America’s First Racist President™

Joe Biden

Earlier this week, I awoke to read the strangest news: presumptive Democratic Presidential nominee Joe Biden had called Donald Trump America’s “first” racist president. Though the quote makes marginally more sense in context, it still left me scratching my head. Surely a seasoned politician like Biden doesn’t forget that America has produced presidents like Andrew Jackson and Woodrow Wilson. Racism isn’t new in this country.

But then I thought about it. What if Biden’s right? Jackson and Wilson were products of their times, ages when slaveholding and segregation were seen as economic necessities, backed with government authority. They fell into racism ass-backward, and were richly rewarded for it. Trump, however, resists the larger cultural narrative. Official, outspoken, bigoted racism isn’t standard anymore; Trump must choose daily to be, and remain, racist.

In the 19th and early 20th Centuries, America’s Left and Right were unified in two bipartisan positions: environmentalism, and racism. Our political parties linked arms to defend clean water and White supremacy. But after Lyndon Johnson threw the Democratic Party’s weight behind the Voting Rights Act of 1965, our political climate changed. By 1968, Richard Nixon was already reduced to dog whistles, an art later perfected by Ronald Reagan.

Donald Trump’s undisguised racism is a conscious, deliberate throwback. He could choose another course, as indeed his predecessors have, straddling the aisle, but he doesn’t. More importantly, he doesn’t disguise his positions. He exists entirely as he is, insensible to changing values around him. He divides people into in-groups and out-groups, sustaining an older moral system, which he has to feed daily because it isn’t the cultural context anymore.

In other words, Trump is America’s first president to choose racism. He supports racism willfully, not because America expects it, but because it’s his motivating option. He isn’t a product of our time, and doesn’t belong to our collective guilt (except insofar as he does). Rather, he makes a willful stand against the larger world, especially against his immediate predecessor, because it’s the only thing that makes him special.

As an entrepreneur, Trump’s business model turned on making himself, and his name, exclusive and rare. He defined himself, and those who bought into his buildings and other ventures, as separate from the population, and therefore valuable. And, like prior business models organized around exclusivity, he divides customers into insiders—those wealthy enough for the buy-in—and ousiders—the hoi-polloi. His enterprise depends on creating systems of winners and losers.

Donald Trump

This contradicts America’s changing standards. Within Trump’s lifetime, our collective worldview was divided into moral binaries: rich and poor, White and Black, male and female. Today, we increasingly recognize that class, race, and gender exist along spectra, and just as important, we acknowledge these spectra as artificial. Our shared definition of what makes someone human, and worthy, is becoming more inclusive. But Trump and his supporters consciously reject this change.

And the longer they reject this change, the more effort it requires. They not only must consciously choose hostility, bigotry, and binary thinking, they must also reinforce this thinking daily, because our cultural context won’t reinforce it for them. As society generally becomes more welcoming, those who perceive themselves as an exclusive elite must defend their standing with increasing force. As with all things governmental, “force” ultimately means “violence.”

Which leads to the Gestapo tactics our government is currently utilizing to crush dissent. Organized state violence is frequently the rear-guard defense of a dying structure, from the Whiskey Rebellion to Bull Connor. Trump knows he’ll lose if applying logic or appeals to common values, because America broadly welcomes African Americans, trans people, and immigrants, for one simple reason—he can’t appeal to common values that aren’t common anymore.

So yes, Trump and his supporters are racist in ways America hasn’t previously seen before: racism as willful, even countercultural, choice. Trump’s business model, and his supporters’ dwindling self-figuration, are dying. Scared, powerless, and lacking larger support, these regressives resort to violence, because otherwise they’ll lose the sunk cost of daily choices. This is racism as conscious deliberation, as massive cross-cultural reversal, as willful retreat from the present.

Admittedly, reading Biden’s words, this isn’t what he meant. Biden, like Trump, doesn’t think before he speaks, and therefore says unbelievably dumb things sometimes. But taking his words into our cultural context, I suspect Biden has accidentally landed on a larger truth we’d previously missed. Trump’s violent bigotry isn’t a show of strength, it’s an admission that he’s losing. That’s a truth we can carry boldly into the future.