I want to return to the president’s racist tweets against four Democratic members of Congress this past weekend, because they bring together all the foulness and challenges of addressing this unfit president in one combustible and super-saturated package. Let’s start with the discussion of whether this is just another example of Donald Trump inciting outrage in order to distract and confound his opposition. I’m all for keeping our eyes on the prize, and not getting sucked into every controversial or despicable pronouncement from this president, who after all has showed a canny ability to steer political coverage and discussion through his abuse of the presidential megaphone, now amplified by the dubious miracle of Twitter. This is why I’ve argued repeatedly that, given the relative ease with which the president has been able to maintain the initiative, it’s crucial that the opposition set forth a coherent and damning explanatory framework for the president’s actions and pronouncements; this framework should hamper his ability to change the subject, instead providing a narrative into which each new offense can be seen as pieces of a united and despicable whole, and thus turn the president’s efforts against him.
The president seeks to outrage, and does so in a myriad of darkly creative ways, but it’s the reasons for what makes us feel outraged that we ought always return to. But I’ve argued since the start of this presidency that no further evidence was needed to prove his unfitness for office; that his words and actions during the 2016 campaign disqualified him from being president. It was clear then that he was a treasonous, anti-democratic, white supremacist authoritarian-in-waiting, and not a day has gone by since his inauguration that he didn’t re-prove the truth of this case. Put another way: from the start, the actual reasons for the outrage he provoked were sufficient to justify implacable commitment to his removal from office. In a sense, all other offenses he committed after his inauguration were only icing on a gay-fearing-baker’s artisanal wedding cake.
My ideal political stance, then, is one that acknowledges but doesn’t treat in isolation Trump’s various offenses. As I said, what is required is that the basic premises of his unfitness for office be established, and each new offense entered as a piece of evidence in the tally of established broader reasons for why he should be forced from office. But the key is this: I’m not just talking about congresspeople literally noting these offenses in preliminary articles of impeachment (although, yes, that’s part of it), but about something larger. I’m talking about opponents of Trump putting together a public argument with which to convince as many fellow citizens as possible of the urgent need for action, with the end being removal of the president via impeachment or resignation. Failing this, this strategy aims at ensuring the president is defeated in the 2020 election. And beyond this, I want to be clear: the ultimate response to Trump is to organize politically, in order to win future elections and oppose his policies, be it the abuse of migrants or the ongoing offenses against our environment.
This is part of the reason I’ve sometimes included “ruthless” in my list of necessary qualities for addressing Trump and the authoritarian GOP: we must ever be aware that the point is not simply to call out presidential misdeeds, but to do so in a way that persuades fellow Americans into opposition, and that shifts some number of these Americans into political organizing, whether it’s voter registration, putting pressure on their elected officials, or working on political campaigns. And this is most effectively done if we can point to how each individual offense is part of an identifiable and political strategy and agenda. The president is going to keep doing what he’s done, because he thinks it works: it certainly jazzes his base, and he may be right, up to a point, about how it jars and overwhelms the opposition.
But it simply makes no sense to me to conclude that when a president self-indicts on a daily basis, his opponents cannot find a way to turn his own high-risk strategy against him. I’ve been trying to summarize my take on such a strategy, which at its core involves describing and contextualizing the behavior of Trump and the GOP.
As I wrote a couple days ago, what is so striking about the president’s “black/brown people should go back to their home countries” tweets and remarks is that this is a clear case where the tweets are not a distraction from something worse. After all, these remarks, and the GOP’s mass silence in their aftermath, further establish that the president and his party are agreed on a white supremacist vision for the United States. So of course they should inspire outrage — but the real story, the thing we should be talking about and persuading our friends and neighbors of, is that we have a president and a ruling party that see white supremacism not only as a legitimate basis for organizing politics and society, but as at the center of their political agenda and strategy.
This is also why discussions of whether or not these tweets “prove” that Donald Trump is a racist are understandable but also off the mark. On the one hand, for the president to put forth such clearly racist sentiments will hopefully turn some number of people against the president. But on the other, the point is not that Trump is personally racist, but that he embraces and seeks to implement a white nationalist vision of the United States. His words might sound like the classic “racist uncle” yelling at people of color from the porch of some Gray Gardens-style manse, but coming from the president they are something else entirely. Not only do they render him untrustworthy to execute the law of the land in a race-blind, equitable fashion, but they are of a piece with what we already know: that the GOP and Trump see their surest path to political victory through inciting the fears and hatreds of their white base, and to promote whites’ political position and status in society at the expense of everyone else. This is to say nothing of the supercharging of daily racism and violence against non-whites in our country that the president’s endorsement of overt racism will lead to.
I think this is a case where some Democratic politicians are using the seemingly wise theory that you can’t jump at every Trumpian provocation as a way to avoid this damning conclusion in response to Trump’s “back to Africa” remarks; for to publicly indict the GOP and Trump as white supremacist in ideology is to at some level to risk all strategies that seek to win the White House by courting persuadable white voters who broke for Trump in 2016, who they fear will side with Trump if the 2020 election focuses primarily on race.
I also think that any spin on Trump’s recent tweets that stresses their intention to outrage his opposition dangerously misses or understates what is clearly a key part of their intent: to incite Trump’s backers, and to peel away some number of undecided white voters into the Trump camp. The GOP can of course pretend that they’re actually talking about protecting the borders, or protecting the U.S. from “communists” like the congresswomen targeted by the president, but Trump keeps giving the game away: it’s about inflaming racial hatred against non-whites. And when Trump makes explicit a white nationalist agenda that by its very nature will require suppression of non-white votes, that promotes the primordial American sin of racism, and that views non-whites as not real citizens, it’s not just another campaign strategy, one among many: it’s a full frontal assault on what this country is about, channeling the most hateful and discredited of traditions.
In such a situation, to argue that the Democrats are somehow falling into Trump’s trap by “allowing” the president to make the election about white supremacism instead of health care or the economy completely misreads the stakes and downplays the need to explicitly refute this cancerous ideology. The president is going to incite “white grievance and anti-immigrant nativism” in 2020, as this Washington Post article notes, no matter what the Democrats do; he thinks this is what won him the 2016 election, and it’s what he believes in. This is a moral reckoning that the opposition can’t avoid, as it goes to the heart of what sort of country we are. But beyond this, it also goes to whether we’re actually a democracy: for a white nationalist appeal isn’t going to win the White House or Congress without anti-democratic measures to suppress and gerrymander the vote.
This doesn’t mean that Democrats should avoid talking about the economy, the environment, health care, or education; after all, these are areas in which the president is failing everyone, including his supporters. But the best defense against his white nationalist pathology is to shine a light on it; to explicate the meaning of the president’s racist words to ensure that no informed citizen can be ignorant of their immoral content; and to contend that you can have white nationalism, or American democracy, but not both.