Armed members of the far-right Proud Boys groups stand guard during a memorial for Patriot Prayer. Trump blames urban violence on the left, but these are his boys - and so were the Trump Goons in Portland. This is happening on his watch. (photo: Getty)
resident
Trump did not explicitly condemn white supremacy and right-wing
militias during the debate, despite an invitation from moderator Chris
Wallace, claiming that the “left wing” is more responsible for violence
than the “right wing.” Here’s the question that prompted
Trump’s reaction:
WALLACE: But are you willing, tonight, to condemn white supremacists and militia groups
and to say that they need to stand down and not add to the violence in a
number of these cities as we saw in Kenosha and as we’ve seen in
Portland? Are you prepared to specifically do that?
Trump responded: “Sure, I’m prepared to do that. I
would say almost everything I see is from the left wing, not from the
right wing. I’m willing to do anything. I want to see peace.” Both
Wallace and Joe Biden asked him to “do it.” And then, Trump singled out
one group with a statement that has drawn alarm:
TRUMP: Proud Boys, stand back and stand by. But
I’ll tell you what: Somebody’s got to do something about antifa and the
left. Because this is not a right-wing problem — this is a
left-wing problem.
The Proud Boys, a group labeled by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group, was involved in the Unite the Right rally
in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017, which attracted a number of white
supremacist groups. Members of the Proud Boys are known for using white
nationalist memes as well as anti-Muslim and misogynistic rhetoric.
The FBI has elevated the threat level of racially
motivated violent extremists in the U.S. to a “national threat priority”
this year. In testimony this month to the House Homeland Security Committee,
FBI Director Christopher Wray said the majority of domestic terrorism
threats and violence comes from “racially motivated violent extremism,”
mostly from people who subscribe to white supremacist ideologies.
Wray described antifa as an ideology
or movement rather than an organized group and said the FBI was
investigating some cases involving people who self-identify with antifa.
But he said the protest-related violence doesn’t appear to be organized
or connected to one group. Protests for racial justice have at times
turned violent but have largely been peaceful.
Trump's Goons terrorized peaceful protestors in Portland, refusing to identify themselves and snatching innocent bystanders off the street into unmarked vans.
Well, that was an unholy mess. Donald Trump came in planning to do
nothing but try to drag Joe Biden down to his level and turn everyone
watching off of voting at all, and he worked harder at it than he’s
probably worked at anything in the last four years.
Moderator Chris Wallace fought to get Trump under control, but
couldn’t succeed for more than about two minutes at a time in the face
of Trump’s relentless barrage of lies, insults, and petulance. At times
the debate devolved into Trump arguing with Wallace, the moderator, with
Wallace looking and sounding very irritated at times. Since Wallace is a
Fox News host, it's an interesting question how that will have come off
for Trump’s base, which presumably couldn’t reflexively dismiss Wallace
as hostile fake news.
The moderators of the next two debates must truly have been
despairing as they watched. Either that or putting in calls demanding a
mute button they could personally control on the candidates’
microphones.
Biden, for his part, had a series of strong moments when he turned
his focus to the camera and addressed viewers directly on issues like
health care, COVID-19, and the economy. And he did well with incredulous
facial expressions and disbelieving laughter, as well as a few times
when he spoke for us all by, for instance, saying “Will you shut up, man?”
For sure Biden outperformed the low low expectations Trump spent
months setting up for him, at least before Trump realized the problem
and started screaming about drug tests. In the few moments Wallace got
Trump under control enough for brief moments in which Biden could
answer, he was disciplined, empathetic, and generally on message.
If Biden also too often took the bait and responded to Trump’s
taunts, getting dragged into petty crosstalk where the only winner could
be the guy who wants people disgusted with the whole process—and he
did—it’s hard to imagine how any of us would have done in the face of
this nonstop verbal assault. Biden will need to develop almost
superhuman restraint for the next debates.
What this debate made clear, though, is that there should not be any
more presidential debates in 2020. Donald Trump’s only plan is to make
these as ugly as he can, to make voters loathe the political process and
be more likely to fall for his attempts to delegitimize the elections.
This night was bad for the United States and bad for democracy and we
shouldn’t allow it to be repeated.
Sooooo big! Your president demonstrates how much money he saved by not paying taxes. How much did you save by cheating your government? Me too. (photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images)
Americans paid for Trump’s $73m tax refund – and he’s laughing all the way to the bank
ell, now we know why Donald Trump didn’t want the public to see his tax returns.
A New York Times investigation
looking at years of previously undisclosed documents found that Trump
used countless maneuvers to avoid having to pay federal income tax. He
ended up paying $750 total in 2016 despite hundreds of millions of
dollars in income from The Apprentice and his various companies and
licensing arrangements. Many years he paid nothing at all, and even
received an income tax refund of $72.9m, which included millions in
interest, straight from the federal treasury to Trump’s pocket.
The New York Times paints a picture of an elaborate
shell game in which losses from some of his companies are used to wipe
out tax liabilities elsewhere. It is not always clear how much of his
“losses” are real losses rather than creative accounting, but the Times
suggests that Trump may be both living large on hundreds of millions in
annual income and overseeing distressed and unprofitable businesses.
We had known some of this already. Trump had admitted publicly
that he used a $916m loss reported on his 1995 tax return to avoid
paying any federal income tax for years. Trump’s former attorney Michael
Cohen testified last year that he remembered Trump “showing him a huge
check from the US Treasury some years earlier” and commenting “that he
could not believe how stupid the government was for giving someone like
him that much money back”. But now we have stark confirmation of the
facts: Trump is a billionaire who doesn’t pay his taxes, leaving the
financial responsibility for funding the government to ordinary working
people. It’s a national disgrace.
Trump will, of course, spin all of this as simply
sound business practice. He has previously said that tax avoidance makes
him “smart”, and that he is simply taking advantage of perfectly legal
and legitimate loopholes. Indeed, some Americans might be inclined to
see it the same way. Everyone gets to pay as little in tax as they can
get away with under the law, if Trump has found a way to pay nothing,
that’s a problem with the system rather than with him.
There are a few reasons why we shouldn’t dismiss it like this, though.
First, the New York Times not only showed that Trump
didn’t pay taxes, but it also revealed that some of the methods he used
may have bordered on the criminal. The usual distinction made between
“tax avoidance” (legal) and “tax evasion” (illegal) is murky in Trump’s
case, and the Times reports that the IRS has been looking into his
questionable refund and the New York attorney general has been
investigating whether he inflated land appraisals to increase his
deductions. In his returns, there are allegedly questionable
“consulting” fees that seem to have been paid to his children and then
claimed as business expenses, thus reducing his liability. Much of
Trump’s lavish lifestyle is treated as a business expense. This is easy
to claim, since much of his “business” consists of “being Donald Trump”.
So he wrote off $70,000 of hairstyling as a business expense. If he is
selling a brand, and the brand is “hedonistic self-indulgence”, then, as
the Times put it, “everything that feeds the image … can be written
off.”
A particularly egregious instance of bending the law
stands out. In 1996, Trump bought a 50,000 sq ft historic mansion in
Westchester county, which is surrounded by nature preserves. Trump
threatened to develop the property and the people in surrounding towns
objected, so instead he agreed not to develop it in exchange for a
“$21.1m charitable tax deduction” for land preservation. Trump then
classified the mansion as an investment rather than a residence so that
he could reduce his property taxes, even though it appears the Trump
family did indeed live in it.
So it may not just be that Trump is a businessman with
unusually shrewd accountants. He might be exactly what he looks like: a
tax cheat. The New York Times reports that most similarly wealthy
people pay far more than Trump in taxes. Hell, I pay far more than Trump
in taxes, and I edit a tiny print magazine. This could be more a case
of fraud than cleverness, even if the law has not yet caught up with
Trump.
It’s true that Trump benefited from a system that
rewards those who can afford the most creative accountants. We obviously
won’t fix the problem by encouraging Donald Trump to feel ashamed of
himself, or even by voting him out of office. But Trump is not a mere
passive beneficiary of a broken set of rules. The billionaires don’t
just exploit the loopholes. They also make them
through pushing for ever-expanding exemptions from the tax burden they
would otherwise pay. In Trump’s case, it is true in the most literal
sense that he made the rules he benefits from. Trump’s major legislative
initiative was a whole new tax cut tilted toward giving wealthy people
like himself even more favorable treatment.
It’s one thing to pay only your legal minimum but understand that the
system is unfair. It’s quite another to be actively trying to make that
system more grotesquely unequal.
Americans should be disgusted that Trump paid sums
ranging from $750 to nothing in federal income taxes. Both his own
behavior and the system that made it possible are outrageous. After all,
when billionaires don’t pay their taxes, the rest of us have to cover
the gaps. When you look at your own tax bill, understand that it could
be lower if super-wealthy people like Trump weren’t trying to shift the
burden onto everyone else. You paid for Trump’s $73m tax refund and he’s
laughing all the way to the bank.
The Times investigation shows us both a system that is
corrupted and the way the president has made every sketchy maneuver
possible to avoid contributing to the public good. Anyone who believes
the rich should pay their fair share should realize that the situation
will only grow worse so long as Trump holds power.
My tax returns are beautiful, so why do you need to see them?
The media love their political horse races, which is why an eminently
qualified Democratic candidate managed to lose the presidency to a
surly, KFC-besotted yam in 2016.
Of course, this year’s presidential election isn’t so much a horse
race as a Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome death match to determine whether we
devolve further into an apocalyptic hellscape or manage to claw back
some simulacrum of normal.
“Get rid of the ballots” and “there won’t be a transfer,” said Donald
Trump on Wednesday. This comment is a direct and dangerous expression
of his anti-democratic intention. If unstopped, Trump may well destroy
our 244-year-old democracy.
It is time to stop pulling punches. It is time to stop relying on
political pundits to weigh in on Trump’s behavior, which they often
soften and even normalize.
Preach!
The whole column is worth a gander, but this portion, where the duo
delineates Trump’s numerous, shall we say “faults,” is particularly
salient:
This isn’t a normal election. This is, as the authors note, a fight
for the future of our democracy — something we’ve always taken for
granted, even in our darkest hours.
I know Joe Biden never asked for this, but it’s up to him to save the
republic, even as Trump continues to cross the Rubes-he-cons.
Knowing that Trump believes in nothing except himself, you have to wonder if he chose Amy because she's a cute li'l thing like his obviously untalented press secretary. But Donald, who's going to write her payoff check now that you don't have Cohen around to do your bidding?
Maybe you never wondered if there was a brand of religious zealotry
out there that includes all the secretive ultra-conservative Catholicism
of Opus Dei, then slathers on the anti-rationality, ready condemnation,
and baked-in misogyny of extreme fundamentalist evangelicism. It
doesn’t matter if you’ve thought about this worst-of-both-worlds stew,
because exactly that combination seems set to remold American law for a
generation or more.
With multiple news organizations reporting that on Saturday, Donald
Trump will officially name 48-year-old Amy Coney Barrett as his
replacement for the seat of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, it’s worth
noting that Barrett is a lifelong member of “People of Praise.” This
group, springing from a Catholic charismatic movement of the 1970s which
seemed intent on capturing the energy Catholics saw in the surging
fundamentalist movement, has, among other things, a very strict view of
gender roles. Not only does this include refusing to allow women to hold
positions of leadership in the church, it strictly confines the role of
women in the workplace and the home. And it called women who do things
correctly “handmaids.”
No, despite what’s been cited elsewhere, Canadian author Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale
was not a source of inspiration for the People of Praise. That would be
difficult, since Atwood didn’t write her book until 1985. People of
Praise coined their use of handmaid in 1971. There also appears to be
little evidence that inspiration ran the other way. After all, People of
Praise does not engage in abusive sexual slavery, and does not
preach that men own women. That doesn’t mean that what it does believe
still can’t be toxic when taken to extremes.
To be fair, it appears that Atwood got her use of the term handmaid from another Catholic
charismatic spin off group, called People of Hope, which sprang up
at around the same time as People of Praise. People of Praise is aware
that handmaid has become a loaded term. Several years ago, the
terminology was changed to the phrase “woman leader.” Note that this is
explicitly not simply “leader,” because decisions of consequence remain
strictly the role of men. However, strong women leaders can advise and
instruct other women on “womanly affairs.” Within the not-a-church, the
organization retains a strict patriarchal hierarchy that combines the
worst aspects of excluding women built into the traditional Catholic
Church, and layers on ideas of groups like Promise Keepers about the
“Biblically defined roles” of men and women. Husbands are regarded as
both the “head of the household” and the “spiritual head” of their
wives.
All of this may seem incompatible with the whole idea of a woman as a
judge, much less as a Supreme Court justice. Which makes it somewhat
understandable that people are confused … and that “Republic of Gilead”
has been trending.
Barrett brings this same sort of strict fundamentalist approach to
her interpretation of law. She considers herself an “originalist,” going
even further than Antonin Scalia in insisting that the only
interpretation that is possible, is one based on the intentions of the
Constitutional authors. The idea that the world might have changed over
the last two and a half centuries, and specifically that our
understanding of the role of women, and of human rights in general,
might be somewhat better than that of a group of 18th century
slave-holders who denied women a voice or a vote does not concern
Barrett. She has written about this extensively and unapologetically.
How far does she take this? Far enough that one of her concerns is
the “legitimacy of the Fourteenth Amendment.” That’s right. Amy Coney
Barrett is such an originalist, that she ready to throw out
Constitutional amendments. Including the one that defines all people as
equal when it comes to allocating representatives and prevents states
from reimposing slavery. The amendment that is the foundation of
essentially all Civil Rights legislation, Barrett refers to as
“the possibly illegitimate Fourteenth Amendment.” This is who she is.
On the other hand, Barrett’s originalism is also open to being shaped
by precedents … so long as she likes them. In her extensive writing,
Barrett has called some past decisions “super precedents,”
suggesting that the Court can treat them with reverence similar to that
of the Constitution. But the definition of super precedent seems to be
confined to those decisions which Barrett believes are worth
preserving. As the L.A. Times
noted the first time Barrett’s name made the short list of possible
Court nominees, she has made it clear that she believes Roe to be “an erroneous decision.”
But, devastating to the lives and safety of American women as
overturning Roe might be, it’s far from the limits of what Barrett might
do in a long career on the courts. She has opposed marriage equality, explicitly said that transgender women (who she refers to as “physiological males”) are excluded from Title IX protections, and given at least tacit support to segregation.
When Amy Coney Barrett comes before the Senate for questioning, Roe
is certain to be one of the questions that … she refuses to answer. But
it shouldn’t be the only one asked. She should be asked about Civil
Rights, about transgender rights, about marriage equality, and about the
$@#%ing 14th Amendment. Barrett isn’t just an self-defined origalist,
she’s an extremist whose social and legal believes are far outside the American mainstream. Democrats must do everything they can to define her, before she defines us.
"Hey Billy, I need another favor. Could you write out a check to Amy and leave the amount blank? I got a feeling about that girl. In fact, if she were my daughter I'd probably be dating her."
In just the last three days, Donald Trump has refused to confirm that
he would submit to a peaceful transfer of power, stated that we should
just “throw out the ballots” so that instead of a transfer he could just
stay in control, and continued to claim that the election is being
rigged against him. Even though the White House has issued statements
saying that Trump would go along with a “free and fair election,”
they’ve been accompanied by claims that the election is not fair.
Reassurance level = zero.
It’s now clear that reporters aren’t the only ones fretting over
whether or not Trump will leave the White House voluntarily. Joe Biden
may say that Trump will be “escorted out” if he fails to leave following
his defeat. But just who will do the escorting? Trump and Attorney
General William Barr have already demonstrated they can militarize the
Border Patrol, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the Marshals
Service, the Department of Prisons, and even the Park Police to
distribute violence and construct rings of isolation between Trump and
the people. So what about the actual military?
For months, military officials have been publicly scoffing at the
whole idea that they could be entangled in removing—or defending—an
executive who clung to power despite being defeated at the polls. But
privately, they are worried. Senior Pentagon leadership has
been asking themselves what they should do if a defeated Trump fails to
exit stage far-right. And what they should do if Trump cites the
Insurrection Act and orders them to put a final bullet through
democracy.
As The New York Times
makes clear, Trump’s efforts to pre-invalidate the election are
increasing. While Republicans in Congress may be putting up a pretense
of reassuring voters both about election integrity and the peaceful
handover of power, that’s not what Trump supporters are hearing. Trump,
his surrogates, and right-wing media are all spreading the message that
the election is already being corrupted by an effort to
manufacture Democratic votes and discard Trump ballots. Feeding this
fantasy is exactly why Trump is playing up a minor incident in
Pennsylvania in which a handful of spoiled ballots were discarded.
Trump’s sales technique is not subtle. The things that Trump wants
people to believe, he repeats over and over and over. And at the top of
Trump’s playlist right now are claims that the election is rigged, the
election is rigged, the election … and so forth.
What Trump supporters are hearing is that the polls are a lie, posted
by the fake news Trump has spent four years demeaning. The real polls,
Trump insists, have him so far ahead that the only way he can possibly
lose is if the election is a “big scam.” He is repeating, on every
television appearance, and at every rally, that the election is not
fair. That it’s not honest. And he’s told his supporters there is only
one way to tell if the election was real—if he wins. If Trump loses,
he’s already told his rally goers that this means the election is a
scam.
The reason Trump is doing this is simple enough: He knows he is extremely likely
to lose. Yes, it’s sill over a month until the election, strange things
happen, the public is fickle, Biden could fall off the debate stage.
Both candidates are in their 70s in a nation where a pandemic disease
has killed over 100,000 people in that age group alone—thanks to one of
those candidates. But the polls, which Trump reads obsessively, have Biden ahead by a margin that is extremely significant, if not insurmountable.
Trump is preparing to lose. Trump is planning to hold onto power. Both those things are true.
As the Times reports,
the Pentagon has reason to worry. The 200-year-old Insurrection Act
would enable Trump to send active-duty military troops into states under
the claim of putting down riots and “quelling disturbances.” It would
not matter what state or local officials had to say. Troops might be
sent into states in advance of elections under the pretense that they
were needed to control “Democrat cities” where anarchists are running
riot. They might be sent in to suppress protests following an election
where Trump declares victory regardless of the vote. They might be
deployed around the White House in January to make sure that only Trump
is present to drop his hand onto John Roberts’ Bible.
The rarely used Insurrection Act absolutely provides this power, but
what would the military do if called on to either suppress voters before
the election or crush democracy in the wake of a Trump defeat? Several
top officials seem ready to resign rather than carry out such an order,
including Air Force Chief of Staff Charles Brown. But even if all of the
top brass stormed out, leaving behind angry letters, Trump could, and
would, replace them immediately. Then what?
Just as epidemiologists simulated the pandemic months before it
arrived, a group of national security and military experts called the Transition Integrity Project have already gamed out what comes next. Their report makes
for terrifying reading. As they point out, Trump has repeatedly
justified his actions for political reasons, and either ignored the law
completely or let his assistants produce some legal rationale after the
fact. And while the nation mourns Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, much
concern has focused on the role the Supreme Court could play in the
upcoming election, and there are even darker possibilities.
“A close and contested election may be resolved through the exercise of power, not through the courts.”
The experts involved in simulating the election assumed that Trump
will use the Department of Justice (DOJ) to launch repeated
investigations of elections and officials in states he did not win,
demand recounts in those states, and continue a coordinated effort to
demean the outcome. Trump could insist that the DOJ was finding major
issues with voter fraud and possibly even order Barr to arrest anyone
attempting to count ballots after the close of the polls. He might
pressure Republican officials to immediately certify states before all
votes are tallied, or refuse to certify states where Trump is losing.
And he could encourage supporters—including armed supporters—to harass
election officials at state and local levels while continuing to
complain that it is really Biden who is trying to start “a revolution”
or “antifa coup.”
During the simulations, the Democratic team was not idle. The
simulated Biden campaign worked to obtain statements from bipartisan
official supporting the election, even securing a statement from all
living presidents to denounce Trump’s efforts to weaken faith in
elections. They called on Republican leaders to join a “National Day of
Unity” and eventually called a general strike in an effort to pressure
business leaders for support. The effect of all these efforts was
… limited.
The biggest thing to come from the simulated outcomes is that this can’t wait until
Election Day. Democrats should assume there will be a contested
election and plan for that eventuality now. In an actual crisis, “events
will unfold quickly.” Biden and other political leaders, coming off
days of hard campaigning and a long night of watching results, won’t be
in a position to make snap decisions. All the options, and responses,
need to be well-planned in advanced so that no one is trying to think
through a complex response at 3 AM. Democrats also need to understand
that this is both a legal battle and a political battle. Messaging and
presence could mean as much as paperwork piling up in courts—and both
should be prepared in advance.
Biden is extremely likely to win the election. But that’s not the
same as wresting power away from Trump. As much planning needs to go
into how to handle a hostile transition as is going into securing votes
in the election. It shouldn’t be that way, but then nothing in 2020
should be this way.
The very last thing those who value our democracy should do is underestimate the evil that these two creatures are capable of. Remember, if Trump leaves office, he will end up in jail for his shady financial dealings. He will do anything - anything - to keep that from happening.
“Well, we're going to have to see what happens," Trump said
when first asked if he would “commit here today for a peaceful
transferral of power after the November election.” He continued, "You
know that I've been complaining very strongly about the ballots, and the
ballots are a disaster.” But it’s when the reporter, Brian Karem of Playboy magazine, pressed again, that Trump really laid it out.
“Get rid of the ballots and you’ll have a very peaceful—there won’t be a transfer, frankly. There will be a continuation.”
Get rid of the ballots. As in, throw out the votes. There won’t be a
transfer. That’s the plan. Win or lose, Trump plans to find a way to
stay. In the past, we’ve been lectured about whether to take Trump
literally or seriously. In this case, the answer is both, but either one
would be a terrifying move to authoritarian dictatorship.
Getting rid of the ballots isn’t the only component of Trump’s plan to steal the election. The Trump campaign is also looking into using state legislatures to overturn results by selecting electors who will support Trump despite the voters choosing Biden. And of course Trump has already conducted test runs of state violence against protesters.
Once again, like the villain in a bad movie, Trump is pausing in the
middle of his nefarious plan to explain the nefarious plan. Even though
he’s not telling us anything we couldn’t have guessed he was thinking,
the fact that he’s saying it is significant—a true emergency for
democracy, already.
“Even if meant to distract, these are powerful words to come
from a president,” Princeton University historian Julian Zelizer told The New York Times. “He’s clearly accelerating his effort to set up a challenge to an outcome that is unfavorable to him.”
That means the fight back needs to accelerate as well. The
absolute first line of defense is for Joe Biden to win big. Huge. Way,
way past the margin of cheating. The second line of defense is a robust legal effort,
of the kind the Biden campaign has already set up, to protect the
election results not just from normal voter suppression but from all of
the Trump campaign’s more, uh, creative(ly illegal) attempts to steal
the election. State election officials who don’t want to enable the
theft of an election need to be ready to protect their ballots and their
counting process.
Added to that, the media needs to get very serious about what’s
going on. As Trump has ratcheted up the election-stealing talk, there’s
been a rash of tweeted complaints from national political reporters
about how Biden and Sen. Kamala Harris aren’t doing enough interviews
with them, and how Biden is sometimes late for events. Reporters need to
grapple with this reality: no more petty both-sidesing complaints about
access and timing. Instead, a serious and literal focus on what Trump is signaling—and sometimes flat-out telling us—about his plans.
As for the rest of us, alongside working to deliver that huge,
beyond-the-margin-of-cheating election victory, we need to be ready to
be in the streets. There needs to be a massive response ready in the
fight for democracy.
According to interviews with more than two dozen current and former
officials in the Trump administration, Donald Trump’s behavior in
private is … exactly what you might expect, as reported by Greg Miller of The Washington Post.
In unguarded moments with senior aides, President Trump has
maintained that Black Americans have mainly themselves to blame in their
struggle for equality, hindered more by lack of initiative than
societal impediments, according to current and former U.S. officials.
After phone calls with Jewish lawmakers, Trump has muttered that Jews
“are only in it for themselves” and “stick together” in an ethnic
allegiance that exceeds other loyalties, officials said.
Trump’s private musings about Hispanics match the vitriol he has
displayed in public, and his antipathy to Africa is so ingrained that
when first lady Melania Trump planned a 2018 trip to that continent he
railed that he “could never understand why she would want to go there.
As Miller’s article points out, Trump isn’t the first racist
president we’ve ever had. He is, however, the first incumbent president
in living memory who has explicitly made racism the cornerstone of not
only his tenure in office but his reelection campaign, as well.
As Masha Gessen wrote in her now-famous essay on autocracy: “Believe the autocrat. He means what he says.”
Whenever you find yourself thinking, or hear others claiming, that he
is exaggerating, that is our innate tendency to reach for a
rationalization. This will happen often: humans seem to have evolved to
practice denial when confronted publicly with the unacceptable. Back in
the 1930s, The New York Times assured its readers that Hitler’s anti-Semitism was all posture.
But the outspoken racism of this president and the administration he
controls could never be mistaken for “‘posturing.” As detailed by Ibram
X. Kendi, writing this month in The Atlantic,
racism has been the guidepost of nearly all of Trump’s domestic
policies from day one, with a constant and obvious goal of eliminating
all of the achievements of the nation’s first Black president. As Kendi
describes it, “he would make it seem as if a Black man had never been
president, erasing him from history by repealing and replacing his
signature accomplishments, from the Affordable Care Act to DACA, the
Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy.”
And although Trump has not succeeded (thus far) in completely undoing
the work of President Obama, it isn’t for lack of trying. He has
significantly undermined many of his predecessor’s accomplishments
through deliberate sabotage, stealthy rollbacks, or willful neglect. But it was never enough for Trump to simply repudiate Barack Obama.
His end goal is much more comprehensive and mirrors that of the GOP
as a whole—to protect and preserve a social hierarchy where whites are
always at the top. Through his words and behavior he brought unabashed
racism into the mainstream for millions of Americans, the same ones who
attend his rallies and wear little red hats, the same ones who cheered
as he demonized immigrants during his campaign rallies in 2016. As Kendi
sardonically observes, we should all be thankful for what he has forced
us to recognize about this country and its high-minded pretensions of
equality.
Black Americans—indeed, all Americans—should in one respect be
thankful to him. He has held up a mirror to American society, and it has
reflected back a grotesque image that many people had until now refused
to see: an image not just of the racism still coursing through the
country, but also of the reflex to deny that reality. Though it was
hardly his intention, no president has caused more Americans to stop
denying the existence of racism than Donald Trump.
As Kendi points out, from the time he first declared he would be a
“president to all Americans,” Trump’s term in office has been saturated
through and through with racism.
Within days of being sworn in, Trump broke that promise.
He reversed holds on two oil-pipeline projects, including one through
the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, which was opposed by more than 200
Indigenous nations. He issued executive orders calling for the
construction of a wall along the southern border and the deportation of
individuals who “pose a risk to public safety or national security.” He
enacted his first of three Muslim bans.
By the end of the spring, Attorney General Jeff Sessions had directed
federal prosecutors to seek the harshest prison sentences whenever
possible. Sessions had also laid the groundwork for the suspension of
all the consent decrees that provided federal oversight of
law-enforcement agencies that had demonstrated a pattern of racism.
Led by Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, the administration worked on ways to restrict immigration by people of color.
There was a sense of urgency, because, as Trump said at a private White
House meeting in June 2017, Haitians “all have AIDS” and Nigerians
would never “go back to their huts” once they came to the United States.
With the template in place, Trump’s reaction to the neo-Nazi
murderers marching in Charlottesville, Virginia—that there were “very
fine people” in their ranks—should have surprised no one. His attacks on
women of color, specifically elected Democratic women of color, and his
exhortations that they should “go back to where they came from,” or his
characterization of poor African and Caribbean nations as “shithole”
countries should have been no surprise, either.
With his reelection strategy now dependent on convincing his
lily-white base of committed, racist supporters that they are under dire
threat from protesters and the Black Lives Matter movement, the sad
fact is that it’s hard to imagine how these latest revelations
regarding how Trump actually thinks and speaks in private will make any
difference to anyone at this point.
That’s how far he’s taken this country down.
First it was soldiers who died defending our country; now it's Blacks and Jews.
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resident
Trump did not explicitly condemn white supremacy and right-wing
militias during the debate, despite an invitation from moderator Chris
Wallace, claiming that the “left wing” is more responsible for violence
than the “right wing.” Here’s the question that prompted
Trump’s reaction:
ell, now we know why Donald Trump 
