The danger of a Trump campaign on a losing trajectory

Gore Vidal was correct when he damningly observed that the American people do not have a memory of the last week. “We are the United States of Amnesia," the famed novelist concluded. "We learn nothing because we remember nothing.” Given America’s state of hyperpolitics, the black hole that is the attention economy spurned on the 24/7 news media, and a public that is not able to concentrate longer than a goldfish, Vidal now looks much too generous.

This absence of memory is especially true for White America and its understanding, or lack thereof, of the realities of the color line and its impact on America’s past and present. The real and complex history of the United States, and how it was and continues to be shaped by racism and white supremacy is systemically whitewashed and distorted in the nation's schools and culture. This is a form of psychological and emotional abuse for Black and brown people whose history and life experiences are erased in service of protecting white privilege and the many lies that sustain it.

Such acts of racial erasure eventually damage the minds, morals and ethics of white people — and in particular white children. As such it is a threat to American democracy. It is an attempt to deny the American people the lessons of the Black Freedom Struggle and Civil Rights Movement, two of the most successful pro-democracy movements in U.S. history. 

White America simultaneously practices a type of selective remembering that is grounded in an eternal present where the complex history of the country and the color line are flattened and distorted. In this narrative, there are great men like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. who showed up, read a speech, were assassinated, and then robbed of their radicalism as they were inducted into the high pantheon of American heroes — and then somehow “the race problem” was solved. The election of President Barack Obama is cited as further so-called proof that racism and white supremacy were mostly vanquished in the country. In the Age of Trump, the long arc of history has been twisted and distorted to such an extreme that it is now white people who are supposedly the “real” victims of “racism” in America and not Black and brown people. There is no substantive evidence to support such fantasies of white victimology.

Ultimately, because the American people (specifically many white people and those mercenary Black and brown people who are invested in accessing the privileges of whiteness) live a selective relationship to history — where the past is almost like a motherless child or orphan — they possess a limited ability to confront the many great challenges we are facing as a country. Thus, the American people and their political elites are unable to effectively respond to Trumpism and the neofascist-white authoritarian movement because they still believe in the fiction of American exceptionalism and that fascism is something “over there” rather than homegrown.

In one of the most recent and dangerous examples of how America’s organized forgetting along the color line has negatively impacted our public discourse and politics, Donald Trump, his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, and the other mouthpieces and agents of the MAGA neofascist movement, are now claiming that Black Haitian refugees in Springfield, Ohio are eating white people’s dogs and cats and presumably other pets as well.

The mainstream news media and political class — and many among the general public — are responding with shock and disgust that Trump and his agents would traffic in such obvious white supremacist and racist conspiracy theories that are dehumanizing and inciting violence against innocent people. However, alongside that disgust and outrage is a general failure to understand how these attacks against the Haitian community – which are auxiliary to the larger campaign of racism and misogyny against Kamala Harris — are part of a much older history of white supremacy and racist conspiracy theories and violence in America.

First and most importantly: there is no evidence to support this racist fear-mongering about Haitians in Springfield (or the United States more broadly). To that point, JD Vance has all but admitted that his claims that Haitian refugees are eating (white) people’s pets are not true. But the facts and the truth have little meaning or importance for racists and white supremacists because their ideology and beliefs are based on the twin lies of the race concept and that race is a real thing. Those people deemed to be “white” are thought to be somehow inherently superior to non-whites.

Racist conspiracy theories and rumors about Black and brown immigrants eating white people’s pets have a long history. Such lies are routinely circulated by white supremacists and other racists and nativists when there are changes, real or perceived, in the country’s racial and ethnic demographics.

Springfield, like other parts of the country, has a history of anti-black violence including lynchings. 11 African-Americans were lynched in Springfield, Ohio between 1902 and 1904, as leading sociologist Joe Feagin explained:

Historically, Springfield, Ohio, like other U.S. cities, has experienced major racial conflict and segregation tracing back to the city’s early 1900s race riots. White riots in 1904, 1906, and especially in 1908 were motivated by white efforts to "cleanse" the city of its growing Black immigrant population. Across many northern cities, violent white riots were part of a major backlash against Black Americans migrating in the thousands from the oppressive Jim Crow South during the famous “Great Migration” era (early 1900s) to seek much better socioeconomic opportunities. 

The 1908 Springfield riot was particularly savage. Beginning as an attempt to lynch Black men falsely accused of crimes, when a white lynch mob discovered these men had been moved away, they took out their racist rage on the city’s Black community, destroying businesses and homes and killing several other Black men. This early white violence was followed by much racial segregation and discrimination in the city that targeted the Black community.

Certain neo-Nazi groups have racially targeted Springfield, starting the false claim that Haitian immigrants there are eating pets, a phony claim picked up and used by GOP politicians like Trump and Vance in public statements. Unsurprisingly, as the Southern Poverty Law Center reports, the state of Ohio is a major home for numerous hate groups like these neo-Nazis.

Today the Republican Party has become good at racialized political opportunism and exploitation of white racial fears. Sadly, the racist framing of hardworking Haitian immigrants seeking hope for their families in Springfield by politicians Trump and Vance is dramatically demonstrative of the deep systemic white racism persisting in this society.

Phillip Dray, author of "A Lynching at Port Jervis: Race and Reckoning in the Gilded Age," offered this historical context for the racist lie that Haitians are eating pets in Springfield and concluded that the city's immigrant-led economic resurgence "is a glimpse of the functioning multi-ethnic, multi-racial future they most fear":   

One thing I've been reminded of during the current Springfield situation is the response of Black anti-lynching crusaders to the lynching scourge of the post-Reconstruction era, that at its deepest level, it represented not whites' fear of Black crime or sexual transgression, which was sensationalized and exaggerated, so much as the opposite, white resentment of the political and economic progress Black people had made, along with their increased social mobility.  

Today, the faux claims that Haitian immigrants are eating white people's pets seem to speak of a final desperate phase, much as Southern whites in Reconstruction, as Frederick Douglass argued, first fought imagined Black insurrection, then turned to securing white control of the ballot, and eventually to the fiction that Black men were sexually assaulting white women.  

What truly disturbs JD Vance and other dubiously concerned whites is that what is actually taking place in Springfield — a successful integration of Black immigrant workers and their families into a struggling Rust Belt city — is a welcome development that local white officials characterize as a "resurgence."  For white supremacists like Vance and Trump, however, it is a glimpse of the functioning multi-ethnic, multi-racial future they most fear.  

As a direct result of Trump and Vance’s and MAGA World’s lies and provocations (which now include the lie that Haitians are disease and plague carriers who are spreading HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis), there have been several days of bomb threats and other terrorist threats targeting the Haitian community in Springfield (and non-whites more generally). White racist street thugs have also been seen marching in the streets of Springfield. The situation is so combustible that the mayor of Springfield has invoked his emergency powers.

In a speech last week in Tucson, Arizona, Donald Trump, a man who has been determined to be a sex abuser by a court of law, launched into a lurid fantasy "about young American girls being raped and sodomized and murdered by savage criminal aliens.” At a rally in Uniondale, New York on Wednesday, Trump was even more explicit:

For every New Yorker being terrorized by this wave of migrant crime, and I’ve been talking about migrant crime for five years. I said, if you let them in, it’s going to be hell. They are vicious, violent criminals that are being led into our country, their people that their countries, who are very smart, they don’t want them. That’s why, all over the world, a lot of people coming from jails, out of the Congo in Africa.

‘Where do you come from?’ ‘The Congo...Where in the Congo?’ ‘We come from jail.’ ‘What did you do?’ ‘We will not tell you’”....“They’re coming from the Congo. They’re coming from Africa. They’re coming from the Middle East. They’re coming from all over the world, Asia, lot of it coming from Asia, and what’s happening to our country is we’re just destroying the fabric of life in our country, and we’re not going to take it any longer. And you got to get rid of these people. Give me a shot. You will have a safe New York within three months. Three months.....For every New Yorker being terrorized by this wave of migrant crime, November 5 will be your Liberation Day. It’s going to be liberation because you are living like hell. You’re living a life like hell.

Leonce Gaiter, author of "A Memory of Fictions," explained the following about Trump and his MAGA movement’s race-baiting and appeals to white racial violence and vigilantism:

A Trump campaign on a losing trajectory leans on its main appeals — race hatred and white supremacy. Trump’s and Vance’s blatant lies about Haitians in Springfield are an invitation for their white supporters to revel in their collective revulsion at dark-skinned immigrants and Black people in general. It’s a MAGA team-building exercise. It supports their power to spin lies with impunity while reinforcing Trump’s status as vortex of white grievance-as-religion, as well as white, Christian, male dominance and contempt for everyone else as a political platform.

Trump’s lynching and white vigilantism appeals are part of his strategy of eliminationist rhetoric about non-white migrants, immigrants, and “illegal aliens” where he promises, like Hitler, to purify the blood of the nation by purging the human vermin.

Philosopher and facism expert Jason Stanley warned of the evil and destruction that awaits if Trump and his agents continue with such provocations and incitements to racial and ethnic violence:

Dehumanizing rhetoric has become so normalized in US politics that it has become easy to ignore it. In the lead up to the Rwandan genocide, Tutsis became used to being called snakes and cockroaches. They did not expect what this vocabulary prefigured for their lives.

Now, we face from the Republican candidate for President, Donald Trump, straightforwardly genocidal speech about non-white immigrants, together with very real Nazi like threats of deportation, “remigration,” and explicit descriptions of concentration camps.

Is there any country in history where such talk has not led to widespread state atrocities, along a continuum that ends in Rwanda? When will Americans listen to history to understand what will happen?

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Trump has also been mining America’s white supremacist and racist past for narcissistic and political energy and momentum by holding his rallies in what are known as “sundown towns.”  These are white communities, as identified by the late historian James Loewen and other experts and activists, where, by law and/or custom, Black people (and in other regions of the country Mexicans, Hispanics, Asians, and First Nations peoples) were not allowed to be in the city or town limits at night. In many sundown towns, these restrictions also included not being allowed to live, buy homes, or even travel through the community at any time of the day. Black and brown people who violated these rules would be subjected to prison, fines, physical violence, and other forms of abuse and even death.

Sundown towns were also maintained as all or nearly all-white spaces through pogroms and ethnic cleansing campaigns. It is estimated that dozens if not hundreds of Black communities were destroyed by such acts of white terrorism and mob activity. American society remains highly race and class segregated. That is the legacy of sundown towns. 

"Although Springfield, Ohio was not officially a 'sundown town,'" Joe Feagin notes, "it came close to this definition as evidenced by the white race riots and other aggressive white efforts to maintain an all-white Springfield."

When Trump and his agents dream of “Making America Great Again” and fighting back against how white people are victims of “reverse racism” that are being “replaced” in their “own country” by non-whites who are “stealing elections” through non-existent voter fraud this is the social order he and they want to restore.

Donald Trump’s base of support is rock solid and remains at 47 percent. Trump's strategy of racism and white supremacy on steroids has not hurt him among his base. Moreover, Trump and the Republican fascists have suffered few political penalties for their racist and white supremacist language, behavior, and policies — and their general contempt for multiracial and pluralistic democracy. White racism and white racial resentment remain very powerful forces in American life and politics and Donald Trump, his MAGAfied Republicans, and the “conservatives” and larger right wing are using such beliefs and values to get and keep power in a country that is increasingly rejecting their policies and vision.

On this, Wright Thompson, author of the new book "The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi," made a provocative comparison:

The political rhetoric of August and September 2024 in America reads eerily like a transcript of the political rhetoric of August and September 1955 in Mississippi. Most everyone knows the price Emmett Till paid for whistling on a summer Wednesday night. What almost no one knows is that the day before was Election Day, the culmination of a Mississippi governor's campaign marked by violent rhetoric and fear mongering. Ambitious humans with no sense of ethics or shame, in both parties, have long said whatever it took to win votes. And ordinary people have paid, and let us not forget collected, a price for those words and votes.

The mainstream American news media, what Eli Mystal describes as “the white media” is mostly unwilling to strongly, consistently, and forcefully condemn Trump and his followers’ and enablers’ (and the Republican Party and “conservative” movement’s) racism and white supremacy because of white defensiveness/white racial fragility where the bar for accurately describing white racist behavior by politicians and other public figures is set so high that it is almost unreachable by any standard of evidence. Instead, public discussions of racist and white supremacist behavior and values all too often default to silly, vacuous, and intellectually immature discussions of intent and what is in some white person’s heart or bones. In all, racism and white supremacy are not just bad behavior or bad intentions. A mature and serious understanding of racism and white supremacy focuses on actual outcomes, public policies, impact, structures, and institutions that unfairly privilege and advantage white people over non-whites. Intent and mean words have little to nothing to do with it.

Donald Trump, his MAGA movement, and the other neofascists are enemies of multiracial pluralistic democracy and the good society. In practice, this means that they are enemies of real democracy and human rights, freedom, equality, and dignity. This is the story that the mainstream news media, Kamala Harris, and the country’s responsible political class need to be telling. They now have less than 60 days before Election Day to do so if they want to stop Dictator Trump and his authoritarian movement from taking power and inflicting great pain on Americans on both sides of the color line.