You want to blame Donald Trump for being the source of the torrent of racism that now dominates American politics, but all he’s really done is normalize thought and speech that had been delegitimized a generation ago.
Which isn’t to say that Trump is an actor reading a script handed to him, playing a role that he’s not comfortable with. His name has been tied to racism dating back to his early days as a developer in New York City in the 1970s, when the Justice Department in the Nixon administration sued the Trump Management Corporation for refusing to rent to black potential tenants, and lying to black applicants about whether apartments were available.
The Central Park Five, his push for a black vs. white season of “The Apprentice,” his role as the chief Obama Birther, him announcing his campaign by denouncing Mexican immigrants as rapists and drug dealers – this is deeply embedded in the DNA-type stuff going on here.
But, Trump is nothing if he wouldn’t have been able to strike a nerve.
I admit to naively believing that racism was literally dying out every day, as younger generations that came of age in the post-civil rights era replaced the older cohorts that had held, how shall we say, different attitudes on race.
Damn, I was – we were – wrong.
And it’s not just here, in America, where this is happening. Brexit is a reaction to increases in the people of color population in Britain, basically, a middle finger extended from the island toward the continent, and its continental views.
France has seen its own nativist political movement gain strength, and if the recent European parliamentary elections are any indication, well, stay tuned, but the identitarians are gaining steam.
So, no, we’re not alone, and I’d say, no, this isn’t a replay of the 1930s, if only because we know what happened in the 1930s, and enough of us learned the lessons that we think we know how to prevent that from happening again.
Emphasis: we think.
Thing is, it’s not like, thinking about American politics, this just goes away whenever it is that Trump steps off the stage.
The toothpaste, as they say, isn’t going back into the tube.
Trump’s base, the hard cores, may be 30 percent of the electorate, but doing the math, that’s 100 million people.
So, what, when Trump is done, those folks just up and repent, admit to the err of their ways, embrace their fellow man, kumbaya, my lord, kumbaya?
Er, no, obviously not.
Just as doubtful is that there could be another perfect storm like the one that produced Trump as a viable political candidate.
It’s ridiculous when you spell it out, but in Trump, you had a D-list celebrity, a failed businessman who used a lifeline in the form of a poorly-rated reality-TV show to repair his reputation, then ran roughshod through a weak Republican nomination field, and got lottery-winner lucky that Hillary Clinton figured out a way to snatch defeat from the jaws of inevitable victory.
This wasn’t Hitler scheming for more than a decade to build a party from a beer hall until he got what he wanted.
Trump is a classic failson who has spent his entire life failing his way upward to fake success.
You don’t get two of these accidents of history in a generation, which isn’t to say that there won’t be people who try to build off what Trump has done.
That’s actually the scary part, because we’re already seeing it.
You don’t get elected with a 30 percent base just out-showing up the other side to the polls.
Whatever was left of the responsible wing of the Republican Party has allowed itself to become co-opted into the Trump movement.
Or, maybe, what actually happened was … well, more on that in a moment.
Let’s start with, they’re not true believers, necessarily, but that doesn’t matter when the effect is the same.
They’re the ones defending with eloquence the president when he denounces women of color in Congress among his critics and demands that they go back to where they came from.
They’re the ones executing his policies to harass immigrants, make it harder for people of color to vote, make it easier to gerrymander political districts to dilute their voting strength when they do get to cast a ballot.
Trump is a rabble rouser who hasn’t the first clue as to how the federal government works, and even less interest in learning.
Those who follow him may not be able to rouse a crowd into chanting for the deportation of American citizens and the jailing of political rivals, but they may not have to.
They’re using the time they have, be it another year and a half, or four more years after that, to jigger with the levers of our representative democracy.
Dangerous precedents are being set – allowing unlimited gobs of money to influence elections, packing the courts with sympaticos who can rule unconstitutional anything remotely progressive, blatantly ignoring any efforts at oversight from Congress, from the media, from private citizens.
Trump? He’s no mastermind, but you knew that already.
Whatever you think of him and Russia, no, he personally didn’t scheme with Vladimir Putin to fix the 2016 election.
Come on. Trump is nowhere near that smart.
He went bankrupt in the casino business, which is almost literally a license to print money.
Trump is a patsy, or more to the point, a convenient idiot, who, credit due, is good at one thing: getting attention, or rather, distracting attention.
While we’re all in a lather about his latest racist rants about immigrants or women in Congress or whatever lather he gets himself into watching “Fox & Friends” tomorrow morning, the oil industry is rewriting environmental regulations, the banks are rewriting the rules of high finance, the insurance companies are consolidating their hold over healthcare, et cetera, et cetera.
If a few people of color, a few immigrants, a few women, have to get thrown under various buses while all of this is going on, well, that’s the cost of doing business.
The Republican Party, to get back to the bigger point here, hasn’t been co-opted by Trump.
The Republican Party, shrewdly, from the get-go, co-opted Trump.
I’d applaud the sheer genius of it, begrudgingly.
Column by Chris Graham
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