Trump’s Racism Is A Dead End.

As far as I can tell, we are the only democracy which isn’t a parliamentary system. And the problem when your choice at the ballot box is limited to two parties, is that you either win or you lose. There’s no in between.

If there was an in between, you could play a role, indeed an important role in politics even if you didn’t win. But that’s not true in America. You either count for something or you count for nothing. As Grandpa would say, “prust und prushit,” (read: that’s all there is.)

I say this because I still can’t figure out how Trump could have come out of 2016 knowing that he won only because he beat Hillary by 2/10ths of one percent in the total votes cast in three states (Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin) and then run such a stupid campaign last year.

Why was it stupid? Because you don’t run a national campaign by making enemies of Jeff Bezos and Anthony Fauci. You just don’t.

Yesterday, I saw an Amazon ad on TV. It was a guy, obviously a recent immigrant and a Muslim, who works in an Amazon warehouse and started off by talking about how he lost both his brother and his mother this year and what got him through those tragedies the care and support from his Amazon workmates.

Then the narrative switched, the music and mood became less somber, and the guy started talking about how Amazon was now paying his tuition so that he could become a nurse.

The second TV spot I then happened to see was part of a CNN interview with Fauci in which he said, in his quiet and steady voice, that he hoped discussions about public health wouldn’t be politicized again because we all needed to work together to defeat Covid-19.

How could Donald Trump go into a re-election campaign without using the digital sales approach of Jeff Bezos as a way to keep the economy going while getting everyone to practice social distancing at the same time? How could Trump attack Anthony Fauci and call him a liar when doctors are the only people we really trust?

I’m going to answer those two questions by pushing out a theory which may be correct but may also be all wet. You be the judge, okay?

I am convinced, but I may be wrong, that the way Trump views the world and his place within the world is through one prism and one prism alone, namely, the prism of race. In a word, he isn’t just an unmitigated racist, he’s a racialist. In other words, he’s not just someone who holds beliefs that one race is superior to other races; he consciously promotes racial bigotry in the public square.

Yesterday, more than 70 employees of the State Department sent a letter to Secretary of State Blinken, asking him to remove an employee who posts openly anti-Semitic statements on a public website. This is what his website says is the reason for its existence: “Building Christian Nations to replace the decaying rubble of our modern Babel.”

His sermon this past Sunday was “dedicated to the Jews.” And like many of his public statements, this racist rants and raves about how America will be ‘destroyed’ unless White (read: Christians) people save the country from being taken over by ‘sub-species’ like Jews.

When did this character first start working for the State Department? In 2017. Think this guy was the only openly racist asshole to get a job in the Executive branch under Trump? At least three positions were filled by contributors to Breitbart and other alt-right media venues, including a feature writer for WorldNetDaily, known for its early and enthusiastic promotion of the idea that Obama was born outside the United States.

It would be bad enough if Trump doesn’t actually believe this racist crap but only uses it to cynically build his political base and stay in the race. But I think it goes far beyond that. When he began referring to Covid-19 as the ‘kung flu,’ it was clear, at least to me, that his basic political instincts were developed and honed while sitting on a bar stool in some joint in Richmond Hill, Queens.

Know what they used to talk about in those joints when Trump was growing up? They talked about the Mets, the Jets, and how to keep ‘the element’ from moving into the neighborhood.

But most of that kind of talk was passive; the language simply let everyone in the joint know that you belonged there too. It wasn’t meant to get people all pissed off; it wasn’t meant to get them to drive down to Washington, D.C. and run up the Capitol steps on January 6th.

Which is why I said above that Trump isn’t just a racist. He’s a racialist because he consciously uses racism to promote racial violence by Whites against non-Whites.

I happen to have a very thin skin for such behavior because my grandmother saw her father, my great-grandfather, shot down in the street outside of their home during a 1919 pogrom. And that pogrom took place because someone like Trump got a bunch of Cossacks together that morning and told them to go kill the Jews.

I’m not saying that Trump’s racism will ever lead to the kind of violence in this country that erupts in other, less-developed places throughout the globe. This country is too wealthy, too stable, and too law-abiding for that kind of violence to occur. With all due respect to the five people who died during and after the January 6th riot, only one of them was actually killed by an assault during the event. That’s hardly what happened in my grandmother’s little village outside of Kiev which was entirely wiped out. Our family cemetery in Elmont, Long Island, has a memorial which lists the names of more than 40 people killed that day.

What makes someone either become a racialist or believe what a racialist says? What makes an entire nation or nearly an entire society believe racialist ideas? And I think the answer to that question, which is hardly an original thought on my behalf, is that we are all afraid of things we don’t understand, and we are particularly afraid of human beings we don’t understand because they are different from us.

Or as Eli Wiesel once said to me, “it’s a fear of the other.”

For all his braggadocio and bullshit, Donald Trump certainly exhibits that kind of fear. It’s the schoolyard bully in him, par excellence. Bu here’s the good news.

In this country, when it comes to racial differences, the ‘other’ is becoming the norm. The 2020 Census indicates that Whites now constitute 57.8% of the country’s population, with 15 states already below that threshold, with another 5 states joining that group within the next year. And I’m not talking about states like Vermont, North Dakota and Maine that don’t have any people. I’m talking about states like California, Georgia, Florida, Texas, and New York, which together count more than one-third of the total population of the United States.

If someone like that idiot who works for the State Department wants to keep America as a White country, I suggest he form a new country out of some Midwestern and Mountain states, because those places will be the only majority-White locations within the next, few years.

And that’s the reason why Trump’s racialism not only cost him his re-election but makes his so-called 2024 campaign a dead end.

Know who was the only Presidential candidate to get on the national ballot eight years after he first ran? Grover Cleveland, who won the popular vote both times.

I’d like to see Trump as the GOP Presidential candidate in 2024 because he would get clobbered even more than the last time around.

That’s not such a bad idea.