These people are fukking untrustworthy 
I tried to tell yall:
The Problem With Calling Trump a Racist
By focusing on the president's racism – and disregarding his greed – Democrats risk casting the president as a false prophet for white Americans
1 day ago
Donald Trump is not an ideologue; he's a plutocrat Mark Wilson/Getty
Last week, several major news outlets validated a sentiment long-held by many Americans when they announced, finally, that Trump is racist. The admission marks the end of the gas lighting Americans of color (and our like-minded allies) have experienced since the start of his campaign. But although this feels like progress, the new headlines feed into an old and dangerous narrative that has persisted since before the 2016 election: namely, that highlighting Trump's racism is a strategic boon.
The view that a racial lens is the best way to see and understand the Trump phenomenon is popular among many of the country’s most esteemed thinkers. Ta-Nehisi Coates has emphasized what he perceives to be Trump’s unique exploitation of race by dubbing him our “First White President.” More recently, Charles Blow characterized Trump as “The Lowest White Man” in a piece for the New York Times – focusing on how the gap between Trump’s inadequacy and Obama’s exceptionalism evinces a society that demands more from those to whom less is given, while casting the successes of a rich kid like Trump as proof of the power of meritocracy.
Both explorations are thoughtful in their analysis of racial trends. But these narratives only tell a partial story. In failing to incorporate a class analysis, writers and political analysts risk unwittingly cultivating a harmful mythology: that Trump represents the best interests of white Americans.
Of course, I understand why Trump’s presidency is increasingly defined by its relationship to race and racism. Trump glided into the 2016 presidential contest on the twin engines of a golden escalator and the Southern Strategy – signaling his antagonism toward non-white interests by flagging Mexican immigrants as an existential threat to American (read: white) purity.
Yet Trump is no ideologue. His antipathy for people of color has never indicated an affinity for the needs of white voters in general. While his policy prescriptions benefit wealthy (yes, predominately white) Americans, his efforts to help the white working class are relegated to lip service and unfulfilled promises. His pledge to not “let people die in the streets” was forgotten in the zeal to first repeal and then replace Obamacare, and his promise to bring jobs back from overseas has been revealed as a sham – the Carrier plant Trump famously “saved” continues to lay off workers. Even Steve Bannon, perhaps the only true believer among Trump’s team of advisors, has been ousted. Gone is the man who fought for a 44 percent marginal tax rate for the 1 percent. In are the (liti)gaters of the so called “swamp,” along with a massive tax cut for corporations and the superrich.
Such being the case, it seems clear that while Trump is a racist, he is no zealot. Instead, it seems more apt to describe him as a plutocrat.
mercenary in kind. He has explicitly mocked the idea of a “poor” person joining his cabinet, and it can even be argued that Trump chose riches over racism when he claimed Oprah Winfrey as his dream vice presidential candidate back in the Nineties. A man so invested in status that he named his son “Baron,” Trump’s place in the public imagination is bookmarked by brassy bold letters, rococo interiors and glitzy excess in lieu of genuine taste. Lest his milieu be in doubt, Trump announced his candidacy in the lobby of one of his opulent towers mere yards away from the flagship location of Tiffany’s Jewelers – the namesake of another of his children.
Greed is such a central motivating thread for Trump, that it may even be the cause of his undoing, as the Mueller investigation reportedly subpoenas his international banking records, and Democrats continue to investigate the possibility of using the emoluments clause to impeach him.
But despite his governance of grift, the mainstream left has committed to a narrative in which Trump is defined predominately by his racial antagonism. He’s our “first white president.” The “lowest white man.” Similarly, his supporters, who certainly should be criticized for being, at best, indifferent to Trump’s racism, are painted as motivated solely by racial animus rather than the blend of economic populism and bigotry that has long been used to foment a potent nativist anxiety.
In fact, to a significant number of liberals, the idea that a populist economic strategy should be integrated alongside a more race-forward approach represents a betrayal of anti-racist ideals. Some writers, like Nikole Hannah-Jones – a brilliant authority on matters relating to race and social justice – are outwardly hostile to the idea that economics could have played any role in Trump’s ascendency, tweeting recently that “so many in the media and academia look foolish for saying Trump won because of economic anxiety. . . . It was always race. Always.”
In his much respected, widely circulated piece on the Trump phenomenon, the Atlantic's Adam Serwer went so far as to attack the premise of economic anxiety itself. Arguing that, unlike whites who voted for Trump, voters of color suffered “a genuine economic calamity in the decade before Trump’s election,” Serwer suggests that Trump voters were somehow immune to the devastation of the recession. Although the recession disproportionally affected people of color, it absolutely was calamitous for Americans of all hues.
To be clear: I don’t think these writers, who are generally quite sensitive and humanistic in their approach, believe white Americans are actuallyimpervious to economic harm. But it’s important to draw attention to the ways in which our liberal language increasingly pushes the idea that anti-blackness and pro-whiteness are always in diametric opposition, leaving no space for forms of oppression which subjugate subsets of both groups.
In “The Lowest White Man,” Blow begins to move in what I feel to be the right direction – recognizing the role racism has played in dividing the poor and preserving power for the wealthy. He even quotes Lyndon B. Johnson’s prescient warning that “if you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket.” But Blow ignores that at the center of President Johnson’s observation is an acknowledgment that those who use racism to accrue power often do not represent the best interests of white Americans, but wealthy Americans. Instead of considering the class implications at play, Blow characterizes Trumpism as “a religion founded on patriarchy and white supremacy.” Dave Chappelle came much closer to the real dynamic in a much-quoted riff from his newest Netflix comedy special: Trump isn’t fighting for poor whites, he observed; “[Trump]’s fighting for me,” a millionaire who, incidentally, is black.
wrongly) assumed would follow, and the correspondingly higher value of his Central Park-facing properties. The housing discrimination for which Trump is famous was enabled by a lack of fundamental respect for black renters, yes, but it was also likely motivated, in part, by a desire to extract the maximum fees from his properties. Trump wrote off entire nations as “shythole countries,” but while those “shytholes” were uniformly brown, it strains credulity to believe that he would have made a stink about wealthy, non-white nations like Japan or Saudi Arabia. Even Eric Trump’s foot-in-mouth defense of his father’s racism speaks some truth to power: “My father,” he says, “sees one color: green. That’s all he cares about.”
It seems Trump’s true religion is not racism, as Blow diagnosed it, but avarice.
As Coates has persuasively written, the “tightly intertwined stories of the white working class and black Americans go back to the prehistory of the Untied States – and the use of one as a cudgel to silence the claims of the other goes back nearly as far.” Acknowledging the combined motives of racism and greed does nothing to diminish the cruelty of Trump’s bigotry – no more than acknowledging that slaves represented economic capital to antebellum whites minimizes the essential moral imperative of the Civil War.
I tried to tell yall:
The Problem With Calling Trump a Racist
By focusing on the president's racism – and disregarding his greed – Democrats risk casting the president as a false prophet for white Americans
1 day ago
Donald Trump is not an ideologue; he's a plutocrat Mark Wilson/Getty
Last week, several major news outlets validated a sentiment long-held by many Americans when they announced, finally, that Trump is racist. The admission marks the end of the gas lighting Americans of color (and our like-minded allies) have experienced since the start of his campaign. But although this feels like progress, the new headlines feed into an old and dangerous narrative that has persisted since before the 2016 election: namely, that highlighting Trump's racism is a strategic boon.
The view that a racial lens is the best way to see and understand the Trump phenomenon is popular among many of the country’s most esteemed thinkers. Ta-Nehisi Coates has emphasized what he perceives to be Trump’s unique exploitation of race by dubbing him our “First White President.” More recently, Charles Blow characterized Trump as “The Lowest White Man” in a piece for the New York Times – focusing on how the gap between Trump’s inadequacy and Obama’s exceptionalism evinces a society that demands more from those to whom less is given, while casting the successes of a rich kid like Trump as proof of the power of meritocracy.
Both explorations are thoughtful in their analysis of racial trends. But these narratives only tell a partial story. In failing to incorporate a class analysis, writers and political analysts risk unwittingly cultivating a harmful mythology: that Trump represents the best interests of white Americans.
Of course, I understand why Trump’s presidency is increasingly defined by its relationship to race and racism. Trump glided into the 2016 presidential contest on the twin engines of a golden escalator and the Southern Strategy – signaling his antagonism toward non-white interests by flagging Mexican immigrants as an existential threat to American (read: white) purity.
Yet Trump is no ideologue. His antipathy for people of color has never indicated an affinity for the needs of white voters in general. While his policy prescriptions benefit wealthy (yes, predominately white) Americans, his efforts to help the white working class are relegated to lip service and unfulfilled promises. His pledge to not “let people die in the streets” was forgotten in the zeal to first repeal and then replace Obamacare, and his promise to bring jobs back from overseas has been revealed as a sham – the Carrier plant Trump famously “saved” continues to lay off workers. Even Steve Bannon, perhaps the only true believer among Trump’s team of advisors, has been ousted. Gone is the man who fought for a 44 percent marginal tax rate for the 1 percent. In are the (liti)gaters of the so called “swamp,” along with a massive tax cut for corporations and the superrich.
Such being the case, it seems clear that while Trump is a racist, he is no zealot. Instead, it seems more apt to describe him as a plutocrat.
mercenary in kind. He has explicitly mocked the idea of a “poor” person joining his cabinet, and it can even be argued that Trump chose riches over racism when he claimed Oprah Winfrey as his dream vice presidential candidate back in the Nineties. A man so invested in status that he named his son “Baron,” Trump’s place in the public imagination is bookmarked by brassy bold letters, rococo interiors and glitzy excess in lieu of genuine taste. Lest his milieu be in doubt, Trump announced his candidacy in the lobby of one of his opulent towers mere yards away from the flagship location of Tiffany’s Jewelers – the namesake of another of his children.
Greed is such a central motivating thread for Trump, that it may even be the cause of his undoing, as the Mueller investigation reportedly subpoenas his international banking records, and Democrats continue to investigate the possibility of using the emoluments clause to impeach him.
But despite his governance of grift, the mainstream left has committed to a narrative in which Trump is defined predominately by his racial antagonism. He’s our “first white president.” The “lowest white man.” Similarly, his supporters, who certainly should be criticized for being, at best, indifferent to Trump’s racism, are painted as motivated solely by racial animus rather than the blend of economic populism and bigotry that has long been used to foment a potent nativist anxiety.
In fact, to a significant number of liberals, the idea that a populist economic strategy should be integrated alongside a more race-forward approach represents a betrayal of anti-racist ideals. Some writers, like Nikole Hannah-Jones – a brilliant authority on matters relating to race and social justice – are outwardly hostile to the idea that economics could have played any role in Trump’s ascendency, tweeting recently that “so many in the media and academia look foolish for saying Trump won because of economic anxiety. . . . It was always race. Always.”
In his much respected, widely circulated piece on the Trump phenomenon, the Atlantic's Adam Serwer went so far as to attack the premise of economic anxiety itself. Arguing that, unlike whites who voted for Trump, voters of color suffered “a genuine economic calamity in the decade before Trump’s election,” Serwer suggests that Trump voters were somehow immune to the devastation of the recession. Although the recession disproportionally affected people of color, it absolutely was calamitous for Americans of all hues.
To be clear: I don’t think these writers, who are generally quite sensitive and humanistic in their approach, believe white Americans are actuallyimpervious to economic harm. But it’s important to draw attention to the ways in which our liberal language increasingly pushes the idea that anti-blackness and pro-whiteness are always in diametric opposition, leaving no space for forms of oppression which subjugate subsets of both groups.
In “The Lowest White Man,” Blow begins to move in what I feel to be the right direction – recognizing the role racism has played in dividing the poor and preserving power for the wealthy. He even quotes Lyndon B. Johnson’s prescient warning that “if you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket.” But Blow ignores that at the center of President Johnson’s observation is an acknowledgment that those who use racism to accrue power often do not represent the best interests of white Americans, but wealthy Americans. Instead of considering the class implications at play, Blow characterizes Trumpism as “a religion founded on patriarchy and white supremacy.” Dave Chappelle came much closer to the real dynamic in a much-quoted riff from his newest Netflix comedy special: Trump isn’t fighting for poor whites, he observed; “[Trump]’s fighting for me,” a millionaire who, incidentally, is black.
wrongly) assumed would follow, and the correspondingly higher value of his Central Park-facing properties. The housing discrimination for which Trump is famous was enabled by a lack of fundamental respect for black renters, yes, but it was also likely motivated, in part, by a desire to extract the maximum fees from his properties. Trump wrote off entire nations as “shythole countries,” but while those “shytholes” were uniformly brown, it strains credulity to believe that he would have made a stink about wealthy, non-white nations like Japan or Saudi Arabia. Even Eric Trump’s foot-in-mouth defense of his father’s racism speaks some truth to power: “My father,” he says, “sees one color: green. That’s all he cares about.”
It seems Trump’s true religion is not racism, as Blow diagnosed it, but avarice.
As Coates has persuasively written, the “tightly intertwined stories of the white working class and black Americans go back to the prehistory of the Untied States – and the use of one as a cudgel to silence the claims of the other goes back nearly as far.” Acknowledging the combined motives of racism and greed does nothing to diminish the cruelty of Trump’s bigotry – no more than acknowledging that slaves represented economic capital to antebellum whites minimizes the essential moral imperative of the Civil War.
