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What's Next for the Militias? |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=58025"><span class="small">Mike Giglio, The Intercept</span></a>
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Wednesday, 20 January 2021 13:44 |
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Excerpt: "The Capitol riot has forced a reckoning inside America's militant groups."
Members of the North Carolina Minuteman Coalition train in Lawndale, N.C., on Jan. 16, 2021. (photo: Mike Giglio/The Intercept)
What's Next for the Militias?
By Mike Giglio, The Intercept
21 January 21
The Capitol riot has forced a reckoning inside America’s militant groups.
 met Gordon Baird at a militia training this fall. We spoke briefly about a charity cookout he said his group had held and his suspicion that Joe Biden is a pedophile. His zip ties, though, were what stuck out. Baird was kitted out with his tactical gear and rifle, but he also had half a dozen sets of plastic cuffs strapped to his body armor.
I thought about the zip ties during the Capitol riot, when I saw a photo of a man carrying some through the Senate chamber while decked in his own battle-rattle. It made me wonder: How far was he really willing to go? It’s the same question most of the country is asking about militant groups this week, with government buildings on lockdown and the FBI issuing arrest warrants for those who allegedly entered the Capitol. So I reconnected with people like Baird, to see if they knew the answer.
Baird, 30, heads a group called the North Carolina Minuteman Coalition. He was in Washington, D.C., on January 6 but insisted he didn’t go into the Capitol. “I went,” he said, “to hear my commander in chief.” He told me this on Saturday, when he and his 10-year-old son, dressed in matching fatigues, met me at the training site he built on his 6-acre property in Lawndale, North Carolina. A handful of men were walking through lightly organized drills as Baird explained that local police had visited once or twice to make sure everyone was shooting safely. He said the cops sometimes give a whoop of the siren when they pass, “just to say hey.” The pride with which he recounted these details speaks to the dilemma many militant groups are now facing: They might be pro-Trump. But most are also pro-cop and want to be seen as community protection forces, a sort of law enforcement auxiliary. Storming government buildings and trying to overturn an election flies in the face of that. At the end of the day, it’s also illegal. It’s the same contradiction conveyed by the plastic cuffs: Taking the law into your own hands also means breaking it.
These militant groups have arrived at a moment of truth. In meetings and conversations over the last week, I found members struggling with it. Behind all the rhetoric and threats and Trumpian claims about the election is a choice about what side of law and order they really want to be on. Where they land will say a lot about whether the political violence we saw on January 6 remains relatively isolated or metastasizes into a wider uprising.
Some may have already made their choice, like the three veterans with alleged ties to militant groups whom the FBI has charged with conspiracy, saying that they planned and executed an incursion into the Capitol amid talk of making a “citizen’s arrest” of lawmakers for “acts of treason” and “election fraud.” And then there are people like Baird. He was still trying to make up his mind about the riot. He said it was wrong and anyone who entered the Capitol made a “fatal mistake,” while also echoing the talking point that the assault might have been a leftist ploy. It had exposed protesters to the same accusations of insurrection and domestic terrorism that many of them had spent the summer lobbing at Black Lives Matter and antifa. “I can tell you right now: I’m not a terrorist. I’m a patriot,” he said.
He stressed several times that he still believes in working through the system and within the rule of law. Yet he was gratified by the message the riot had delivered to politicians in the Capitol: “At the end of the day, it put the fear of God back in them, and I think that might be just what they needed.”
His group is small — about 20 active members, he said, and less than half that number were on hand for the relaxed weekly training I attended. Everyone seemed to agree that further violence would be a mistake. They were against the idea of storming state Capitols or other government buildings.
Later, Baird told me word had been spreading among militia groups that the FBI was on the hunt: “Everybody keeps saying the FBI is out there coming to see you. I’m expecting the FBI to come see me. I’ve got nothing to hide. I welcome them.”
He wouldn’t have a problem with people getting arrested if they’d been part of the riot, he added. “If someone stormed the Capitol and was actually inside the Capitol, then by all means,” he said. “If you’ve got proof that you can show me that they were in the Capitol, then I wash my hands of it.”
When I asked what he’d do if he caught word of militant groups planning violence, he replied, “I carry flexi-cuffs in my truck for a reason.”
He added: “When you take it to the extreme, when you’re trying to kick off a civil war — at that point, you become part of the problem.”
So that’s one possibility: Militant groups cool down and even do some self-policing. There are others, though. Some group somewhere could start something with real momentum that more groups decide to get behind. Or Trump could spotlight calls for a specific push or protest and incite people, as he did on January 6. (Baird and others noted that part of the reason they were standing down was because Trump had said to.) Then there’s the chance that the government response to the riot will inflame people.
Many militant groups have been relatively open about their membership, with formal chapters and people affiliating on social media. There are myriad outfits with thousands of members who are sometimes involved only casually. The authorities have mostly tolerated them — I can’t say if Baird’s account of his interactions with police is accurate, for example, but a big wooden sign for his group and training center marks his roadside property. Police are sometimes sympathetic to militant groups and even involved in them, and it may be only now that they’re considering the extent to which those groups can be threatening. Overnight, federal authorities have begun scrambling to monitor them, social media bans have jumped, and politicians have embraced terms like “insurrectionists” and “domestic terrorists.” Meanwhile, these are often people who spent years immersed in conspiratorial fears about a coming tyranny, only to have Trump and many Republicans tell them it’s finally about to happen.
I asked Baird what he’d do if it started to seem that groups like his were being targeted.
“At that point, that’s when we would start scurrying and getting ready.”
It helps to come back to people over time if you’re trying to keep track of a national breakdown. I first met Joe Klemm at a militia muster in Virginia in July. He stepped onto a flatbed truck and addressed the hundred or so people there with a speech so aggressive in its call to uprising that it made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.
From there I watched him get pulled ever deeper into the conspiracy world Trump had created around the election. I was with him at a training before the election, the same one where I met Baird, as Klemm echoed Trump’s claims that there’d be massive voter fraud. And again on November 3, as he and his men drove around to polling stations in southwestern Virginia, patrolling. Klemm is convinced that the election was stolen and considered coming down to the Capitol in that short window when it seemed possible the people inside could hold their ground. So I wondered if I’d find him itching for action when I met him at his home last week. Instead, he seemed content to sit back and wait.
“It’s business as usual,” he told me. “We’re just following the orders of the president to stay away from any protests or uprisings that are at the capitals.”
We drank whiskey at his kitchen table, discussing Q theories. Klemm, who’s 29, was with a friend named Andrew, a sweet-mannered ICU nurse who had nothing to do with militias but told me Klemm made him feel safe. (He asked me to use only his first name because he feared being harassed online for his views.) Maybe Trump would find a way to stay in power, and the senators and members of Congress who’d voted to accept the Electoral College results would be tried for treason. Maybe Trump would only appear to step down before being inaugurated on March 4, the day presidents were sworn in until 1933. Maybe Michael Flynn would step in to lead the militias before that. “If he were to put the call out for the militias to assemble for whatever reason — it’s been discussed before — we would get behind Flynn and support his orders,” Klemm said.
“I mean, word on the street is he’s going to be vice president,” Andrew added.
“Mhmm,” Klemm agreed.
“I mean, these are crazy times,” Andrew told me. “I don’t fully believe it, but I just know that anything is possible. Would anything shock you at this point?”
People can stay lost in their theories, or the theories can start to crash against reality. Long before QAnon, many Americans had convinced themselves that socialism and tyranny were coming and centered those fears on the specter of agents from a budding globalist-Marxist regime showing up at their homes. Now federal agents may indeed find themselves door-knocking as they search for people who took part in the riot. That simple act could also bring the national conflict home for militia members who have so far mainly viewed their involvement as local. On Friday night, I joined an Iraq War veteran named Will as he had dinner at a restaurant in a shopping center in rural Virginia. He’d helped to organize the summer muster where I first encountered Klemm; the idea was to raise a self-styled militia for his county. Will told me he hadn’t been in D.C. and that the violence had been an unequivocal mistake, but he thought the national response had “turned into a witch hunt for patriots. It’s like we’re the bad guys.”
He turned his hands into two scales and weighed them as if an outcome were hanging in the balance: civil war or not civil war. “I know I’m going to be in Virginia watching,” he said. “I’m a moderate motherfucker. We’re more the ‘We just want to be left alone’ types.”
“This place,” he said, knocking on the table, “is not important. It’s not D.C. It’s not Richmond. The main thing protecting us right now is our complete and total lack of importance.”
I asked what he’d think if militant groups pushed for more violence or tried to storm more government buildings in D.C. or elsewhere. “What is there to gain by that?” he asked. “Either it gets us nothing or it might be the spark that ends it all, and you’ll have kids and old people dying for no reason. It’s fucking pointless.”
I believed that people wanted to stay away from violence when they said so but also knew that they, like everyone involved in this, were trying to make sense of things as they went. Nobody really speaks frankly if they think they’re in a war anyway. When I pressed one person about what might happen next, he reminded me that the FBI had been calling around and said he’d only speak in generalities. Even those who’ve been involved with militant groups for a long time are wondering what to make of the new reality. I spoke to a man who’s among the cooler heads I know in the movement, someone who has never bought into the conspiracies and who I can’t name because he’s a U.S. military reservist. He worried that some of the people furthest down the rabbit hole of the conspiratorial mindset might turn their fears into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The people he knows are dropping off social media, closing Facebook and Twitter accounts, and going dark, he said. “There are people who are genuinely scared.”
Most likely, he said, people are simply worried about being targeted for their affiliations or losing access to their accounts. But what if the feds come knocking on a door and “someone fights back and a cop gets killed, heavens forbid, or [the shooter] gets killed,” he said. “It’s going to entrench the mindset that now they’re sending out the death squads. They’re going to literally make their own worst dreams come true.”
He said people might not realize how much the strains of the last year are clouding their thinking. “It doesn’t help that you have all the stuff from Covid coming on,” he said. “We’re one year into this. That year has put a lot of stress on people, the businesses going under, being forced to wear masks and being forced to stay home, and then you add the elections on top of that. It’s just stacking and stacking and stacking. They don’t have the mental resiliency.”
When the training at Baird’s was over and most people had gone home, a member who’d been outside the Capitol recounted how the moment the crowd broke through felt like the climax of something. The man, who asked to be called Anthony because he feared repercussions for his involvement, was near the steps when word came down that the building had been breached and said he didn’t push inside only because the sea of people was so thick. “We were so fucking live and emotional in that moment, man,” he said. When he heard that requests to call in the National Guard had been delayed, it seemed like fate: “It was like they were giving us an opportunity to give the people in the Capitol one good lick.”
He said they had sent lawmakers a message: “You’re not fucking immortal.”
He cried as he recounted how things had seemed to keep stacking against him until that point, as he lost his job to coronavirus pandemic conditions and tried to support his family on an unemployment check of less than $150 a week. Then Baird had raised money from his social media followers to pay for the gas to drive down to the protest, and Anthony had joined him. “That was one of the most powerful things that I was ever a part of and will ever be a part of,” he said. “We only live once. We’re going to tell our grandkids about this one day.”
It was all over quickly, and for Anthony, it was enough. He and Baird were out of D.C. by nightfall. On the way back, he said, he got messages from militiamen back home who were vowing to follow them back into the Capitol with weapons. He brushed it off, telling them it was a ludicrous idea. He doesn’t think they’d have come anyway. He sensed the momentum sapping from the militia crowd and predicted a period of indecision and infighting. That was the mood, at least, on the eve of Biden’s inauguration.
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FOCUS: Biden's Inauguration Gives Us New Hope and New Energy |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=53457"><span class="small">Jesse Jackson, Chicago Sun Times</span></a>
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Wednesday, 20 January 2021 12:53 |
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Jackson writes: "The movement for justice must continue to organize nonviolent protest, challenging the entrenched systemic racism that still pervades our institutions."
Joe Biden is sworn-in as the 46th president. (photo: AP)
Biden's Inauguration Gives Us New Hope and New Energy
By Jesse Jackson, The Chicago Sun-Times
21 January 21
There should be no reluctance to work with Biden to help pass critical reforms, but at the same time, the pressure for outside must continue to build for there to be any hope of change.
 n Monday, we celebrated Dr. Martin Luther King’s 91st birthday; on Wednesday, Joe Biden will be inaugurated as president, promising change after a dark period of division. Dr. King’s relationship with John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson offers instructive lessons for today’s movement for justice.
Kennedy, inaugurated after eight years of Republican Dwight Eisenhower, brought new energy to Washington. Kennedy favored action on civil rights but was terribly worried that trying to move a civil rights bill would get in the way of the rest of his legislative agenda.
During his campaign, his call to Coretta Scott King when Dr. King was jailed, helped him capture immense Black support in a razor-thin election. Yet, he was wary of King, unhappy that King and the movement kept demonstrating and forcing change.
King appreciated Kennedy but understood the conflicting pressures he faced. The movement continued independently. The Freedom Riders in Montgomery, the dogs and water cannons in Birmingham, the sit-in in Jackson forced Kennedy to act. Even then the legislation — and much of Kennedy’s agenda — was stuck in the legislature.
Kennedy’s assassination brought Lyndon Johnson, the master of the Senate, to the presidency. Johnson decided to push civil rights legislation and put his enormous skills behind passing it. King conferred with Johnson and helped put pressure on legislators who were reluctant. King wasn’t simply interested in protest; he wanted a change in policy and was prepared to work with LBJ to get it.
Johnson, like Kennedy, was wary of King. He often besmirched him in private, angry that King would not stop the demonstrations. Again, the movement — this time the dramatic scenes at Selma — forced action, and Johnson rose to the moment, leading to the passage of the Voting Rights Act.
The collaboration of Johnson and King, however, soon ended. The Watts Riot angered Johnson who thought blacks should be grateful for what he had done. When Dr. King went public with his opposition to the Vietnam War, the relationship was severed. The FBI under J. Edgar Hoover continued its efforts to discredit and intimidate King.
Today the situation is different. Black voters were critical to Biden’s election victory. He chose Kamala Harris as his vice president. He has reaffirmed his commitment to criminal justice reform, to addressing the continued disparities in education, housing, health care and opportunity. What African Americans still seek is an even playing field. On economic justice issues, our agenda speaks to all: the right to a job, the right to health care, the right to a high-quality education, retirement security. To drive reform, the lessons of the 1960s still apply.
The movement for justice must continue to organize nonviolent protest, challenging the entrenched systemic racism that still pervades our institutions. It must continue to build, as Dr. King did, a poor people’s campaign across lines of race and region. The movement can’t follow Biden’s timetable; it must continue to build on its own agenda. There should be no reluctance to work with Biden to help pass critical reforms, but at the same time, the pressure for outside must continue to build for there to be any hope of change.
The 1960s offer another caution: the war on poverty, the progress on civil rights, was lost in the jungles of Vietnam, as that war consumed resources and attention as well as lives. While Biden’s domestic pledges offer hope, he inherits a country mired in endless wars and gearing up for a new cold war with both Russia and China. Once more, follies abroad may sap the energy needed to rebuild at home. Once more, the movement for justice must not be silent about the administration’s priorities.
Biden’s inauguration offers new hope and new energy. He inherits severe crises — the pandemic, mass unemployment, extreme inequality, the climate crisis, racial upheaval. He’ll need all the help he can get. And the best way the movement can help is to keep on keeping on.
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FOCUS: Joe Biden Must Put an End to Business as Usual. Here's Where to Start |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=24193"><span class="small">Bernie Sanders, Guardian UK</span></a>
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Wednesday, 20 January 2021 11:29 |
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Sanders writes: "In this time of unprecedented crises, Congress and the Biden administration must respond through unprecedented action."
Sen. Bernie Sanders. (photo: Getty Images)
Joe Biden Must Put an End to Business as Usual. Here's Where to Start
By Bernie Sanders, Guardian UK
20 January 21
In this time of unprecedented crises, Congress and the Biden administration must respond through unprecedented action
 record-breaking 4,000 Americans are now dying each day from Covid-19, while the federal government fumbles vaccine production and distribution, testing and tracing. In the midst of the worst pandemic in 100 years, more than 90 million Americans are uninsured or underinsured and can’t afford to go to a doctor when they get sick. The isolation and anxiety caused by the pandemic has resulted in a huge increase in mental illness.
Over half of American workers are living paycheck to paycheck, including millions of essential workers who put their lives on the line every day. More than 24 million Americans are unemployed, underemployed or have given up looking for work, while hunger in this country is at the highest level in decades.
Because of lack of income, up to 40 million Americans face the threat of eviction, and many owe thousands in back rent. This is on top of the 500,000 who are already homeless.
Meanwhile, the wealthiest people in this country are becoming much richer, and income and wealth inequality are soaring. Incredibly, during the pandemic, 650 billionaires in America have increased their wealth by more than $1tn.
As a result of the pandemic education in this country, from childcare to graduate school, is in chaos. The majority of young people in this country have seen their education disrupted and it is likely that hundreds of colleges will soon cease to exist.
Climate change is ravaging the planet with an unprecedented number of forest fires and extreme weather disturbances. Scientists tell us that we have only a very few years before irreparable damage takes place to our country and the world.
And, in the midst of all this, the foundations of American democracy are under an unprecedented attack. We have a president who is working feverishly to undermine American democracy and incite violence against the very government and constitution he swore to defend. Against all of the evidence, tens of millions of Americans actually believe Trump’s Big Lie that he won this election by a landslide and that victory was stolen from him and his supporters. Armed rightwing militias in support of Trump are being mobilized throughout the country.
In this moment of unprecedented crises, Congress and the Biden administration must respond through unprecedented action. No more business as usual. No more same old, same old.
Democrats, who will now control the White House, the Senate and the House, must summon the courage to demonstrate to the American people that government can effectively and rapidly respond to their pain and anxiety. As the incoming chairman of the Senate budget committee that is exactly what I intend to do.
What does all of this mean for the average American?
It means that we aggressively crush the pandemic and enable the American people to return to their jobs and schools. This will require a federally led emergency program to produce the quantity of vaccines that we need and get them into people’s arms as quickly as possible.
It means that during the severe economic downturn we’re experiencing, we must make sure that all Americans have the financial resources they need to live with dignity. We must increase the $600 in direct payments for every working-class adult and child that was recently passed to $2,000, raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, expand unemployment benefits and prevent eviction, homelessness and hunger.
It means that, during this raging pandemic, we must guarantee healthcare to all. We must also end the international embarrassment of the United States being the only major country on Earth not to provide paid family and medical leave to workers.
It means making pre-kindergarten and childcare universal and available to every family in America.
Despite what you may have heard, there is no reason why we cannot do all of these things. Through budget reconciliation, a process that only requires a majority vote in the Senate, we can act quickly and pass this emergency legislation.
But that is not enough. This year we must also pass a second reconciliation bill that deals with the major structural changes that our country desperately needs. Ultimately, we must confront the grotesque level of income and wealth inequality and create a country that works for all and not just the few. Americans should no longer be denied basic economic rights that are guaranteed to people in virtually every other major country.
This means using a second reconciliation bill to create millions of good-paying jobs rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure and constructing affordable housing, modernizing our schools, combatting climate change and making massive investments in energy efficiency and renewable energy.
It means making public colleges, universities, trade schools and Historically Black Colleges and Universities tuition-free and forcefully addressing the outrageous level of student debt for working families.
And it means making the wealthiest Americans and most profitable corporations pay their fair share of taxes. We cannot continue to allow profitable corporations like Amazon to make billions of dollars in taxes and pay nothing in net federal income taxes. And billionaires cannot be allowed to pay a lower tax rate than working-class Americans. We need real tax reform.
There is no reason Joe Biden could not sign into law two major bills that will accomplish most of the goals I listed above within the first 100 days of the new Congress. We cannot allow Mitch McConnell and the Republican leadership to sabotage legislation that would improve the lives of millions of working Americans and is wildly popular.
Let us never forget. When Republicans controlled the Senate, they used the reconciliation process to pass trillions of dollars in tax breaks primarily to the top 1% and multinational corporations. Further, they were able to confirm three rightwing US supreme court judges over a very short period of time by a simple majority vote.
If the Republicans could use the reconciliation process to protect the wealthy and the powerful, we can use it to protect working families, the sick, the elderly, the disabled and the poor.
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Donald Trump Is Out. Are We Ready to Talk About How He Got In? |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=27654"><span class="small">Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Atlantic</span></a>
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Wednesday, 20 January 2021 09:14 |
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Coates writes: "It is often said that Trump has no real ideology, which is not true - his ideology is white supremacy, in all its truculent and sanctimonious power."
Scenes from anti-lockdown protests across the country. (image: Eddie Guy/NY Magazine)
Donald Trump Is Out. Are We Ready to Talk About How He Got In?
By Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Atlantic
20 January 21
“The First White President,” revisited
’ve been thinking about Barbara Tuchman’s medieval history, A Distant Mirror, over the past couple of weeks. The book is a masterful work of anti-romance, a cold-eyed look at how generations of aristocrats and royalty waged one of the longest wars in recorded history, all while claiming the mantle of a benevolent God. The disabusing begins early. In the introduction, Tuchman examines the ideal of chivalry and finds, beneath the poetry and codes of honor, little more than myth and delusion.
Knights “were supposed, in theory, to serve as defenders of the Faith, upholders of justice, champions of the oppressed,” Tuchman writes. “In practice, they were themselves the oppressors, and by the 14th century, the violence and lawlessness of men of the sword had become a major agency of disorder.”
The chasm between professed ideal and actual practice is not surprising. No one wants to believe themselves to be the villain of history, and when you have enough power, you can hold reality at bay. Raw power transfigured an age of serfdom and warmongering into one of piety and courtly love.
This is not merely a problem of history. Twice now, Rudy Giuliani has incited a mob of authoritarians. In the interim, “America’s Mayor” was lauded locally for crime drops that manifested nationally. No matter. The image of Giuliani as a pioneering crime fighter gave cover to his more lamentable habits—arresting whistleblowers, defaming dead altar boys, and raiding homeless shelters in the dead of night. Giuliani was, by Jimmy Breslin’s lights, “blind, mean, and duplicitous,” a man prone to displays “of great nervousness if more than one black at a time entered City Hall.” And yet much chin-stroking has been dedicated to understanding how Giuliani, once the standard-bearer for moderate Republicanism, a man who was literally knighted, was reduced to inciting a riot at the U.S. Capitol. The answer is that Giuliani wasn’t reduced at all. The inability to see what was right before us—that Giuliani was always, in Breslin’s words, “a small man in search of a balcony”—is less about Giuliani and more about what people would rather not see.
And what is true of Giuliani is particularly true of his master. It was popular, at the time of Donald Trump’s ascension, to stand on the thinnest of reeds in order to avoid stating the obvious. It was said that the Trump presidency was the fruit of “economic anxiety,” of trigger warnings and the push for trans rights. We were told that it was wrong to call Trump a white supremacist, because he had merely “drawn upon their themes.”
One hopes that after four years of brown children in cages; of attempts to invalidate the will of Black voters in Philadelphia, Atlanta, and Detroit; of hearing Trump tell congresswomen of color to go back where they came from; of claims that Joe Biden would turn Minnesota into “a refugee camp”; of his constant invocations of “the Chinese virus,” we can now safely conclude that Trump believes in a world where white people are—or should be—on top. It is still deeply challenging for so many people to accept the reality of what has happened—that a country has been captured by the worst of its history, while millions of Americans cheered this on.
The temptation to look away is strong. This summer I watched as whole barrels of ink were emptied to champion free speech and denounce “cancel culture.” Meanwhile, from the most powerful office in the world, Trump issued executive orders targeting a journalistic institution and promoted “patriotic education.” The indifference to his incredible acts was telling. So much for chivalry.
The mix of blindness and pedantry did not plague merely writers, but also policy makers and executives. “The FBI does not talk in terms of terrorism committed by white people,” the journalist Spencer Ackerman wrote in the days after the January 6 riot at the Capitol. “Attempting to appear politically ecumenical, a recent bureaucratic overhaul during an accelerated period of domestic terrorism created the category of ‘racially motivated violent extremism.’” But only so ecumenical. “For all its hesitation over white terror,” Ackerman continued, “the FBI until at least 2018 maintained an investigative category about a nebulous and exponentially less deadly thing it called ‘Black Identity Extremism.’”
“When the gap between ideal and real becomes too wide,” Tuchman writes, “the system breaks down.” One hopes that this moment for America has arrived, that it can at last see that the sight of cops and a Confederate flag among the mob on January 6, the mockery of George Floyd and the politesse on display among some of the Capitol Police, are not a matter of chance.
More, that Trumpism did not begin with Trump; that the same Republican Party some now recall in wistful and nostalgic tones planted seeds of insurrection with specious claims of voter fraud; that the decision to storm the Capitol follows directly, and logically, from respectable Republicans who claim that Democrats steal elections and defraud this country’s citizens out of their right to self-government.
This, of course, is not my first time contemplating the import of such things. “The First White President” was the culmination of the years I’d spent watching the pieces fall into place. Pieces that, once assembled, finally gave us Trump. I’m sorry to report that I think the article holds up well. This would be a much better world if it didn’t. But in this world, an army has been marshaled and barbed wire installed, and the FBI is on guard against an inside job. Whatever this is—whatever we decide to call this—it is not peaceful, and it is not, in many ways, a transition. It is something darker. Are we now, at last, prepared to ask why?
The following is an excerpt from Ta-Nehisi Coates’s October 2017 cover story, “The First White President.” You can find the full essay here.
IT IS INSUFFICIENT TO STATE the obvious of Donald Trump: that he is a white man who would not be president were it not for this fact. With one immediate exception, Trump’s predecessors made their way to high office through the passive power of whiteness—that bloody heirloom which cannot ensure mastery of all events but can conjure a tailwind for most of them. Land theft and human plunder cleared the grounds for Trump’s forefathers and barred others from it. Once upon the field, these men became soldiers, statesmen, and scholars; held court in Paris; presided at Princeton; advanced into the Wilderness and then into the White House. Their individual triumphs made this exclusive party seem above America’s founding sins, and it was forgotten that the former was in fact bound to the latter, that all their victories had transpired on cleared grounds. No such elegant detachment can be attributed to Donald Trump—a president who, more than any other, has made the awful inheritance explicit.
His political career began in advocacy of birtherism, that modern recasting of the old American precept that black people are not fit to be citizens of the country they built. But long before birtherism, Trump had made his worldview clear. He fought to keep blacks out of his buildings, according to the U.S. government; called for the death penalty for the eventually exonerated Central Park Five; and railed against “lazy” black employees. “Black guys counting my money! I hate it,” Trump was once quoted as saying. “The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day.” After his cabal of conspiracy theorists forced Barack Obama to present his birth certificate, Trump demanded the president’s college grades (offering $5 million in exchange for them), insisting that Obama was not intelligent enough to have gone to an Ivy League school, and that his acclaimed memoir, Dreams From My Father, had been ghostwritten by a white man, Bill Ayers.
It is often said that Trump has no real ideology, which is not true—his ideology is white supremacy, in all its truculent and sanctimonious power. Trump inaugurated his campaign by casting himself as the defender of white maidenhood against Mexican “rapists,” only to be later alleged by multiple accusers, and by his own proud words, to be a sexual violator himself. White supremacy has always had a perverse sexual tint. Trump’s rise was shepherded by Steve Bannon, a man who mocks his white male critics as “cucks.” The word, derived from cuckold, is specifically meant to debase by fear and fantasy—the target is so weak that he would submit to the humiliation of having his white wife lie with black men. That the slur cuck casts white men as victims aligns with the dicta of whiteness, which seek to alchemize one’s profligate sins into virtue. So it was with Virginia slaveholders claiming that Britain sought to make slaves of them. So it was with marauding Klansmen organized against alleged rapes and other outrages. So it was with a candidate who called for a foreign power to hack his opponent’s email and who now, as president, is claiming to be the victim of “the single greatest witch hunt of a politician in American history.”
In Trump, white supremacists see one of their own. Only grudgingly did Trump denounce the Ku Klux Klan and David Duke, one of its former grand wizards—and after the clashes between white supremacists and counterprotesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August, Duke in turn praised Trump’s contentious claim that “both sides” were responsible for the violence.
To Trump, whiteness is neither notional nor symbolic but is the very core of his power. In this, Trump is not singular. But whereas his forebears carried whiteness like an ancestral talisman, Trump cracked the glowing amulet open, releasing its eldritch energies. The repercussions are striking: Trump is the first president to have served in no public capacity before ascending to his perch. But more telling, Trump is also the first president to have publicly affirmed that his daughter is a “piece of ass.” The mind seizes trying to imagine a black man extolling the virtues of sexual assault on tape (“When you’re a star, they let you do it”), fending off multiple accusations of such assaults, immersed in multiple lawsuits for allegedly fraudulent business dealings, exhorting his followers to violence, and then strolling into the White House. But that is the point of white supremacy—to ensure that that which all others achieve with maximal effort, white people (particularly white men) achieve with minimal qualification. Barack Obama delivered to black people the hoary message that if they work twice as hard as white people, anything is possible. But Trump’s counter is persuasive: Work half as hard as black people, and even more is possible.
For Trump, it almost seems that the fact of Obama, the fact of a black president, insulted him personally. The insult intensified when Obama and Seth Meyers publicly humiliated him at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2011. But the bloody heirloom ensures the last laugh. Replacing Obama is not enough—Trump has made the negation of Obama’s legacy the foundation of his own. And this too is whiteness. “Race is an idea, not a fact,” the historian Nell Irvin Painter has written, and essential to the construct of a “white race” is the idea of not being a nigger. Before Barack Obama, niggers could be manufactured out of Sister Souljahs, Willie Hortons, and Dusky Sallys. But Donald Trump arrived in the wake of something more potent—an entire nigger presidency with nigger health care, nigger climate accords, and nigger justice reform, all of which could be targeted for destruction or redemption, thus reifying the idea of being white. Trump truly is something new—the first president whose entire political existence hinges on the fact of a black president. And so it will not suffice to say that Trump is a white man like all the others who rose to become president. He must be called by his rightful honorific—America’s first white president.
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