Tag: Donald Trump

Ta-Nehisi Coates’ eloquent, angry polemic on racism in the age of Trump

Ta-Nehisi Coates. Photo (cc) 2015 by Sean Carter Photography.

Previously published at WGBHNews.org.

For liberals and progressives trying to make sense of President Trump’s victory last November, the role of race has posed something of a dilemma. On the one hand, Trump’s racist rhetoric clearly played into pre-existing resentments on the populist right, thus boosting turnout among his more deplorable (to coin a phrase) supporters. On the other hand, if an African-American could be elected president twice, how could a white woman have lost because of racial animosity?

The answer, according to Ta-Nehisi Coates, is that Trump — unlike all previous presidential candidates — campaigned specifically as the candidate of white identity politics. Unlike Barack Obama’s opponents, John McCain in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012, Trump rallied supporters who believed that white people comprised an oppressed group under siege. Thus it was Hillary Clinton rather than Obama who reaped the whirlwind of white backlash. As Coates puts it: “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.”

Coates carefully builds his case in an 8,200-word essay in The Atlantic titled “The First White President.” It is, in some respects, a companion piece to his 2012 article “Fear of a Black President,” in which he argued that Obama was not as effective on issues of race as he could have been because he dared not show any real emotion lest he frighten White America. Even so, Coates wrote, simply having a black president served to racialize virtually everything that Obama touched, including his embrace of a health-care plan that had previously been associated with Republicans. Glenn Beck went so far as to castigate Obamacare as “reparations” for slavery.

For a white liberal like myself who wants to believe that racism, though ever-present, is in long-term decline, Coates’ new essay makes for painful reading. Littered with the N-word and informed by historical fears about white slavery (too complex to get into here), the article makes a thorough and devastating case that Trump won because he was supported by an overwhelming majority of white people — and not just the white working class, but whites across the educational and economic spectrum. “Trump,” Coates writes, “assembled a broad white coalition that ran the gamut from Joe the Dishwasher to Joe the Plumber to Joe the Banker.” Citing the magazine Mother Jones, Coates points out that if only white voters had been allowed to cast ballots, Trump would have won the Electoral College by a margin of 389 to 81.

Although Coates reserves his real outrage for Trump, he is not especially kind to Clinton or her Democratic rival, Bernie Sanders. Coates criticizes Sanders for his naive view that economics are more important than race, answering Sanders’ assertion that not all Trump supporters are racist or homophobic with this: “Certainly not every Trump voter is a white supremacist, just as not every white person in the Jim Crow South was a white supremacist. But every Trump voter felt it acceptable to hand the fate of the country over to one.” As for Clinton, Coates credits her for acknowledging “the existence of systemic racism more explicitly than any of her modern Democratic predecessors.” But he attributes that mainly to her need to atone for her own and her husband’s rhetoric and policies, which, among other things, led to an increase in the incarceration rate.

With his long, deeply researched essays on race, politics, and history, as well as a well-regarded series of books (his Trump article is excerpted from his forthcoming “We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy”), Coates has established himself as a leading intellectual on American social culture. He is not admired in all circles, of course. Ben Shapiro, an anti-Trump conservative, wrote several years agoin Breitbart News (then in its pre-Trumpist phase) that Coates espouses a “nihilistic and counterfactual viewpoint” that “demonstrates the media’s obsession with racism as a point of American conflict — a conflict that must be kept fresh, an open wound, so as to maximize the power of the government.”

Far more sympathetic is the liberal journalist Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo. But even he has reservations. Though Marshall agrees with the thrust of Coates’ argument regarding the continued centrality of race in politics and culture, he finds something tonally off about “The First White President” — namely, the conceit that Coates, and Coates alone, has identified race as the true reason that Trump prevailed in the 2016 election. “Coates’ piece is a great essay that brings together a wealth of data and characteristically penetrating analysis. I recommend it highly,” Marshall writes. “But I could not read it without thinking there are a lot of voices — hardly little heard or without megaphones — he’s simply not hearing.”

“The First White President” is an important piece of work that Democrats should examine carefully as they look ahead. White resentment is a powerful force. It’s been present in Republican politics for a long time, from Richard Nixon’s “Silent Majority” to Ronald Reagan’s denunciation of “welfare queens” and “strapping young bucks” to George H.W. Bush’s infamous exploitation of a black criminal named Willie Horton. Now Trump has upped the ante considerably. How effectively Democrats will respond remains to be seen. But as Coates shows, anyone who thinks that the problem can be solved merely through efforts to win over the white working class is sadly mistaken.

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Once again, the Times bends over backwards for Trump while the Post lets him have it

It seems that every day The New York Times finds a way to say something hopeful about President Trump while The Washington Post sticks with reality as we can all see it. There are many examples I could dredge up, but let’s start with today’s papers. First the Times’ Glenn Thrush:

Harvey Gives Trump a Chance to Reclaim Power to Unify

Hurricane Harvey was the rarest of disasters to strike during the Trump presidency — a maelstrom not of Mr. Trump’s making, and one that offers him an opportunity to recapture some of the unifying power of his office he has squandered in recent weeks.

Now a tropical storm as it continues to inundate the Texas and Louisiana coasts, Harvey is foremost a human disaster, a stop-motion catastrophe that has already claimed at least 10 lives and destroyed thousands of structures. But hurricanes in the post-Katrina era are also political events, benchmarks by which a president’s abilities are measured.

Mr. Trump is behaving like a man whose future depends on getting this right.

Now the Post’s Jenna Johnson:

Even in visiting hurricane-ravaged Texas, Trump keeps the focus on himself

As rescuers continued their exhausting and heartbreaking work in southeastern Texas on Tuesday afternoon, as the rain continued to fall and a reservoir near Houston spilled over, President Trump grabbed a microphone to address hundreds of supporters who had gathered outside a firehouse near Corpus Christi and were chanting: “USA! USA! USA!”

‘Thank you, everybody,” the president said, sporting one of the white “USA” caps that are being sold on his campaign website for $40. “I just want to say: We love you. You are special…. What a crowd. What a turnout.”

Yet again, Trump managed to turn attention on himself. His responses to the devastation caused by Hurricane Harvey have been more focused on the power of the storm and his administration’s response than on the millions of Texans whose lives have been dramatically altered by the floodwaters.

As I said, these contrasts are a regular occurrence. I don’t know what to attribute them to, but I wonder if the Times’ bend-over-backwards approach to Trump is the flip side of its decades-long obsession with Clinton non-scandals, from Whitewater to emails. Yes, the Times has done plenty of great investigative reporting on Trump, and it seems to be locked in a steel-cage death match with the Post to see which paper can dig up the most dirt on him. But then there are these weird tonal lapses.

The Times and the Post are great papers. The Times features better writing and has a much broader mandate. But the Post’s fierce coverage of national politics and its unapologetic attitude toward Trump have long since made the Post my first read, along with The Boston Globe.

Update. From my Northeastern colleague Alan Schroeder:

I’m sure that has something to do with it. Yet Trump has been known to pick up the phone and call Post reporters, too. There’s no question that the Times is the paper Trump, a New Yorker, most cares about. I don’t know how much of a factor that is.

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The real target of the Boston counter-protest was Trump

Bonita Yarboro traveled with three friends from Hamden, Connecticut, to protest against “racism, anti-Semitism, every -ism out there.” Photo (cc) by Dan Kennedy.

Previously published at WGBHNews.org.

There’s been so much written and said about free speech and the lack thereof at Saturday’s rally on the Boston Common that the big picture is in danger of being lost. So let me try to bring it back into focus. An estimated 30,000 to 40,000 people turned out not to protest what a few right-wingers had to say or to rumble with the police. Rather, they came to express their anger and disgust with President Trump.

Lest we forget, back in May a similar event drew just a few hundred people, with the two sides being kept apart by police officers. We might have seen a similar response this past weekend. But then a motley band of white supremacists and neo-Nazis marched in Charlottesville, Virginia. A fellow-traveler was accused of driving into a crowd of people who had come to protest against such hate, killing one of them, Heather Heyer. And Trump, on his third attempt to address what had happened, threw a temper tantrum of a news conference in which he placed racists and those who oppose racism on the same moral plane.

It was that reality that was on the minds of those who showed up at the Reggie Lewis Center in Roxbury on Saturday morning. I was among them, carrying a notebook and a smartphone with handmade press credentials around my neck so no one would think I was one of the protesters. The crowd reminded me of the folks who’d turned out in Copley Square last January to protest Trump’s first, botched Muslim ban: earnest liberals from the suburbs, Black Lives Matter activists, young people, LGBTQ people, lots of racial diversity, lots of ink (not visible last winter), and a large number of clergy. Mayor Marty Walsh, Police Commissioner Bill Evans, and Attorney General Maura Healey all put in appearances on Saturday.

There were, of course, a few political radicals on hand. Two older women who would only give me their first names held up a large banner that said “No Free Speech for Fascists” — and, in smaller type, “Progressive Labor Party,” a far-left group. I asked them if they thought their views contradicted the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech. “There is no free speech,” Ruth instructed me. “Speech costs a lot of money.” Added Heidi: “We need to stop this hate speech.”

More typical was a young African-American woman named Bonita Yarboro of Hamden, Connecticut, who was holding a green sign that read “I am Black and I MATTER. Any questions?” I asked her what had brought her to Boston and what her hopes were for the counter-protest, dubbed “Fight Supremacy” by its organizers. “Four of us came up together in a Volkswagen Beetle,” she said. “I just want to stand up against racism, anti-Semitism, every -ism out there.”

We got under way a little before 11. The march down Tremont Street toward the Boston Common was a rolling celebration. The police officers who lined the route were professional and friendly. Charlie Pierce wrote in Esquire that Police Superintendent Willie Gross was posing for selfies with marchers.

By 1, with our destination still ahead of us, word started to ripple through the crowd that the rally was over and that the right-wing speakers had left. With the Common just ahead of me, I spotted state Rep. Byron Rushing, a South End Democrat, who told me he’d been prohibited from entering the 75-yard zone around the Parkman Bandstand that police had set up to protect the speakers. “I came down to hear them, and they wouldn’t let me in,” he said. “Freedom of speech should be reciprocal. If they can talk, I should be able to listen.”

In fact, there remain some legitimate concerns about how the authorities handled access to the bandstand. The police department had a genuine public-safety challenge on its hands, and the buffer zone was probably a necessity — but it wouldn’t have been as onerous if, say, a few pool reporters had been allowed in to hear what the speakers had to say. It didn’t help that Commissioner Evans issued a statement in which he said it was “a good thing” that the right-wingers couldn’t get their message out. The ACLU and others have expressed concern.

But the triumph of the counter-protest was not that it had silenced a few extremists (and it’s not even clear how extreme they were, given that some who had been scheduled didn’t show up). The triumph was that the crowd had expressed its opposition to the racism and hatred that these days is indulged, even amplified, by the president of the United States. I couldn’t help but feel a surge of patriotism in the face of such idealism.

Trump’s outrages come at us every day. But his sociopathic reaction to the events in Charlottesville seems like a watershed moment of the sort that greeted the “Access Hollywood” tape, on which he was heard profanely bragging about groping and sexually assaulting women. From business leaders to Republican officials, a new wave of people has begun moving away from him. Republican Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee, presidential historian Douglas Brinkley, and investigative reporting legend Carl Bernstein are among the serious, careful folks who recently have questioned Trump’s mental stability. (Brinkley and Bernstein made their remarks on CNN.)

This can’t go on, but how will it end? Regardless of what comes next, I’m proud of my city for the stand it took this past weekend.

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The end of something. But of what?

It feels like events are accelerating and spinning out of control, and that whatever we’ve been going through with Trump is about to come to an end. I’m specifically not wording this as meaning the end of the Trump presidency, though I’m not ruling it out. My prediction that he’d somehow be gone by Labor Day may yet be on target. These are very strange, ugly, scary days.

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Trump’s morally repugnant response to the violence in Charlottesville

I’ve been trying to find the right context for President Trump’s repugnant response to the neo-Nazi violence in Charlottesville. To say that he failed the moral test of being president doesn’t quite get at it, because he’s failed every moral test ever put in front of him. But this was by far his most important test, so it’s much worse than his previous failures, even if his actual words were no different from what he’s said and hasn’t said before.

His performance Saturday was deliberate and perverse. The most plausible explanation is that he was consciously, specifically trying not to alienate the ignorant racists and white supremacists who comprise a large part of his base. I’m glad that other Republicans, including Ted Cruz, gave evil its proper name. But will they take action against Trump? Not likely.

Many sides. Many sides.

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Pence’s petulance undescores his tricky relationship with Trump

Mike Pence. Photo (cc) 2015 by Gage Skidmore.

Previously published at WGBHNews.org.

Few members of the Trump administration have carried themselves with more unctuous sycophancy than Mike Pence. “Thank you, Mr. President, and just the greatest privilege of my life is to serve as vice president to a president who’s keeping his word to the American people,” the former Indiana governor said at that North Korean-style cabinet meeting back in June. At joint public appearances, Pence gazes at President Trump with a mixture of admiration, gratitude, and sheer astonishment at finding himself just a heartbeat away from the presidency.

But now Trump and Pence may be on the outs. The proximate cause is a New York Times story over the weekend reporting the not especially earthshattering news that Pence is keeping his powder dry in case Trump does not run for re-election in 2020. Much of the article, by Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns, concerns the 2020 ambitions of Republicans such as Ohio Gov. John Kasich, Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse, and Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton. But we also learn that Pence has been unusually active in boosting his political prospects, although he “has made no overt efforts to separate himself from the beleaguered president. He has kept up his relentless public praise and even in private is careful to bow to the president.”

This is all pretty unremarkable stuff. Pence himself, though, erupted as though he had been accused of mocking the size of Trump’s hands, calling the Times article“disgraceful and offensive to me, my family, and our entire team” as well as “categorically false.” As Chuck Todd of NBC News tweeted, “Sorta stunned that an obvious point from the NYT piece about a sitting VP’s own ambitions appears to be causing Team Pence such heartburn.”

What makes the Times article so sensitive, needless to say, is the nontrivial chance that Pence will be running for president in 2020 as the incumbent. Although it seems unlikely that Trump will be impeached and removed from office, the inexorable progress of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation may well yield the sort of information that could persuade Trump to disappear. It’s a prospect that no doubt gladdens the hearts of congressional Republicans even more than Democrats, since they would be rid of their rage-tweeting ruler and his record low approval ratings. A Pence presidency would give them a chance to start over.

Yet Bill Kristol, a prominent anti-Trump conservative, seems unimpressed with the vice president. Kristol stirred the pot after the Times story was published by tweeting, “It’s bold of Team Pence to plant the front-page NYT story on plans for 2020, then object vociferously. Multi-dimensional chess!” And when Times reporter Maggie Haberman noted that Pence’s over-the-top response would “make one think Pence had committed theft stead of fluffing own brand,” Kristol retorted, “Pence committed the crimes of 1) theft of spotlight from @POTUS and 2) suspicion of less than total subservience to @POTUS even in private.”

Even before the Times story revealed the extent of Pence’s politicking, the vice president’s standing with Trump may have been more fragile than we outsiders imagine. There is, of course, Trump’s one-way definition of loyalty: he demands total fealty and gives back nothing in return. But Pence has also shown that he is not immune to the scent of blood in the water. As the columnist Richard North Patterson observed in The Boston Globe, Pence — whom Patterson described as “an incompetent ideologue, an obsequious toady, and a self-serving schemer” — made it clear to everyone last fall that he was available for the drafting when it looked like the “Access Hollywood” tape might sink Trump’s campaign.

Thus for all the deference Pence has shown, Trump may regard him as someone who is no better than former chief of staff Reince Priebus, who, as head of the Republican Party, reportedly urged Trump to drop out after the tape was exposed by The Washington Post. As an elected official in his own right, Pence, unlike Priebus, can’t be fired by Trump. But that doesn’t mean Pence’s position is entirely safe.

For anyone of moderate or liberal views, a Pence presidency might be even worse than what we’ve got now. Pence is well regarded on Capitol Hill, especially by House Speaker Paul Ryan. He knows how to handle himself in public. And he is an extreme right-wing ideologue who, you can be sure, would stand a far better chance than Trump of rolling back years of progress on issues such as LGBTQ rights and reproductive choice. The Affordable Care Act would once again be in danger. (On the other hand, Trump would no longer have access to the nuclear codes — no small thing given his unstable behavior.)

If there was any doubt, the Times article reminds us that Pence is ambitious. It remains to be seen whether he is ambitious in the way vice presidents normally are or if he is aggressively trying to take advantage of Trump’s weak position. In either case, he’s not going away. Even if Trump wants him to.

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Did Trump know what he was doing when he banned transgender troops?

Photo (cc) 2014 by Darren Johnson.

I think the key to understanding President Trump’s ban on transgender troops is contained within a much-discussed Politico story. According to the article, by Rachel Bade and Josh Dawsey, Trump was trying to appease right-wing House members who wanted Trump to rescind funding of transgender-related medical treatment for military personnel. In return, those House members would support funding for the wall that Mexico is not going to pay for.

Now, refusing to pay for medical care is bad enough. But Trump went much further than anyone expected by banning transgender people from the military altogether. Here is the key excerpt from Bade and Dawsey’s story:

“This is like someone told the White House to light a candle on the table and the WH set the whole table on fire,” a senior House Republican aide said in an email. The source said that although GOP leaders asked the White House for help on the taxpayer matter specifically, they weren’t expecting — and got no heads up on — Trump’s far-reaching directive.

So what happened? My guess is that Trump, raging at the world and lacking any understanding of the issues, didn’t realize that right-wingers for the most part were not asking him to ban trans troops. As you can see from this Washington Post analysis by James Hohmann, the most conservative Republicans from the most conservative parts of the country are speaking out against the ban. Trump literally didn’t know what he was doing.

And it wouldn’t be the first time. During the campaign, you may recall, Trump said that women who undergo abortion should face “some form of punishment,” as CNN reported. Leaders of the anti-abortion-rights movement freaked out, waving their arms frantically and insisting that they don’t say things like that anymore. Trump backed down. To use a word that is quickly becoming overused, Trump is strictly transactional. He made his comments not out of any deeply felt sense that abortion is always wrong but to cement his ties to the religious right. And he tweaked his position once he realized he was off-key.

So it is, I suspect, with the transgender ban. This was not deeply thought-out; by all accounts, it wasn’t thought-out at all. It was Trump on Twitter, doing what he does. He blundered into going much further than anyone other than Tony Perkins (New York Times article) was asking him to go, and now he — and all of us — have to live with it.

Let me close on a less what-does-it-mean-politically note. Wednesday turned out to be one of the worst days of the Trump presidency — perhaps the worst since he announced the first version of his ban on Muslims trying to enter the country. We should all feel sick and appalled at Trump’s casual cruelty and his willingness to indulge hatred if he thinks it will give him some momentary advantage.

Love your neighbor.

How Trump’s toxic touch could contaminate the scouting movement

Photo (cc) 2013 by Phoebe Baker.

Previously published at WGBHNews.org.

Note: On Thursday, July 27, the BSA’s chief scout executive, Mike Surbaugh, issued a strong statement about Trump’s speech that said in part, “We sincerely regret that politics were inserted into the Scouting program.” Read the whole thing here.

Donald Trump contaminates everything he touches. So no one should have been surprised when his speech at the Boy Scouts’ national jamboree took a nasty turn into partisan politics. After all, it’s always about him.

But there is a larger issue at stake here: the fate of the Boy Scouts of America, which has been slowly evolving out of its discriminatory past. As an Eagle scout, a former scoutmaster, and the father of an Eagle scout, I really care about the future of the organization. And I’m concerned that President Trump’s toxic rhetoric will stain a movement already seen by many as anachronistic.

Make no mistake — Trump’s speech on Monday went well beyond the bounds of anodyne patriotism that has characterized remarks delivered to the scouts by past presidents from Franklin Roosevelt to Barack Obama. As he has repeatedly, Trump dwelled on his Electoral College victory map, which was “so red it was unbelievable.” He derided the “fake media,” claiming they would play down the size of the crowd — as though (as The Washington Post put it) the 30,000 scouts had turned out for him rather than the jamboree. He boasted that he’d bring “Merry Christmas” back into the lexicon, ignorant of scouting’s embrace of all religious faiths. He put in a plug for “killing this horrible thing known as Obamacare.”

And yes, the scouts booed Trump’s reference to Hillary Clinton and chanted “USA! USA! USA!” a few times. But scouting is a pretty conservative movement, and I have no doubt that many of those in attendance were Trump supporters. Those of us in Blue New England are outliers within the BSA, and the president’s actions were not helpful to the idea that scouting is for everyone, not just for kids in red states. Indeed, based on some of the reaction I’ve seen on Twitter, many people already believe the worst about the Boy Scouts, and they saw Trump’s remarks as confirmation of their stereotyped views rather than as a transgressive outburst.

Let me also put to rest the notion that Trump shouldn’t have been invited. Scouting has always had a close relationship with the federal government. It has held a congressional charter since 1916. The president of the United States is also the honorary president of the BSA. My Eagle card is signed by Richard Nixon; my son’s by George W. Bush. The problem isn’t that Trump was invited. It was solely in what he said. Now he has put the national organization in an impossible position. If the leadership fails to go beyond the boilerplate statement it has already issued, then it will take flak from Trump critics. But if it makes it clear that Trump’s remarks were inappropriate, then it will alienate its largely conservative membership. This is what Trump does — he divides.

The sad thing is that the BSA has come a long way in recent years. Seen as a force for progressive values during the civil-rights era, scouting later fell under the sway of cultural and religious conservatives. For years, the movement was known mostly for discriminating against gay boys and adult leaders. The ban was upheld by a 5-4 Supreme Court decision. As I wrote in The Boston Phoenix in 2001, that decision was misguided because it failed to take into account the reality that a small number of unelected leaders were setting policies opposed by many within the organization.

Gradually, the BSA dropped its ban, first allowing openly gay scouts, then gay leaders. It is the height of irony that Trump’s secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, was perhaps the key scouting official responsible for pushing the national organization to end its discriminatory ways. That led the Mormon Church, a major force within scouting, to pull out of two programs for older boys. Unfortunately, scouting continues to discriminate against atheists, as its admirable embrace of boys of all faiths does not extend to those of no faith.

Will scouting endure? Long before Trump’s speech, that was a question with no certain answer. Membership has been declining for years. Uniforms, camping, and hiking have long since given way to youth sports and other activities. The great thing about scouts is that it accommodated all kinds of kids, including those who didn’t fit in elsewhere. To their credit, scouting’s national leaders have slowly been moving into the 21st century. Trump’s speech, though, was a huge setback, and it’s going to take a long time for the movement to recover.

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Obama’s choices: Making sense of The Washington Post’s big exclusive

Earlier today I did some tweeting on the bad choices that then-president Barack Obama faced over Russian meddling in the election — the major theme of The Washington Post’s astonishing exclusive. I’ve pulled my tweets into what Twitter calls a Moment. Please have a look.

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Stat, Trump and the ethics of speculating about a president’s health

Click on image for Stat article and playable video.

Is President Trump quite literally losing his mind?

That’s the explosive question that reporter Sharon Begley asked in a recent article published by Stat, a Boston Globe Media-owned website covering health and life sciences. In comparing Trump’s speech patterns today with how he spoke 25 to 30 years ago, Begley and the experts she consulted found a notable slide in his linguistic abilities.

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