American Id

May 10, 2018

We sit with our mouths agape, watching an idiotic, corrupt racist storm the world stage like an enraged toddler, torching the Iran agreement, with no plan for next steps, merely because of his irrational hatred of President Obama. As Trump careens from one foreign policy disaster to the next, the willing Captain of “Team Bad Decisions,” his only animating principle is that if President Obama was for it, he’s against it (Source: “Everything that scrapping the Iran deal says about Donald Trump,” by Stephen Collinson, CNN.com, 5/9/18). Amanda Marcotte of Salon summed up our situation perfectly when she tweeted: @AmandaMarcotte, “I can’t believe we might end up in WW III because a half-literate racist couldn’t accept that the first black president is smarter than him.” 5/9/18, 10:26 AM.

While Trump was triumphantly announcing that he was tearing up the Iran deal, we learned that several Fortune 500 companies had paid approximately $2 million in fees in 2017 to Essential Consultants, LLC, Michael Cohen’s shell company, ostensibly for access to the President. The explanations offered by these companies were patently absurd. We are supposed to believe that sophisticated corporations, with armies of lawyers at their disposal, sought the advice of a solo practitioner primarily known for brokering taxicab medallions and being Trump’s fixer, on healthcare policy or telecom regulatory issues? (Source: “How Michael Cohen, Denied Job in White House, Was Seen as Its Gatekeeper,” by Mike McIntire, Kenneth P. Vogel, Katie Thomas and Cecilia Kary, The New York Times, 5/9/18). This naked influence peddling should have brought swift condemnation, but instead was met with a collective shrug, because 17 months of profiteering by this administration has normalized it.

Most alarming, though, is the fact that despite the rampant chaos and corruption, Trump’s poll numbers are edging up. Those searching for a reason need look no further than Trump’s consistency on issues that are important to his base. His hardline anti-immigrant policies are portrayed as his fulfillment of his campaign promises. Trump represents a potent promise for one segment of this country, but a perilous threat to another.

From inception, this nation’s promise has been to rigidly enforce a hierarchy that places one group of citizens on top. Those people believed that they were ordained by God to take the land from the indigenous people already here and assert dominion over stolen African people, yoking them and their descendants to the land like beasts of burden, to build this nation into a global superpower.

After a bloody conflict freed the formerly enslaved, this country held fast to that promise by morphing into a system that consigned black people to permanent second class citizenship, with no obligation that they be afforded human dignity or common decency. When a Black community thrived in spite of those strictures, it was burned to the ground (see Tulsa, Rosewood, or Charlotte).

Anyone who doubts that the same resentment of black success underlies support for Trump need look no further than the increasingly commonplace instances of white people targeting black people for harassment or arrest simply for existing. Last week, a white neighbor called the police on three black women checking out of a California Airbnb and claimed a burglary was in progress (Source: “A woman called 911 about burglars at her neighbor’s house. They were black Airbnb guests,” by Marwa Eltagouri, The Washington Post, 5/8/18). This week, a white Yale graduate student called the police on a black fellow graduate student who was napping in the common room of the dorm where she lived!

The truth is, hatred borne of fear is lurking in the hearts of far too many Americans. Fear that acknowledging the full equality of black people requires a reckoning with the enormity of what this country has done. Trump’s ascendance has merely revealed that, for some people, it is easier to hold on to the myth of white supremacy, even if the price is our democracy. Hell, some people will even kill for it.