A Pyromaniac in the White House

There’s a problem with police violence against African Americans. There are a growing number of hate crimes and acts of white supremacist terrorism. There’s complacency from the president of the United States and a “Trumpism” that is rife with racism and authoritarianism. In the midst of this, we have 100,000 dead from COVID-19 and a radically new economic cycle. Given the situation, it’s worth asking how on earth Donald Trump’s reelection has come to be seen as inevitable.

In that distant month of February, Donald Trump delivered an address about the state of the union to Congress. With his acquittal on impeachment charges mere hours away, Trump opted not to mention it and instead painted an idyllic portrait of the economy, even though employment had already been rising for 75 consecutive months by the time he took office, pretending that the stock market’s success was a true reflection of the real economy, and that the federal debt hadn’t spiked due to tax cuts that benefited only the highest classes and large businesses. His triumphalist speech – hyperbolic, anchored by falsehoods, truncated facts and a nauseating egocentrism, followed the original 2016 campaign script directed at the immense numbers who follow him blindly, instead of directed to all Americans. Even in the midst of an optimistic scenario, Trump never stepped out of his role as leader of a faction. In the meantime, the world changed in three months, and the triumphant economic cycle was reversed in a searing manner.

Since the pandemic began, 43 million Americans have become unemployed, and the unemployment rate climbed from 4.3% to 14.7%. There is no living memory of a social shock as brutal as this. So far, the gross domestic product has contracted by 5%, but the Federal Reserve chairman has publically shared his pessimistic prediction of an almost 20% fall in the coming months, with unemployment possibly climbing to 25%, affecting women particularly hard. Meanwhile, the federal emergency relief packages are equivalent to 14% of the GDP, although obstacles in Congress are not helping to bring about a return to a normal economy. Deaths from COVID-19 have surpassed 100,000, which makes the United States the country with the highest number of fatalities. To put it in perspective, this is the equivalent of 42 Pearl Harbors, or 33 9/11s. Trump’s response to the great American tragedy has been three-fold: pretend it’s not that bad, play golf, and point to culprits and conspiracy theories. Until, that is, just days ago, when a police officer mercilessly killed yet another African American on some street corner in America.

Let’s return to the State of the Union address. Most analysts, heavily focused on the economy, overlooked a small detail of this ceremonial event. Unexpectedly, in the middle of the carefully choreographed exchanges between Trump and the various honorees in the gallery, the Presidential Medal of Freedom was awarded to Rush Limbaugh, among the most famous radio personalities in America, and a nationalist with one of the most repulsive pulpits in the public arena. Known for his cultish devotion to Trump as well as for his racism, sexism and other medieval ‘isms,’ he was given a long ovation by the president and the entire congregation of the member of Congress who sit on the benches of what was once the party of Abraham Lincoln. The Presidential Medal of Freedom is the highest honor granted to civilians in the United States, and counts among its recipients people with the highest level of integrity, such as Rosa Parks, Nelson Mandela, John Lewis and Elie Wiesel. The honor granted to Limbaugh was the closing of a cycle begun during the 2016 campaign, when former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke publicly endorsed Trump, after which the president began to regularly appear to condone serious acts committed by white supremacists and neo-Nazi groups around the country.

With a voter base that is predominantly white and male, much of it sensitive to an identity-based agenda intent on recapturing an imaginary racial purity mixed with religious fundamentalism, Trump ended up legitimizing the formation of popular militias capable of patrolling cities and entering state legislatures without any “law and order” effort to put them in their place. The political divide and conquer strategy, speaking only to his followers (who still make up 40% of the electorate) while despising all others, has always accommodated the spread of racial hate crimes (up 35% since 2017) carried out by organized groups identified as white supremacist – The Base, Patriot Front, Identity Evropa, Vanguard America, Atomwaffen Division and the National Alliance – and responsible for a 180% increase in racist and nationalist propaganda in the past three years, much of it on university campuses in states like California, Virginia, Colorado, Texas, Illinois and North Carolina.

As FBI Director Christopher Wray testified in the House of Representatives in February, all states are currently experiencing a radicalization that points to the existence of small, indoctrinated cells trained to support the rapid collapse of social stability in the country (known as “accelerationism”), and built on a profound hatred of Black, Latinx, and Jewish minorities, which have led to more than one 1,000 FBI investigations currently under way. Charleston, El Paso and Pittsburgh are three examples of what this white terrorism is capable of doing. And it is this white terrorism that appears prominently in federal reports, even though it cannot be tackled as a criminal matter due to the absence of a legal framework in which to do so.

This promiscuous relationship between Trumpism and radical supremacist nativism was actually strengthened by the theory Trump championed that Barack Obama was not born in the United States and that therefore his election fraudulent. This conspiracy fixation, which lasted several years and led to increasing discomfort in the White House at the time, fits a pattern of other obsessions Trump has with his predecessor. Every Obama initiative, from Cuba to Iran, from Obama’s health care law to trans-Atlantic to trans-Pacific trade deals, was scrapped.

Even 2015 police reforms, developed by an independent committee and then Attorney General, Loretta Lynch, were history as soon as Trump took office, part of the same scorched earth approach to everything he inherited. This was a package of reforms which, among other things, attempted to monitor aggressive police behavior toward minorities, promoted a community-based, rather than punitive, relationship with communities, limited access to military surplus material and sought to provide more sound and transparent public information at local levels – which are in charge of the more than 18,000 law enforcement agencies in the country – as well as at the federal level. Although it was not perfect, it was an initiative that highlighted serious and systemic problems, among them gratuitous violence and the constant abuses of power directed against African Americans.

The leader of the police union in Minneapolis, the city where George Floyd was barbarically strangled until he died, spoke at a Trump rally in October 2019, firing up the congregated mass with anti-Obama asides and exuberant praise of the current president for having buried the police reforms. Promiscuity, fanaticism and the systematic violation of the separation of powers form the trilogy that defines the Trump administration – or, if you like, regime.

With the White House surrounded by fences, with military as well as unidentified paramilitary groups patrolling the streets of Washington, D.C., and firing on peaceful demonstrators so that Trump can play the part of military strongman with Bible in hand, at the same time as military leaders have disassociated themselves from the most incendiary presidential appeals, America enters the end of the first trimester of the pandemic on its knees, exhausted, broken and with open wounds. To 40% of Americans, Trump is the cure; for the majority, he’s an out-of-control pyromaniac. Until Nov. 3, this majority has to resist and, on that day, vote in large numbers, otherwise there will be a repeat of 2016. Not because it will successfully replicate Richard Nixon’s 1968 strategy, but because of how resigned those who oppose Trump will be.

American democracy cannot survive four more years of Trump.