Ruminating Re-Trumpment

 

Our re-Trumpment has released the vengeful spirits of repressed reactionaries. We are reaping the revenge of every reactionary American movement from the time of the civil rights era and perhaps, from even the New Deal (that Rooseveltian era was perhaps the last time folks seriously talked about a unitary executive).

 

But the vengeful spirit animating the Trumpians is rather single-minded: that’s one reason why DEI and other civil rights-adjacent policies are among the first to bite the dust at his regime's behest. I need not cite chapter and verse, but Trump and his acolytes have made no mystery of their racial preference.

 

From dismissing high-ranking Black leadership at various institutions and gleefully killing programs designed to assuage slavery's legacy, to welcoming fake, white refugees from South Africa, while blocking the immigration of others from "shit-hole" countries... I mean, how more flagrant can the Trump administration be in displaying its Cauca-philia and corresponding Afro-phobia?

 

But … I heard one brother try to explain this away by arguing that Trump was only looking out for his own people, just as we should be doing. Now, this is the kind of logic to which some have been reduced because of their need to justify their Trump support: they leaned out over their skies, so to speak and now find themselves excusing the President of all of the people of the United States for implementing a white supremacist agenda because he’s white. This faulty reasoning invalidates the work of everybody from Crispus Attucks to Malcolm X - whose 100th birthday will be commemorated tomorrow, incidentally. And even more, conceiving executive power as purely a tribal privilege invalidates the very purpose of our democratic republic.

 

Meanwhile, the rampaging forces of MAGA are tearing down all of the guideposts erected to encourage racial pluralism. This is to exploit white Americans' demographic anxiety, which is MAGA's primary political fuel. This anxiety has been stoked by the startling estimate that white Americans will be American minorities by mid-century; a projection that is MAGA nutrition, and exactly the kind of diet that feeds the racial revanchism characterizing Trump’s policies.

 

And … cultural issues are also playing a part in exacerbating these tribalist attitudes. For example, the right-wing media is having a field day over the trial of Sean “Diddy” Combs. Their coverage is breathless, because he’s become a very useful trope: that is, don’t be fooled by a black man’s success; there’s a beast beneath. Unfortunately, the trial is revealing that there may well have been a beast beneath one of the record industry's most prominent black executives.