October 12, 2018
Yesterday the Oval Office was the setting for a scene more fitting for Barnum & Bailey than for the high minded affairs of state that august setting usually requires. Kanye West burst into the West Wing sporting a MAGA hat, armed with his unique brand of proudly narcissistic ignorance and delivered a rambling, incoherent paean to Trump.
Predictably, everyone from Black Twitter to The Washington Post was mesmerized by the insane spectacle. It is truly a sign that we are living in bizarro world when it is a sign of “wokeness” to delete Kanye West and stream Taylor Swift. There was speculation about Kanye’s mental health, but whether he is bipolar or “sleep deprived,” he is clearly seen as nothing more than a prop by Trump. It is the ultimate humiliation to be the useful idiot of Putin’s useful idiot, but in 2018, here we are.
All of this is a distraction from where our attention should be focused. Each new revelation in the Jamal Khashoggi case makes it increasingly clear that Trump is either too compromised by his financial entanglements or too sympathetic to brutal authoritarians (or some combination of the two), to hold the Saudis accountable for the brazen murder of a Washington Post columnist. If Trump gets away with sweeping this under the rug, it will be a harbinger of things to come. Although Trump doesn’t have the courage to personally fire anyone, he has often mused about outlawing protest. Nothing would delight Trump more than having a personal goon squad whose sole loyalty is to him. That is the purpose of his campaign rallies—they are designed to whip his supporters up into a frenzy, so that they are prepared to dispatch his “enemies.”
Trump and the Republicans are eager to destroy any semblance of democracy in this country, in order to reap the benefits of the white supremacist oligarchy they would replace it with. They want nothing less than an autocracy where they can plunder the public treasury at will and divide the American public into cronies, sycophants and serfs.
With the elevation of Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, the legislative branch is all that stands between us and this fate. That is why Brian Kemp has refused to process 53,000 disproportionately Black voter registrations in Georgia, (Source: “Complaints of Voter Suppression Loom Over Georgia Governor’s Race,” by Astead W. Herndon, The New York Times, 10/11/18). This is why Indiana has purged nearly half a million voters since 2016. This is also why, just this Tuesday, the Supreme Court upheld a North Dakota voter i.d. law that required i.d.s to have street addresses, despite the fact the majority of Native Americans in the state have P.O.Box addresses (Source: “Native American tribe slams Supreme Court decision upholding North Dakota voter id Law,” by Tal Axelrod, TheHill.com, 10/11/18). Given that Native Americans were a key factor in Heidi Heitkamp’s victory in 2012, it’s clear that ultra-conservative forces are leaving nothing to chance, despite Heitkamp’s poll numbers. Republicans are pulling out all the stops, working to ensure the future they want. We have been warned. We had better do the same.
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