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.