting his readiness to repeat on a mass scale the killing that sparked the Minneapolis protests, the president has demonstrated how a unifying thread of white supremacism links those police officers to the racist-in-chief.  Rather than seeing the killing as an indication that the police were out of control and need to be subject to the justice system — the perspective of any civilized person — the president instead sees it as a template for further violence, further injustice, further demonstrations of white supremacy.  Our failed president reaches for the thread of racism with all the desperation of a drowning man reaching for a life preserver. He’s trying to strike a pose of law and order, but using the power of the military to enforce racist fantasies is really the ultimate in lawlessness and disorder.  The president may have singled out “looting” (“When the looting starts, the shooting starts”) as a cause for killing, but it’s utterly blinkered and naive not to recognize that it’s the hundreds of African-Americans and others protesting this murder who are the intended targets of this fantasized violence.  At any rate, the idea of some people committing thefts amid the chaos in Minneapolis is utterly insignificant compared to the unacceptable attack on American society when officers of the law hide behind their badge to commit murder.

Objectively speaking, it would be the easiest thing in the world for a non-racist president to use the clear-cut murder of an African-American by police as a fulcrum point for making a stand for racial equality in America (as an example of what this might be like, look no further than this statement released by former President Barack Obama).  Presented with this softest of soft balls, though, our racist president is constitutionally incapable of acting in a way that would promote justice.  An obviously murderous act must be normalized by threatening the same against anyone who protests it; to the racist mind, to act otherwise is to at least tacitly acknowledge that racism is wrong.

The only way that Trump can succeed in his radical re-direction of American society into an abyss of white supremacism and authoritarianism is for enough Americans to stand idly by and let it happen.  His agenda is supported by only a decreasing minority of Americans, and the majority needs to sound off, now, relentlessly, both against this malevolence and in favor of an egalitarian future.  The president’s willingness to embrace violence is another indicator that we are at a crisis as a nation; this is not politics as usual, not by a long shot.  Not for the first time, but certainly in the most decisive manner yet, Donald Trump has acted in a way that renders him an illegitimate president.  He may have cheated his way into office with the help of Russia and the depraved anti-democracy of the Electoral College (thanks, Founders!), but threatening violence against American citizens strips away his moral authority to lead, and any obligation we might have to treat him as if he’s the president.

It doesn’t matter if I think this, of course, but it certainly matters if millions of us do — and if our elected officials start acting as if his lack of legitimacy actually matters.  Wielding his illegitimacy as a political weapon is one important way that we can counter-act his efforts to infuse politics with the threat and taint of violence.  With the country reeling from a pandemic and accompanying economic disaster that Donald Trump did almost nothing to protect us against, the president knows he’s a failure; the arguments people have been making that he’s now in a phase of flailing confusion and doubling down on his basest instincts towards violence and division are spot on.  Trump may be increasingly dangerous in his weakened state, but we can’t let his offenses against the republic blind us to the fundamental fact of his weakness.  Election 2020 is not a normal political contest, but one in which both the president and the GOP can be exposed to the majority as the handmaidens of mass death and destruction, and sidelined as legitimate voices in American politics.

But the lead-up to November will not be normal, either, as the president will continue to escalate his war on American democracy in both words and action — whether it’s attempting to force Twitter to communicate his lies unfiltered to the American people, lying about the need for and efficacy of vote-by-mail, or asserting that only the American military can halt the marauding of African-Americans.  To the greatest extent possible, Democrats need to frame anti-democratic actions like these, as well as GOP voter suppression, as beyond the pale of acceptability, and as the desperate last gasps of a failed party.  As the GOP enters into a frenzy of lawlessness, the Democratic Party needs to be confident in its defense of the rule of law, and trust that a decisive majority of the American people want to chart their own future, not see it hijacked by Donald Trump and the GOP.

Jobs Are Disappearing By the Millions, But These Guys Want to Cut Off Unemployment Benefits?

As a fresh demonstration that we are in a dire economic crisis for which the Trump administration has absolutely no plan, check out these two articles from The New York Times.  The first, titled “Many Jobs May Vanish Forever As Layoffs Mount,” reviews mounting evidence that the coronavirus is sparking shifts in the economy that could well suppress employment far into the future.  To date, some 38.6 million jobless claims have been filed across the United States.  But according to a study by a Stanford economist, more than 40% of these jobs may not come back.  Fewer people in offices will impact businesses that depend on their patronage, like nearby restaurants and stores; meanwhile, the incentive to automate jobs has increased exponentially.  It seems likely that evidence will continue to emerge on the pandemic’s depressive effects on employment.  In combination with the overwhelming fact that the economy cannot operate at anything like normal so long as Americans fear for their lives every time they come into contact with other people, the employment and economic picture looks ghastly.

To hear Larry Kudlow talk, though, you’d think he was living on a different planet than the rest of us.  Late last week, the White House economic advisor said that there’s no need to extend unemployment benefits past their current limits.  Apparently, Trump officials are convinced that too many Americans are choosing cushy unemployment over returning to non-existent or perilous jobs.  Ironically, in the same interview, Kudlow acknowledged uncertainty around the speed of the economic recovery, speaking more cautiously than President Trump and his assertions of the economy’s impending magical turn-around.  Yet this admission just makes his comments on unemployment benefits more nonsensical, and points to a basic truth of the White House response to our economic crisis: these guys really have no idea what they’re doing, and certainly can’t be trusted to navigate us out of the worst financial crisis in a century.

I don’t see how anyone can look at the predictions of an economy with permanently high unemployment levels, and not conclude that massive public intervention is needed to ensure our economy and society aren’t hobbled for years on end.  I worry in particular about the absolute devastation being inflicted on small businesses across the U.S.; these account not only for a disproportionate amount of job creation, but for much of the dynamism in the U.S. economy.  You would think that protecting them now and in the future would be a non-partisan issue — but the federal government’s maladministration of relief funds intended for such companies speaks to a basic indifference to this enormous sector of the economy.  I suspect this indifference is driven by a combination of basic incompetence, alongside an innate preference for the big corporate donors who stand to profit if they’re able to gain a greater share of the US market as smaller competitors die off.

This is obviously a huge and complicated topic, but leaving our economic future to the whims of predatory corporations, indifferent Trump administration officials, and the unavoidable impacts of the coronavirus is simply not an option.  We all need to be thinking about what sort of economy we want and need, and working to make sure we have a government that works for this vision.  At a minimum, this means continued aid to workers who have lost their jobs through no fault of their own.  Anything else is cruelty and economic stupidity.

Professional Vandals

One of the well-documented pathologies of the Trump administration and the contemporary Republican Party is an opposition to professionalism and expertise.  In the Trump administration, this tendency can be found everywhere, from the nomination of incompetent judges to the appointment of Jared Kushner to positions of responsibility over areas about which he knows absolutely nothing.  Disregard for expertise is both a key enabler and expression of the president’s authoritarianism: expert opinion gets in the way of imposing the will of the maximum leader, and so must be dismissed and ignored when it doesn’t directly support the president’s whims.  Ignoring reality isn’t a great way for a person to live, and it isn’t so great for a country, either: as Exhibit A, witness Donald Trump’s repeated efforts to wish the coronavirus out of existence via happy talk and suppressing basic facts about its spread.

Not insignificantly, suppression of expertise not only enables authoritarianism, but opens the door to its evil twin, corruption; without verifiable or measurable standards, political and spending decisions can be far more easily made based on the personal wishes of the president and allied politicians.  As just one example out of many: if the president can lean on health agencies not to speak out decisively against the use of hydroxychloroquine to treat the coronavirus, the president’s cronies can more easily make money off sales of this sham treatment.

But as with other aspects of the danger that Donald Trump and the GOP pose to our country’s future, the attack on expertise can feel both obvious and abstract, something that might be seen as residing in a political realm separate from our daily lives, even as we grasp intuitively how its consequences might rain down on us in a thousand different ways, from higher mercury emissions from coal plants that sicken our friends and family, to money diverted to the president’s allies to build a useless border wall rather than build schools for the children of parents serving in the military.

Lately, though, I’ve been thinking that not only is the war on professionalism actually central to the broader Trump-GOP war on American democracy and society, but that understanding this can help put Americans more in touch with the urgency of the fight we’re in.  Not only does discrediting and ignoring expertise and knowledge enable the president to act in ways that serve himself and various constituencies at the expense of the American majority, it’s also a direct threat against anyone who takes pride in their education, training, and professionalism in the workplace. 

After all, even while we set up artificial distinctions between what might be considered the realms of politics, economics, and public health — to pick three of the biggest categories of all — the war on professionalism blows past such borders.  The president and his allies have every incentive to discredit expertise not only in government, but everywhere it appears – because everywhere it exists, it poses a threat to efforts to raise personal preference and connections over competence and knowledge. 

The elevation of grifting and plunder as the highest goals in life is an affront to every American who takes pride in their work, in their dedication, in their personal skills, and in the respect of their peers.  The Trumpist attitude is that anyone who has standards, who tries to do the best job they can do, and who treats fellow workers with respect, is simply a chump who doesn’t realize that all you have to do to get ahead is join the team that’s rigging the game.

Forget Immigrants and the Media - For Donald Trump, Democracy is the Real Enemy of the People

Today, President Trump threatened to withhold unspecified federal funds from Michigan and Nevada in retaliation for those states’ efforts to implement vote-by-mail in the face of the coronavirus.  While the form and syntax of the threats were typically bizarre — via Tweet, with random quotation marks mashed up against various lies and misrepresentations — the intent is clear.  The president opposes efforts to allow Americans to vote while a pandemic renders in-person voting a danger to the public health; and in his made-up allegations of fraud, he seeks to subvert Americans’ faith in our voting system, and by extension, our democracy itself.  By threatening to use financial pressure to implement his authoritarian hostility toward allowing people to vote, he has once again demonstrated that he is not simply unfit for office, but a self-avowed enemy of American democracy.

More specifically, of course, it’s the ability of likely Democratic voters the president opposes.  So he calls out Nevada and Michigan for supposed fraud, even as Republican-led states, and the Republican National Committee itself, take measures to enable vote by mail.  

Even if these two states stand up to him, the president’s threats may have the intended effect on other states considering vote-by-mail measures.  In a fiscal environment where states are facing massive disruption to their finances, and are deeply reliant on emergency funding from the federal government, they can be seen as particularly vulnerable to shake-downs like the president is engaging in against Nevada and Michigan.

For all the organized chaos, industrial-scale larceny, and gross incompetence of this administration that has led us to this point of economic free-fall and mass death, in some ways there is very little left to say.  Donald Trump, with the complicity and active support of the Republican Party, is clearly engaging in an effort to undermine and delegitimize the 2020 election.  He is doing this because he full well understands he will never win a majority of votes in a free and fair vote; in a parallel preparation for this authoritarian presidency, the Republican Party has worked for decades now to undermine Americans’ right to vote and elect officials of their choosing, via gerrymandering, voter ID laws, and purging of voter rolls targeting Democratic-leaning voters.  The president is despised by millions upon millions of Americans, while even many of his supporters question his mental fitness to serve as president.  Every day he continues in office is a calamity for our present and a curse on our collective future.  It is difficult to see a way forward that does not involve the complete political destruction of both Donald Trump and the GOP in 2020 and beyond.  A president and a party who don’t believe in Americans’ right to vote have no place in our democracy, full stop.

A Plan for the Coronavirus, Just Not For Fighting It

Ezra Klein has come out and stated outright what we’ve been seeing before our very eyes for months now, but which has been sometimes hard to perceive because of its sheer irresponsibility, stupidity, and casual indifference to mass death: the Trump administration simply has no plan or goals around fighting the coronavirus pandemic.  He notes that the nation-wide lockdowns over the last two months were supposed to buy the country time to implement plans, during which period

the US should have built the testing, contact tracing, and quarantine infrastructure necessary to safely end lockdown and transition back to normalcy — as many of its peer countries did. Instead, Trump has substituted showmanship for action, playing the president on TV but refusing to do the actual job. He has both dominated the airwaves and abdicated his duties. As a result, America’s progress against the coronavirus has stalled, even as the lockdown has driven the economy into crisis.

Much of the current public debate is posed as one “between endless lockdown or reckless reopening,” but Klein correctly notes that this dichotomy is due to “the failure to create a safer, middle path,” identifying this as “the most profound and complete failure of presidential leadership in modern history.”  As the title of Klein’s piece puts it, “we have no president.”

Klein’s assessment is clarifying, in that it redeems the maddening feeling I’ve had for weeks now that we have entered more and more into a phase of “re-opening” without actually doing the things (beyond enduring the lockdown) that would make this anything of a good idea.  Yes, states have been taking individual and sometimes collective actions like increased testing and implementation of tracing programs — but overall, the sensation has been that we are prematurely starting to return to normal without much of the infrastructure in place needed to stop fresh waves of the coronavirus in the coming months or even weeks.  According to Klein — and really, according to the known facts — this sensation is an accurate perception of reality.  We really are careening forward without a clear map, and this does seem to me to be indistinguishable from a form of madness.  It is a madness directly informed by the way the president has translated his personal sociopathy into governmental non-action — but it’s also a madness amplified by our collective inability to grapple with the basic fact of his de facto resignation from the role of president.  Donald Trump has no interest in protecting American lives, and anyone who thinks otherwise at this point is either a devoted partisan or naïve beyond belief — yet at some basic, gut level, we collectively keep acting as if he does care.  To always expect him to act otherwise is to enter into a complementary form of madness (maybe mass delusion is a better, more specific term), in which we expect something from Trump that he is unable to provide.  

But though the president has no plan for fighting the coronavirus, the president does very much have a plan for the coronavirus more generally.  This plan, none of us should be surprised to learn, is focused on the protection and preservation of Donald Trump’s political and economic fortunes.  In retrospect, he has never really done very much to hide this plan.  In his obsession with the nation’s economic health and simultaneous indifference to its actual health, the plan has always been to downplay the coronavirus and convince the American people that it’s not nearly as big a threat as they might otherwise believe.  This was his approach in the earliest days, when he spoke of the virus being contained to a handful of Americans before inevitably going away, to his early mystical phase of promising that the virus would disappear on its own, to his attempts to downplay the death toll by comparing it to the cost of car accidents or the common flu.  Once the death toll began to rise and it was clear that he had squandered the months of January and February, continued denial became the only path forward, because anything else would mean acknowledging his prior mistakes — which, as we all know, he does not do, because he cannot admit a mistake, and because he never wants to actually accept the responsibilities of his office.  He is only in it for himself.  That has always been the master plan, and it always will be.