The backtracking and obfuscation by the White House, as well as its engagement of U.S. senators to dissemble on its behalf, show that the president’s “shithole” comments are doing serious damage to the president’s already shitty reputation. I think this is because, at a visceral level, Americans are able to gauge more strongly than ever the depths of racism and white supremacy that fill Donald Trump’s otherwise empty soul. Over at The Atlantic, Adam Serwer contextualizes and maps out this incident’s big-picture implications for the nature of the Trump presidency. After quoting a century-ago Atlantic writer who argued against immigrants from Southern Europe in exactly the same terms right-wingers argue against immigrants from Latin American and Africa today, Serwer turns his attention to the racism inherent in the president’s words:
These remarks reflect scorn not only for those who wish to come here, but those who already have. It is a president of the United States expressing his contempt for the tens of millions of descendants of Africans, most of whose forefathers had no choice in crossing the Atlantic, American citizens whom any president is bound to serve. And it is a public admission of sorts that he is incapable of being a president for all Americans, the logic of his argument elevating not just white immigrants over brown ones, but white citizens over the people of color they share this country with.
The sheer stupidity of Trump’s disparagement of citizens with origins in the countries he insulted has not yet, I think, been fully registered and treated with adequate levels of rage and contempt across the U.S. (This site is only a lukewarm fan of New Jersey Senator Cory Booker, but the outrage he expressed in his harsh questioning of National Security Advisor Kristjen Nielsen about the incident is an example of what we should be hearing from all Democratic politicians). Likewise, this latest declaration that the president does not consider himself the president of all Americans is one more warning sign that Trump has abdicated his basic constitutional responsibilities. Serwer describes Trump’s obsession with race as a guiding principle that directs his policy-making — a fact that it would be deluded to ignore. It is not just that the president is racist, but that this racism is being reflected in official policy.
At The New York Times, Charles Blow has written a column that I see as complementing Serwer's; putting together the points that the two writers make, you can see a framework emerge for understanding the full white supremacist bearings of this White House. Blow sees Trump's racism as a point established beyond a shadow of a doubt, even before these latest remarks; and like Serwer, he points to the racism of his policies. But Blow offers a variation that, while it may seem subtle, may actually be a way to open more people's eyes to the moral decrepitude of this administration. For Blow, a racist president is de facto unacceptable, not simply because this is is morally reprehensible, but because his racism inevitably infects everything Trump has done and will do in office. The central question for Blow is how the nation responds to this existential affront. As he puts it, “We must stop believing that any of Trump’s actions are clear of the venom coursing through his convictions. Everything he does is an articulation of who he is and what he believes. Therefore, all policies he supports, positions he takes and appointments he makes are suspect.”
This might be a maximalist response to Trump’s racism, but it’s a correct one. Much like Trump’s refusal to separate himself from his business interests, which makes every presidential decision questionable for how it might result in his own self-aggrandizement, Trump’s racism must be suspected in every decision he makes, from the economy, to handling disasters like Puerto Rico, to immigration.
But as the inescapable racism of some of the Trump's administration's highest priorities comes ever more clearly into focus, what is even more remarkable is the broader GOP's complicity in this broad effort to enshrine white supremacist notions in policy and law. After all, the GOP has long embraced a subtler racism than this to appeal to the worst impulses of some white voters — but in defending Trump, it has kissed all that goodbye, and gone all in with Trump’s overt white nationalism. Why would the GOP choose to permanently poison its brand after so many years of trying to walk a tightrope between outright racism and plausible deniability?
The answer to this question is deeply intertwined with the reasons why Donald Trump has so thoroughly been able to dominate the Republican Party so quickly, and I don't have anything like a full explanation to offer here. But what I'm increasingly sure of is that Trump's willingness to not only play the race card, but to douse it in gasoline and throw it into our political system like a Molotov cocktail, is key to the way the GOP has subordinated itself to his cult of personality so very readily. My rough guess today is that over the last three or four decades, the GOP has increasingly appealed to its loyal voters as the defender of what I'll call "the cult of whiteness" — a sort of primordial white supremacism, white supremacism with plausible deniability, white supremacism of the most banal sort in which whites are seen as "normal" or "preferable." But as Adam Serwer explored in a previous essay (required reading, by the way), the idea of whites who may not even think of themselves as racist, but who simply see whites as people to be preferred over other races, is just a very basic definition of white supremacism, before you start bringing in all the violence and hatred that the concept inevitably involves. Another way of putting it: the GOP has long been the home for a sanitized version of a racist mindset that can't actually ever be sanitized, at least not when it's shared as the single unifying principle by people as disparate as poor folk in Mississippi, small business owners in Southern California, and reclusive right-wing billionaires in their hidden mountain aeries. So the GOP could be seen as party suffering a low-grade fever that inevitably became a full-blown white supremacist disease.
But the GOP's decision to double-down on racism now can also be seen as having its cause in the same reasons it's always entertained racism: to keep lower- and middle-class voters distracted by the supposed threat of people of color, as the party works to hoover more and more of the economic pie into the increasingly bloated bank accounts of the rich. There is absolutely a connection between our state of extreme inequality and the new willingness of right-wing politicians to scapegoat people of color as the all-powerful creators of subpar wages and bleak life prospects — to the point where they would rather tear our country apart than have us look straight on at the unfairness of how the economy allots and rewards work today.
We need to keep our eyes on this bigger picture. Remember — a White House source initially claimed Trump’s “shithouse” comment was a good thing, as it would rouse his base. It also seems obvious that the White House thinks that a conversation about racism can harm Democrats. I think there’s a grain of truth in this, in that an appearance that progressives and Democrats care about racism above all else will indeed guaranty that voters with racist sympathies (which are so often closely intertwined with broader cultural anxieties and economic anger) may never vote for them, and so cleave them still closer to the GOP.
But as hideous and outrage-inducing as it is, the evil of white supremacism being propagated from the executive and legislative branches is only part of a more comprehensive awfulness. In the eyes of the right, racism's larger purpose is as a tool to make the vast majority of us poorer, and to aggrandize the power of the rich over the rest of the citizenry. This increasingly explicit white supremacism is a key part of a larger con that needs to be exposed and rejected in its entirety — a con that has put our country on a path toward oligarchy and immiseration of the majority, no matter the color of your skin.
