Paul Waldman makes a very good point that helps show how Donald Trump’s support of white nationalism and police violence are not confined to attitude and moral support. Since becoming president, not only has Trump encouraged police at multiple times to abuse the rights of Americans, but has “taken actions to encourage the militarization of police forces and remove accountability from departments with histories of abuse.” In this white supremacist presidency, such actions are where the racist rubber hits the road, and why the current protests and police violence in response cannot be disentangled from Trump’s enthronement by a minority of voters in 2016 as their anointed King of the Racists.
The president’s announcement today that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, is now in charge regarding the nationwide protests (the president was vague on what he actually meant), alongside the president’s insistence to governors that they “dominate” the protestors, his call to name antifa as a terrorist organization (despite the lack of any legal framework to do so), and the Defense Secretary’s reference to the “battlespace” of American cities, are all frightening and infuriating, but also reveal the basic weakness and illegitimacy of this administration. It has taken less than a week of civil unrest to spur Trump and his coterie to explicitly name protestors as terrorists, and to openly discuss a mindset that views the American people not as citizens but as a subject population to be brutalized into submission.
But I am wondering if this quick escalation to what has to be considered massively disproportionate threats of violence, and the calling out of antifa as a terrorist group largely behind the violence, might reflect incipient tectonic changes in American white supremacy. First, it’s notable that the president has refrained from identifying African-Americans, or the Black Lives Matter movement, as the main mover behind the violence we’re seeing. Even Donald Trump sees a political cost to seeming too overtly racist, of course — but what to make of singling out antifa instead. At the most basic level, naming antifa as a terrorist threat, but not white supremacist organizations, is an explicit tell of where the president’s sympathies lie; designating as terrorists a movement that is effectively an enemy of white supremacists and their ilk will be correctly interpreted by the latter as the president’s official seal of approval. Beyond this, though, my theory is that Trump and his ilk are starting to grapple, consciously or not, with a potentially fatal challenge to the appeal and power of racism for politicians evil and unscrupulous enough to make it central to their appeal: the fact that increasing numbers of white people have turned, and continue to turn against, the very notion of white supremacism.
Now, I don’t want to overstate the progress that’s been made. The fact that African Americans continue to suffer from both structural and overt racism in American society, even as many white Americans in good faith believe themselves not to have a racist bone in their body, demonstrates the need for conscious, sustained, and self-critical efforts by white Americans in helping move us all towards an egalitarian state. But it is too cynical to say that nothing has been changing. The BLM movement has broken through to the conscience of many millions of white Americans, and partly as a consequence, we are seeing diversity in the current protests that we haven’t seen before. At The Nation, Jeet Heer notes this fact as a crucial reason why the outcome of the present movement for racial justice — of which the current protests are only one thread — stands a chance of achieving a breakthrough that was not possible in say, 1968, the year to which many commentators are beginning to compare 2020.
My somewhat speculative notion is that the president’s singling out of antifa, alongside the willingness of his advisers to seem to want to declare war not just on the protestors but on the American people more generally, is something of an admission that this is not just a crisis in which white people must be rallied against black people, but in which some white people must now also be considered as the enemy. To me, this would explain at least somewhat the deranged notion that American cities are to be thought of as military “battlespaces,” akin to Baghdad or Fallujah. One basic concept that haunted US efforts in Iraq was the idea that it was exceedingly difficult to tell a civilian from a terrorist — all those damned Arabs look alike, and plus, terrorists are devious and hide among the people! In a way that seems analogous, racists like Trump must now contend with a reality in which to see a white person is not necessarily to see a like-minded racist soul. Such people are deemed traitors. . . terrorists. . . antifa!
I am wondering if what seems to be fratricidal threats against fellow Americans — which are on their face insane, and I think politically self-destructive — might reflect this addled calculation playing out among the president and his advisors. A message must be sent not only to African Americans but to all who question the white supremacist mindset — and since we don’t know who those people are, a massive, over-awing show of force is necessary. After all, federal agencies know that, despite the president’s attempts to whip up hysteria, antifa isn’t powerful, or even an organization at all; to act like it’s an existential threat to domestic security is absurd.
But the idea of white people abandoning white supremacy, even standing in active opposition to it and its defenders? THAT would be the very definition of an existential threat — not to the United States, but to white supremacists like Donald Trump.