America’s Witching Hour

There he stood, 48 hours after Charlottesville. For two days he had avoided criticizing the racists, neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan pack by name. “Racism is evil,” President Donald Trump recited from the teleprompter – a self-evident fact that they wrote down for him, just to be sure.

Finally, a form of condemnation; sort of, anyway. Were we unfair to him? The president, his relieved supporters said with praise, really means it. Too little, too late, others countered.

But the most recent commotion about Trump is pointless, just like all previous commotions and those yet to come. The simple fact that we are discussing whether, when and with which pre-fab wording the president of the United States distances himself from the swastika reveals the whole absurdity of the situation. End of discussion.

And what is going to change? Most likely nothing – quite the opposite.

This was said to be Trump’s worst day, when he was putting off rebuking right-wing terrorists. That’s what we read when he slandered Mexicans. Or when he bragged about his sexism. Or when he made fun of disabled people. Or threatened North Korea with nuclear war.

So many worst days.

We Have Always Known All of This

Trump keeps being Trump. No homespun crisis has come as a surprise, not even this one. Everything has always been known, has always been laid bare, not just since the election. Is Trump a racist? An egomaniac? A misogynist? A friend to the Russians? A lunatic? Today’s debates are the same as yesterday’s and that of the day before yesterday.

The neo-Nazi debate is no exception. We will never know what is going on in Trump’s head. But we know enough to make a judgement:

• We know that Trump’s political career is based on a racist lie, namely that Barack Obama – America’s first black president – isn’t even an American. This lie first made him popular in the morass on the right;

• We know that he launched his presidential candidacy with a racist rant against immigrants from Mexico;

• We know that he trivialized violence at his campaign appearances, even encouraged and incited it, especially against those who think and look differently;

• We know that he hesitated to reject the support of right-wing hate groups during the election, while he never wasted any time in dragging the names of minorities, Muslims and the media through the mud;

• We know that his election victory was cheered by racists and right-wing extremists; “Heil Trump!” hundreds bayed, under the guidance of the smug Richard Spencer, who was also in Charlottesville;

• We know that he put figures from the right-wing movement in the White House in the persons of Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller and Sebastian Gorka. Right-wing extremists and “the white man” are not the problem, according to Gorka, shortly before Charlottesville;

• We know that his formula for economic salvation, “Make America Great Again” – just a glorified slogan – is code for the restoration of a white nation-state, where the 20th century’s civil rights reforms have never existed. He defined his favorite period as the late 40s and 50s when American was “great,” that is to say, when blacks and whites still ate at segregated tables;

• We know that his planned wall along the Mexican border, his ban on travel from Muslim-majority countries and his insidious undercutting of electoral rights in the U.S. are methods to bring about this white nation-state;

• We know that his most recent plans to massively limit immigration to just English-speaking applicants finds support on this basis; after all, they are derived from a similar 1924 immigration law; and

• We know that on Sunday, when he could have brought himself to condemn the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, he said in an interview that he was considering a pardon for Joe Arpaio, an Arizona ex-sheriff convicted of racist policies, Trump saying about Arpaio, “He’s a great American patriot.”

American’s Witching Hour

We are witnessing America’s witching hour. The ghouls haunted this place long before Charlottesville. They brought slavery, civil war, segregation, mob justice, discrimination and mass incarceration (i.e., slavery 2.0). They hastened the intellectual impoverishment of the once proud Republicans, stoked Trump’s campaign and enabled his win. And now they’re shaking – with his help – the very foundations of American democracy.

Trump has brought these specters out of the storeroom back into the light of day.

On the other hand, thousands of people protested on Monday at New York’s Trump Tower, the president spending his first night there since taking office. They protested against him, against the racists, against the loss of American values.

They protested against the phantoms that will not relinquish their grip on this country.