Over the last week or so, the reality that Donald Trump is inciting violence as part of his re-election strategy has begun to be reported more openly. In just the past few days, he has defended accused killer Kyle Rittenhouse of acting in self-defense when he killed down two people in Kenosha, and tweeted extensive endorsements of the terrorizing crime spree by Trump supporters through Portland this past weekend. The purpose of inciting and encouraging violence is transparently self-serving; as Zack Beauchamp writes, “the president appears to genuinely believe that the chaos unfolding on American streets is good for him politically. The more violence there is, the more he can fearmonger about “Democrat-run cities” and “Joe Biden’s America” — distracting from America’s botched response to the Covid-19 virus.”
But the president’s incitement of violence by right-wingers cannot be separated from his parallel effort to exaggerate any violence associated with the Black Lives Matter protests as an organized, left-wing assault on the United States. This is the violence he claims to defend American against, the basis of his fake assertion of being a “law and order” president. And so the sad sacks of antifa are elevated into domestic terrorists, who the president accuses of actually being the armed wing of the Democratic Party that calls the shots of Joe Biden’s candidacy. At the same time, evidence that much of the looting and violence we have seen are the result of opportunistic criminals, not protestors, is ignored. And not incidentally, the grotesquely exaggerated descriptions of left-wing chaos work to undermine the reality that the Black Lives Matter protests represent the greatest civil rights upwelling of the last half century.
This false narrative of left-wing violence is the phantom menace that now underlies Donald Trump’s praise and encouragement of right-wing violence as a means of stopping alleged malefactors on the left. But the reality is that Trump is inciting the right in order to build a sense of a nation in chaos, not to bring either law or order. After all, if law and order is really what he’s after, why not send in DHS troops or the National Guard, as he has repeatedly threatened to do, and actually did do in Portland? Why tell citizens that they themselves need to take matters into their own hands, and dispense rough justice to looters and protestors? Trump does so in order to feed the fears of the gullible, and to unleash the depredations of right-wing thugs. A nation in fear, he reasons, will want a strongman president in place. And just as importantly, because this is a man who clearly does not acknowledge American democracy any longer, right-wing vigilantes could come in handy if he loses in November and tries to retain power. The US military may not follow him, but militias can be counted on to suppress dissent.
After all, if antifa is hardly the terrifying force Trump and the GOP would have us believe, then who exactly are the right-wing militias supposed to be committing violence against? Well, you and me, basically. If peaceful BLM protestors are slurred as domestic terrorists, and are seen as the real power behind the Democratic Party, then those requiring the infliction of violence very quickly encompasses all Democrats and others who oppose Donald Trump.
This is the point where general fears of political violence by Trump allies need to be connected with the white supremacist mindset that animates both Trump and the right-wing militias. Groups like the III Percenters and the Proud Boys are obsessed with the idea that white people are losing their primacy in society, and are the targets of a deliberate campaign of “white genocide.” This is bonkers, but is merely the psychotic, bleeding edge of the white supremacism that the president and the GOP now champion. White people are losing their demographic, cultural, and political centrality in the United States, and this must be resisted by all means necessary, whether by voter suppression or covering up for Russian election interference that benefits the Republican Party. Reinforcing and reviving white supremacy has been the overriding political project of Donald Trump’s term in office; from securing the border against brown-skinned “invaders” to banning Muslims from American shores, to calling the BLM movement a hate group, Trump has maintained his base by giving them what they want — government policies that treat non-whites as non-American, slathered over with great heapings of openly racist rhetoric.
The fact that right-wing threats and acts of violence cannot be separated from white supremacism means that our current crisis is not just another generic example of authoritarianism and even fascism attacking a democratic form of government about which all good people should be concerned — though it is surely that — but one formed out of a thousand specific details of American history, culture, and the daily lived experience of millions. Donald Trump and the Republican Party’s descent into authoritarianism and violence is inextricable from their deathly embrace of white supremacism. The president is not simply racist, or “exacerbating racial divisions.” He has worked consistently and savagely for the last three and a half years, and in increasingly violent fashion now, not only to ensure that white Americans remain the dominant racial group in America, but to attack and undermine the lives of non-whites in our country. Every step of the way, he has been actively or passively assisted by the Republican Party.
So while it is extremely worrying that Trump’s incitement of violence for political ends puts him in the tradition of fascists and other strongmen like Mussolini, the salient detail about the right-wing militias that Trump is attempting to mobilize is that these violent and racist men are the modern-day equivalent of the KKK (a fact not coincidentally supported by the fact that in some instances they are actually members of the KKK). Only now, instead of targeting mainly African-Americans, the majority of Americans have become the despised enemy — for the majority of American do indeed support the Democratic Party, with its ideals of racial justice and equality. Minority Americans are surely in greater danger, but even white Americans find themselves in the crosshairs of these trigger-happy men, as evidenced by recent events in Portland and Kenosha.
But although we are at a frightening and dispiriting crossroads, part of how we fight back, non-violently, is to know these forces for what they are. The president is king of the white supremacists and inheritor of the Confederacy, and by violence and propaganda works to return us to a past that the majority finds totally unacceptable. The armed militias he incites to action are the modern-day incarnation of the KKK, psychos playing at being soldiers when in reality they are death squads in the making, fantasists of mass slaughter of those they consider less than human. They are white nationalist trash who practice at terrorism and murder.
Because the chaos and violence spread by the president and his allies are inherently frightening and dispiriting to normal, law-abiding American citizens, it is necessary to see beyond them in order to gather our collective wits and understand the stakes, and our opponents, for what they truly are. There is understandable fear among many Democrats and other opponents of Trump that he is going to steal the election, either by the violence we have been discussing, or via other means of subverting the vote, such as the ongoing attacks on the US Postal Service and vote by mail. But apart from doing what we can to ensure a fair vote, we all need to understand that a president willing to encourage political violence against his opponents in the name of an authoritarian white supremacism has engaged in activity that citizens of a democracy can never accept or forgive. What the president considers a brilliant tactical move by endorsing right-wing white nationalist violence, we must work to transform into the worst decision of his life. Openly acting as a lawless president in his incitements, Donald Trump has exposed not only himself but the entire GOP apparatus to political destruction by an American majority committed to the non-violent contestation of power in the country. An embrace of violence renders the GOP illegitimate as a democratic party, and by extension discredits what remains of the Republican agenda as mere appendices to a violent, white supremacist world view. And central to this argument is hammering home, day and night, who these so-called patriots carrying guns really are: latter-day night riders, white supremacists who have picked up weapons of war to terrorize their fellow citizens of all races. The response to them should not be fear, but fury. This country cannot be a haven for such sick and immoral men, not in the Oval Office and not on the streets.