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.