Given President Trump’s determination is to leave no doubt that he considers himself to be the white-supremacist-in-chief, it’s worth remarking anew, in the face of his racist tweets today targeting four U.S. representatives, how grotesque an error Democrats have made in not making his animating racism and white supremacist project the focal point of the party’s opposition to his misrule.
The task before the Democrats has always been crucial and inescapable, but in no way complicated or even overly difficult. This is a president who, from the start, has bared his racism for all the world to see, a racism that has in turn informed and lent consistency to all he seeks to do while he occupies the Oval Office: restrict the political power of non-white Americans; shape the economy so that it benefits those who are already rich and predominantly white, while distracting his supporters as he picks their pockets; enact mass cruelty and human rights crimes against brown-skinned immigrants at the southern border. The principle of opposition isn’t hard to articulate: a man such as this president, who views whites as the natural top tier of American society, and who views non-whites as neither full citizens nor, to be blunt, fully human, lacks the moral authority to be president.
There are other explanatory frameworks through which to view this presidency - misogynistic, plutocratic, kleptocratic - but the white supremacist aspects are dominant, and bleed into the other dark tendencies of this White House. The promotion of racism serves to distract Trump’s base from the many ways in which the president serves them badly, whether through tax cuts that benefit only the richest among them, disabling climate agreements that would keep the planet from spiraling into uninhabitability, or foreign policy blunders that raise the probability of wars both costly and catastrophic.
The white supremacist narrative also has the benefit of being affirmed on a near-daily basis by the president himself.
Let me put it another way: the president wants everyone, both this base and his opponents, to know that he’s a racist. This may enthuse many of his supporters, but it also carries great danger for him, as it serves to create a cap in the number of people who will ever support him. However, what the president is betting on, in part, is that this cap can, somewhat paradoxically, be lifted as a direct result of his explicit racism. Part of a president’s traditional power is that of persuasion; together with the authority of his office, he can change what many people consider to be acceptable to think, feel, and express.
This means that Trump’s blatant racism is inevitably a test for the Democrats: if they fail to counter it with sufficient force, they will lend his vile ideology a sort of tacit acceptance, when what they need to be doing is making it clear such white supremacism is unacceptable in a civilized society such as ours. The Democrats have, until now, been failing this test, by not identifying the president’s racism as sufficient grounds for implacable opposition to him. The good news, if you can call it that, is that the president has constantly offered them a second chance to make up for this error. His tweets this weekend are such a second chance. I think it’s an error to say that these tweets are a distraction: they are, in fact, very much the thing itself, the basic statement of Donald’s Trump argument for why people should support him, and what sort of governing we can expect for the rest of his first term or, god forbid, another four years beyond that.
So make the president double-down on his remarks (he will never apologize for them). Make the whole GOP defend the indefensible. Let them all go on the record saying that only white-skinned Americans are actually Americans, or refuse to answer the question, or break with the president.
It is a secondary issue, but not too much so, that the president’s tweets today might be held up by some as a shining example of how he maintains the initiative in our political discourse, by shaping the conversation through the power of the presidential tweet. A better way of viewing what has happened is to observe how Trump has once again acted consistently with his prior actions and all that we know of his despicable character. There is no worse thing that the president is distracting us from than his white supremacism; if he thinks he is, then he’s mistaken. And if he thinks that this is a winning subject for a summer weekend, then it is largely proof that the moral rot that drives his racism has also led him to an overly cynical view of the American public. We all owe it to each other to call the president’s racism by its true name, and to re-affirm that the only acceptable way forward for this president is resignation or removal from office. A president who doesn’t accept that nearly half the citizenry is even American defiles the Oval Office and has proven himself unfit to govern, or to be trusted with equitably executing the laws of the land.