Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s
Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
President Donald
Trump is a racist and a white supremacist. Even the most progressive media are
tiptoeing about that clear and obvious fact, of which his bizarre reaction to
the August 13 events in Charlottesville, Virginia is only the latest evidence.
There was the launch of his Presidential campaign over two years ago — is it that long that we’ve had to deal with his pestilential
presence at the center of American politics? — with his now-infamous speech
denouncing immigrants from Mexico as criminals, drug dealers and rapists. There
was the pledge to ban all Muslims from coming into the U.S. as soon as he could
find a constitutional and legal pretext for doing so.
There was
Trump’s bizarre insistence that Americans of color aren’t “real” Americans. He
stated that Gonzalo Curiel, the judge in the lawsuits against him by people who
were scammed by his so-called “Trump University,” was “Mexican” even though he
was born in Indiana, and that meant he couldn’t be a fair judge in a case
involving Trump. He said Omar Mateen, the alleged shooter of 49 people at a Gay
bar in Orlando, Florida on June 13, 2016, was “an Afghan” even though he was
born in Queens, New York — just as Trump himself was. (It got even weirder when
Trump said the real people to blame for
the Orlando massacre were the federal immigration officials who had let
Mateen’s Afghan parents into this country.) And of course he spent over five
years, from 2011 to 2016, denouncing then-President Barack Obama as a “Kenyan”
and saying he didn’t meet the constitutional requirement that the President be
“a native-born citizen.”
Trump’s racism
and white supremacism were also evident when he insisted, both before and after
the election, that millions of “illegal” voters were casting ballots against
him — and his repeated statements that he would have won the popular vote
against Hillary Clinton if it weren’t for three to five million “illegal”
votes. Trump’s racist attitudes were evident when he set up his Voter Integrity
Commission, ostensibly to stamp out “election fraud” but really to validate and
extend nationwide the long-term agenda of the Republican Party to keep itself
in power indefinitely by preventing people likely to vote against it — young
people, poor people and especially
people of color — from being able to vote at all.
And Trump’s
racism and white supremacism were values he was, in the words of Oscar
Hammerstein II’s classic song from the 1949 musical South Pacific, “carefully taught” — in his case, by his father,
Fred Trump. In 1927 Fred Trump was one of seven people arrested at a Ku Klux
Klan Memorial Day rally in Queens, New York. In 1950 he was called out by name
by folksinger Woody Guthrie, who had just moved into a Fred Trump-owned
building in New York — and then found himself forced to move out again when he
learned the Trump Organization systematically discriminated against Blacks in
housing rentals. The Trump Organization was sued by the federal government for
housing discrimination at least twice, once when Fred Trump was still in charge
and once after he had handed over the reins to his son Donald.
So it should
have been no surprise when, immediately after Trump’s election, Richard
Spencer, a leader of the so-called “alt-Right” — a movement challenging
traditional conservatives precisely over their refusal openly to embrace racism
and white supremacism — led a rally in Washington, D.C. in which the attendees
shouted, “Hail Trump!” and gave the raised-arm Nazi salute. The rally was part
of a conference that drew such “alt-Right” luminaries as Spencer, Jared Taylor
(who once said the police were justified in racially profiling
African-Americans and law-abiding Blacks should just accept it as the price
they paid for having so many criminal brethren), and Peter Brimelow. (The event
itself and Brimelow’s participation are documented at http://www.thedailybeast.com/white-nationalists-and-nazi-saluting-tila-tequila-toast-emperor-trump-in-washington-dc.)
Peter Brimelow’s
name stuck out to me because I’d encountered him in the 1980’s when he was a
contributing editor to the Right-wing magazine National Review — at least before he became too rabidly “alt-Right”
even for them. He’d written a series of articles denouncing immigration and
calling for drastic cutbacks in documented (so-called “legal”) immigration as well as a hard-line border
enforcement policy against undocumented immigrants. In one of his articles,
which he later collected into a book called Alien Nation, Brimelow said the U.S. needs to impose severe
restrictions on legal immigration to “preserve America’s ethnic mix” — i.e., to
keep the U.S. a white-majority country.
Brimelow was one
of Trump’s advisors on immigration policy during his Presidential campaign, and
on August 2, 2017 (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2017/08/02/trump-gop-senators-to-introduce-bill-to-slash-legal-immigration-levels/?utm_term=.964750435c90n)
Trump appeared at a media event with U.S. Senators Tom Cotton (R-AK) and David
Perdue (R-GA) to announce support for a bill that would drastically reshape
America’s immigration policy in ways similar to those Brimelow had called for
30 years earlier.
In addition to
shrinking the total number of green cards issued each year from 1 million to
500,000, the Trump-Cotton-Perdue-Brimelow immigration plan would shift from an
immigration policy based on family unification to a so-called “merit-based” one
in which prospective immigrants would be allotted preferences based on
education levels, career skills and ability to speak English. It would also cap
the number of refugees admitted to the U.S. at 50,000 and also eliminate a
“visa lottery” that awarded 50,000 green cards per year, mostly to Africans.
Though events
move so quickly during the Trump administration that that immigration policy
announcement has been virtually forgotten, it’s significant as one of the most
obvious ways in which Trump and his alt-Right brethren have sought to put their
ideas into practice as public policy. Though alt-Rightists like Spencer and
former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke have carefully avoided claiming
Trump as one of their own — for one thing, Spencer said after Charlottesville,
Trump does not believe in “identitarianism,” the loony-tunes belief of the
so-called “Christian Identity” churches that Jesus Christ was Aryan and the
Aryans, not the Jews, are God’s chosen people — they have hailed him as an
“American nationalist” and a leader who will bring new publicity and new
adherents to their ideas.
Spencer’s Latest
Hatestock
It was Richard
Spencer, mastermind of the neo-Nazi rally celebrating Trump’s election back in
November 2016, who also was the principal organizer of the Hatestock in
Charlottesville. He issued the call under the name “Unite the Right,” obviously
hoping that more traditional conservatives could be lured to march with him and
accept his Darth Vader-like invitation to move over to the Dark Side of the
Right. The ostensible purpose of his rally was to protest the decision by the
Charlottesville city government to take down a statue of General Robert E. Lee,
commander in chief of the Confederate armies during the Civil War and thereby
the leader of the military campaign to preserve slavery, from a city park and
remove Lee’s name from the park, renaming it “Emancipation Park.”
The
Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally drew the typical sorts of people who
show up for these things, a batch of young and some not-so-young white men (if
there were any women involved I haven’t seen them in the TV clips, but then
America’s neo-Nazis reproduce the original Nazis’ sexism as faithfully as they
reproduce their racism). Some of them looked robust and reasonably attractive,
but most were such twerps that I suspect if Leni Riefenstahl, director of the
original Nazis’ infamous propaganda film Triumph of the Will, had seen them, she’d have thrown up her hands in
despair and said, “I’m supposed to make them look like a master race?”
Later President
Trump would say that most of the people who showed up for the “Unite the Right”
rally in Charlottesville weren’t neo-Nazis or racists but simply people
defending the statue of Robert E. Lee against historical revisionism. But
anyone who showed up for the event with that relatively benign an idea of its
agenda should have been disabused quickly. In addition to a smattering of U.S.
flags, the participants carried Confederate flags, Nazi German flags and banners
containing the “Vanguard” logo and other insignia of American neo-Nazi and
skinhead groups. They marched with cheap tiki torches in a pathetic D.I.Y.
attempt to mimic the dramatic torchlight processions of the original Nazis
Riefenstahl had so powerfully filmed in Triumph of the Will. What’s more, the attitude of the participants in
“Unite the Right” wasn’t that of a bunch of peaceful protesters out merely to
petition their city government to keep Robert Lee’s statue and name in that
park. Many of them came armed, and it’s clear from the video footage that even
those who didn’t were spoiling for a fight, anxious to draw out Left-wing
counter-protesters whom they could bully and assault.
And, tragically,
progressives, Leftists and just plain decent Americans took their bait. If
there’s one lesson I hope the Left comes away with from Charlottesville, it’s
that we need to rethink the ways in which we respond to and confront the
hate-filled calls of Richard Spencer and other alt-Rightists. Next time Spencer
calls one of his Hatestocks, I’d like the Left either to ignore him completely
— let his event drown in an under-attended wake of idiots spouting rhetoric
whose insanity is equaled only by its inanity — or organize, not a counter-demonstration at the site of the alt-Right
action, but an event of our own at a different venue in the same community. The
energies of progressives and Leftists in Charlottesville would better have been
spent organizing a giant teach-in with speakers hailing the virtues of racial
equality and diversity, and offering some badly needed history lessons in what
the Civil War was really about
and why Robert E. Lee is not a fit person to be honored anywhere in the U.S. in
2017.
Instead, the
Left took to the streets and gave Spencer’s alt-Rightists exactly what they
wanted — an enemy they could confront, yell at, swing blunt instruments at and,
in one tragic incident, run down and kill with a car. A 20-year-old “Unite the
Right” participant named James Alex Fields, Jr. is accused of turning his car
into a crowd of anti-Right protesters in Charlottesville, killing 32-year-old
Heather Heyer and injuring 19 others. The alleged assailant was driving a Dodge
Challenger — itself an iconic car for U.S. Confederate sympathizers thanks to
its appearance on the 1980’s TV series The Dukes of Hazzard, whose lead characters not only drove a Dodge
Challenger but painted it in Confederate colors and actually called it the
“General Lee”!
Heather Heyer
became one of those people you’ve never heard of until after their death but
who seems so nice, warm, loving and committed to noble ideals you wish you’d
have had the chance to meet her. Her mother appeared on TV with a grief-ridden
statement so moving even President Trump found words to praise it, saying
essentially that the last thing Heather would have wanted was for her death to
bring more hate into the world, and calling on the people of America to sow
love where there is hate and honor her daughter by healing and bridging the
gaps between races.
The [N]ever-Changing
Trump
And what did
President Donald Trump have to say about Charlottesville? Therein hangs a tale.
He first spoke about it on August 13, when the bodies were almost literally
still warm. He read from a prepared text and said, “We
condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred,
bigotry and violence.” So far, so good, you might say — but then Trump went off
script and added, “On many sides — on many sides,” seemingly equating the
neo-Nazis and neo-Confederates who had taken to the streets in Charlottesville
to spew racial hatred, bigotry and white supremacy with the courageous, if
arguably ill-advised, progressive, Leftists and decent Americans who had put
their own lives on the line (and, in one case, lost hers) to stand against
them.
Trump’s odd remarks drew a firestorm of criticism not only
from the people you’d expect — Democratic Congressmembers and leaders of
civil-liberties and civil-rights organizations — but from some you wouldn’t.
Perhaps the most moving denunciation of Trump came from Senator Orrin Hatch
(R-UT), who tweeted, “We should call evil by its name. My brother didn’t give
his life fighting Hitler for Nazi ideas to go unchallenged here at home.”
Lindsey Graham, another Republican Senator — and one from
the birthplace of the Confederacy, South Carolina — said, “These
[‘alt-Right’] groups seem to believe they have a friend in Donald Trump in the
White House. I don’t know why they believe that, but they don’t see me as a
friend in the Senate, and I would urge the president to dissuade these groups
that he’s their friend.”
Two days after
his initial comments, on Monday, August 15, Trump appeared to backtrack from
his initial statement blaming “many sides” for the violence in Charlottesville.
“Racism is evil and those who cause violence in its name are criminals and
thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis and white supremacists,” he said that time.
But he read it off a Teleprompter and said it in such a flat, affect-less way a
lot of Americans wondered if he really meant it. Actor Bryan Cranston joked
that Trump looked like he was “making a hostage tape” in that video — i.e.,
reading a statement he didn’t believe in because he was being held captive and
forced to do so under the threat of torture.
Just one day
later, on Tuesday, August 16, Trump gave a wild and woolly press conference
outside his Trump Tower building in New York City in which he made clear he didn’t believe the hostage tape he’d made the day before.
In addition to lashing out again and again at some of his favorite targets,
including the “fake news” media and Senator John McCain (R-AZ) — who had had to
make actual hostage tapes during his 5 ½ years in captivity as a prisoner of
war in North Viet Nam (and who famously blinked his eyes in Morse Code to let the
world know what he really
believed as opposed to what his captors were making him say) — he backtracked
on his backtrack and once again let the world see his racist, white supremacist
id.
Trump began his
August 16 press conference by saying he hadn’t made a full statement about
Charlottesville until the previous day because he was still trying to make sure
what the facts were so his statement would be accurate. That in itself was
pretty hilarious given how free-wheeling he’s been with accusations against his
real or perceived political enemies. As Stephen Colbert joked that night on his
talk show, “‘I wait for the facts,’ okay? Just ask
the millions of illegal voters who refused to look for Obama's birth
certificate during my record-breaking inauguration, okay? It's all on the Obama
wiretaps.”
Then it got worse. Trump wouldn’t refer to the murder of
Heather Heyer as an act of terrorism, even though he’d been scathing during his
campaign against Obama and Hillary Clinton for refusing to call attacks committed
by Muslims “radical Islamic terrorism.” He insisted that the anti-Right
protesters in Charlottesville had included people he called “alt-Left,”
anarchist “Black Bloc” members who, Trump said, actually started the violence.
“What about the fact they came charging, that they came charging with clubs in
their hands, swinging clubs?” Trump said. “Do they have any problem? I think
they do. … [Y]ou had a group on one side that was bad, and you had a group on
the other side that was also very
violent. And nobody wants to say that, but I’ll say it right now. You had a
group on the other side that came charging in, without a permit, and they were
very, very violent.”
Frankly, as a progressive American committed to values of
economic and social equality, civil liberties and racial justice, I’ve long
wished the “Black Bloc” would just go away. I’ve had long conversations with
thoughtful anarchists who on occasion have gone in “Black Bloc” drag and
participated in demonstrations, but done so responsibly and non-violently. But
I have nothing but contempt for the “Black Bloc” activists in Berkeley and
elsewhere who have raised chants like, “No free speech for racists!” and
threatened violence at such intense levels that Right-wing speakers like Ann
Coulter and Milo Yiannopoulos have been prevented from speaking. Not only is
this morally wrong — the way to answer hate speech is with just speech, not to
shut down the hate speakers — it’s also politically dumb. It allows the Right
to portray themselves as innocent victims being shouted down by all those big,
bad, horrible Leftists.
But that’s not what happened in Charlottesville. It was the
Right who came spoiling for a confrontation. It was the Right who came armed,
not with clubs but with guns. It was the Right who drew blood. And they did so
not in the name of a reasoned ideology — not even in the name of the modern-day
American Republican Party’s platform of lassiez-faire Libertarianism in the economy and a Big Brother-ish
government micro-managing people’s social lives in general and their sex lives
in particular — but under banners originally raised in defense of slavery and
genocide.
And once again, America’s mainstream Right joined its
progressive Left in protest against Trump’s seeming endorsement of
“alt-Rightists” and their cause. “To understand the significance of Trump’s
words, you have to understand a bit about the alt-Right,” said National
Review contributor David French. “While
its members certainly march with Nazis and make common cause with
neo-Confederates, it views itself as something different. They’re the
‘intellectual’ adherents to white identity politics. They believe their
movement is substantially different and more serious than the Klansmen of days
past. When Trump carves them away from the Nazis and distinguishes
them from the neo-Confederates, he’s doing exactly what they want.
He’s making them respectable. He’s making
them different. But ‘very fine people’ don’t march with tiki torches
chanting ‘blood and soil’ or ‘Jews will not replace us.’”
In 1964, when the Ku Klux Klan offered Republican
Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater their endorsement, largely because of
his vote as a U.S. Senator against the landmark Civil Rights Act that year,
Goldwater forthrightly and angrily said that he wanted no part of the Klan or
their support. By contrast, when former Klan Grand Wizard David Duke endorsed
Trump in 2016, Trump gave at best a tepid criticism of him and continued to
nudge-nudge, wink-wink towards him and the rest of the racist,
white-supremacist Right the way he did on August 15 with his most recent
remarks on Charlottesville. And Duke repaid Trump’s tacit support with active
praise, sending out a tweet which read, “Thank you President Trump for your
honesty & courage to tell the truth about #Charlottesville & condemn
the leftist terrorists in BLM/Antifa.” [BLM stands for “Black Lives Matter” and
“Antifa” is a loose-knit coalition of Left-wing anarchists who stage
demonstrations against Right-wing groups and events they consider fascist.]
Being Trump Means
Never Having to Say You’re Sorry
One of the most eternally fascinating things about Donald
Trump is his utter unwillingness ever to admit he has been wrong or even made a
mistake about anything. In the July 25, 2016 issue of The New Yorker (http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/25/donald-trumps-ghostwriter-tells-all), Tony Schwartz, ghost writer of Trump’s best-selling
“autobiography” The Art of the Deal,
said of Trump, “Lying is second nature to
him. More than anyone else I have ever met, Trump has the ability to convince
himself that whatever he is saying at any given moment is true, or sort of
true, or at least ought to be true.”
That’s why absolutely none of the attempts by people who
had Trump’s ear — or thought they did — to restrain him, to counter his worst
impulses, to turn the energy and drive that are his most obvious positive
qualities towards good things for the nation, or even good things for the
Republican Party and the economic Libertarian/social conservative agenda for
which it stands, have failed, The Washington Post just reported (https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trumps-lack-of-discipline-leaves-new-chief-of-staff-frustrated-and-dismayed/2017/08/16/9aec8e16-82b8-11e7-82a4-920da1aeb507_story.html?utm_term=.75a0388e8261)
that retired General John Kelly, who just moved over from being Secretary of
Homeland Security to chief of Trump’s White House staff, has become the latest
appointee frustrated by his inability to corral Trump and steer him away from
his worst impulses.
According to Post reporters Ashley Parker and Robert Costa, Trump’s
moral equivocation about Charlottesville “left Kelly
deeply frustrated and dismayed just over two weeks into his job, said people
familiar with his thinking. The episode also underscored the difficult
challenges that even a four-star general faces in instilling a sense of order
around Trump, whose first instinct when cornered is to lash out, even
self-destructively.”
But John Kelly
is still working for President Trump. So is Gary Cohn, Trump’s economic
adviser, who had to listen to Trump’s tirade on Charlottesville up close on
August 16 and, as a Jew, felt incredibly uncomfortable with his boss’s tacit
endorsement of neo-Nazis. “Those close to Cohn described him
as ‘disgusted’ and ‘frantically unhappy,’ although he did not
threaten to resign,” Post reporters
Parker and Costa wrote in the above-cited article. “But Trump felt vindicated
after the remarks, said people familiar with his thinking. He believes that his
base agrees with his assertion that both sides are guilty of violence and that
the nation risks sliding into a cauldron of political correctness.”
One of my hopes
that Trump’s Presidency wouldn’t be as bad as he’d made it sound like it was
going to be during his campaign was the belief that somehow or other, fellow
members of America’s ultra-rich elite would be able to talk sense into him.
Surely, I thought, when Trump tried to do anything particularly damaging to the
economy, some of his fellow 0.01-percenters would reach out to him and say,
“You realize how much money this is going to cost us? You realize how much
money this is going to cost you?” But so
far it hasn’t worked out that way; despite the consensus among quite a few
American CEO’s — even those running fossil-fuel companies — that America should stay in the Paris climate
agreement, Trump pulled us out of it with a grandiose pseudo-populist statement
that he was elected “to represent Pittsburgh, not Paris.”
The latest
failure of Trump’s corporate brethren to corral him started on Tuesday when Ken Frazier, CEO of Merck, abruptly stepped down from one
of the advisory groups Trump had set up to get CEO’s involved in his
administration. Though one of the groups hadn’t met at all and the other had
been little more than an opportunity for photo ops, Frazier, who is Black,
announced he could no longer serve on Trump’s Manufacturing Jobs Initiative
after Trump’s Charlottesville comments. Trump lashed out at Frazier, saying
that the CEO of Merck should be working harder at lowering drug prices than
criticizing him. Significantly, he did not similarly attack the next two CEO’s who got off the Initiative, those
from Intel and Under Armour, who happened to be white.
Within the next
two days, CEO’s on the Manufacturing Jobs Initiative and Trump’s other business
advisory group, the Strategic and Policy Forum, were conference-calling each
other debating whether they should all resign from those groups en masse or go even further and call for the groups to be
disbanded. Somehow, Trump got word of this and responded by sending out a tweet
unilaterally abolishing both groups himself. “Rather than putting pressure on the businesspeople
of the Manufacturing Council & Strategy & Policy Forum, I am ending
both,” Trump tweeted. “Thank you all!” The President of the United States
sounded for all the world like a grade-school kid who, not liking the way the
other children were playing with his football, decided to take it and go home.
The message is coming through loud and clear: Donald
Trump doesn’t care what you think of him.
Donald Trump doesn’t care what anybody
thinks of him. As long as he can count on a hard core of support in the South
and the Rust Belt — the core that elected him President in the first place even
though he lost the popular vote — he is convinced he can win re-election in
2020 as a minority president just as he got elected in 2016 as a minority
president. And even though Trump’s actual policies, including a health care
bill that would have eviscerated Medicaid, slashed funding for substance-abuse
treatment and thrown between 16 and 32 millions of Americans out of access to
health insurance, and a so-called “tax reform” likely to benefit only the rich,
hurt his base voters, they nonetheless are staying with him.
They’re staying with him less because of anything he does
than the attitude he projects. Donald Trump has won the undying affection of a
great swath of American voters by standing up for the attitude that America is,
always was and always will be a nation run of, by and for white, straight,
cisgender males who own guns, eat meat and get their energy from “manly”
digging or drilling for fossil fuels, not from “feminine” sources like solar or
wind. To Trump’s voters, the ideas that whites are superior to people of color,
men superior to women, straights superior to Queers, and Transgender people are
“confused” and therefore don’t belong in the military are utter, unimpeachable
truths, beyond debate and questioned only by malevolent losers who want to ruin
America.
The United States is facing the same crossroads Russia
faced in 1917 (and again in 2000), Italy in 1922, Germany in 1933, China in
1949, Cuba in 1959 and Venezuela in 1999. A dictatorial leader with a fanatical
minority following has taken over this country and is running it basically the
way he pleases, essentially ruling by decree and ignoring the prerogatives of
an elected legislature and a supposedly independent judiciary. The tide that
swept him into office has largely nullified the constitutional checks and
balances that were supposed to keep the leader from amassing personal power and
using it however he sees fit. He is keeping himself in power largely by
assuring the continued loyalty and fanaticism of his base, which he does
basically by telling them over and over again that they are “winners” and
everyone who opposes him is a “loser” and therefore not worth bothering with.
Donald Trump has the potential to destroy American
democracy. A United States firmly under his one-man rule (which, thank
goodness, it isn’t yet!) would be one in which elections would still happen —
as they did in the Soviet Union throughout its existence — but their outcomes
would be predetermined, and therefore meaningless. A Trump dictatorship would
be one like Stalin’s, in which even his closest associates would continually
have to watch their backs to make sure they were flattering the boss enough to
reassure him of their “loyalty” — one of Trump’s favorite words, though in his
definition a one-way street in which he is supposed to receive loyalty but is under no obligation to give it.
It is not foreordained that
the United States of America will remain under Donald Trump’s one-man rule
forever, or at least until he croaks and his designated successor takes over.
(One wonders how his friends in the neo-Nazi movement feel about the rather
obvious fact that Trump’s designated successor, at least as far as we can
deduce by the wide range of responsibilities he has already given him, is his
Jewish son-in-law, Jared Kushner.) What is clear is that the forces, if any, that will derail
Trump’s ambitions do not yet exist, and a very careful strategy involving both
electoral involvements and mobilizations outside the system will be needed to
bring a successful anti-Trump resistance into being.
