“Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.”
—James Baldwin
The militarization of U.S. culture meshes seamlessly with the machineries of war that enable the United States to ring the world with its military bases, maintain vast stockpiles of weapons, deploy thousands of troops all over the globe, and retain the shameful title of “the world’s preeminent exporter of arms, [controlling] more than 50 percent of the global weaponry market.”1 Forces of militarization and war provide an array of platforms with the capacity to produce spectacles of violence, a culture of fear, ultra-masculine ideologies, and armed policies that give violence legitimacy. Under such circumstances, the pretense of national security enables authorities to redirect resources away from institutions dedicated to the public interest and the common good.
Under the Trump regime, armed power is being elevated as the preeminent measure of national greatness. While soldiers and war have long been central to Americana, militarized culture is now being sutured into the very tissue of everyday life in the United States. Trump’s celebration of militarization as the highest of America’s ideals was evident in his speech to a joint session of Congress when he stated: “To those allies who wonder what kind of friend America will be, look no further than the heroes who wear our uniform.”2 The irony here lies in the gesture of a helping hand that hides the investment in and threat of an aggressive militarism. Needless to say, such militarism is on full display as Trump undermines the sophisticated work of statecraft in favor of taunting his enemies with public threats to “totally destroy” them.
Police brutality and impunity seem to rouse little ethical and moral concern among much of the American public. Under Trump, such behavior appears to be officially condoned. How else to explain Trump’s comment, without irony or remorse, during a campaign rally in Iowa that he “could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot someone and not lose any voters”? How else to explain his July 2017 instructions to law enforcement officers not to be “too nice” to criminal suspects? Trump’s remarks immediately prompted the acting head of the Drug Enforcement Administration, Chuck Rosenberg, to send a memo to all DEA agents and officers not to mistreat suspects. Disgusted with Trump, Rosenberg then announced his resignation.3
Falsehood and retribution appear to be key strategies in Trump’s only-winning-matters approach to politics and his bumper-sticker promise to “Make America Great Again.” Taken with his distorted call for “law and order”—a code for a strengthening of the police state—it limns the outline of a militant authoritarian regime taking shape.4 David Leonhardt, writing for the New York Times, has argued that “Democracy is not possible without the rule of law” and that Trump appears to have nothing but contempt for the principle.5
As president of the United States, Trump has attempted to politicize law enforcement by undermining the protected space between the Department of Justice and the White House. For Trump, unmitigated loyalty appears to be the only important factor in shaping his relationship with other branches of government. Such actions are well established among fascist dictators. Trump’s emphasis on loyalty was particularly evident in the ways Trump pressured FBI director James Comey to back off his investigations into Michael Flynn and other members of Trump’s inner circle, and in Trump’s subsequent dismissal of Comey. As Jennifer Rubin has noted: “Trump’s insistence on personal loyalty bolsters Comey’s claim that Trump demanded the same of him. It also reveals an intent to remove or interfere with the Justice Department’s actions, as if it were his personal law firm. The idea that the Justice Department should be protecting him and not the country goes to the essence of abuse of power.”6
Trump has publicly slandered almost every judge who has disagreed with him. He has publicly criticized Jeff Sessions, his attorney general, for recusing himself from the federal investigation into Russian covert operations and for appointing former FBI director Robert Mueller as special counsel for supervising the investigation.7 According to Trump, Sessions was partly criticized for not passing the loyalty test. As I have mentioned earlier, in Trump’s dysfunctional notion of governance, anyone who does not commit to a notion of total loyalty incurs his wrath. Loyalty in Trump’s regime simply means deference and subordination to go along with whatever the bossman says, even if it’s unethical, unconstitutional, or illegal.
Among Trump’s most flagrant expressions of his disregard for the law are his constant reference to a list of political enemies and his “openly calling for the Department of Justice, which he controls, to put his political opponents in jail,” a demand targeting Hillary Clinton, Huma Abedin, and James Comey, among others.8
In a blatant act of interference with a federal inquiry—what many consider an obstruction of justice—Trump has publicly criticized Mueller and his team, suggesting they should not investigate him, his family, or their intricate web of global financial holdings. In addition, Trump brazenly courts foreign businesses and governments “to speed up [Trump’s] trademark applications” while a ranking “senior administration official urges people to buy Ivanka Trump’s clothing.”9 And his violations of ethics laws appear to increase daily. Marjorie Cohn, the former president of the National Lawyers Guild, has gone so far as to claim that Trump is not only negligent in enforcing the law but has become a serial lawbreaker in his ongoing efforts to obstruct justice. She writes:
Six months after taking office, Donald Trump has demonstrated contempt for the rule of law. He has not only refused to enforce certain laws; he has become a serial lawbreaker himself and counseled others to violate the law. Trump is undermining Obamacare, which is currently the law of the land. He is advocating police brutality. Plus, he has illegally bombed Syria, killed large numbers of civilians in Iraq and Syria, instituted an unconstitutional Muslim Ban, violated the Emoluments Clause and obstructed justice.10
Taken as whole, Trump’s conduct signals not only the undermining of democracy, but the emergence of a quasi-fascist form of power. Trumpism is, as I stress throughout this book, the symptom of the long legacy of pro-corporate authoritarianism in the United States that waged its first frontal assault under Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, was embraced by the Third Way politics of the Democratic Party, and then solidified its power under the anti-democratic policies of the Bush-Cheney and Obama administrations. During this period, democracy was further undermined by bankers and big corporations, with power concentrated in the hands of a financial elite determined to ignore mechanisms of social justice achieved through the New Deal and the civil rights and education struggles of the 1960s. In the face of Trump’s bald authoritarianism, Democratic Party members and the liberal elite are trying to place themselves at the forefront of organized resistance. But it is difficult not to see their gestures of defiance as hypocritical in light of the role they have played during the last forty years in subverting democracy and throwing communities of color under the bus.
Consider who Trump has installed around him: elite billionaires such as Rex Tillerson (since fired), the former ExxonMobil CEO, as secretary of state; Steven Mnuchin, a banker and hedge fund manager, as his treasury secretary; Wilbur Ross, a billionaire investor, to head the Commerce Department and Amway heiress Betsy DeVos as secretary of education. Those worth millions include Ben Carson as secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Elaine Chao as secretary of Transportation, David Shulkin (since fired) as secretary of Veterans Affairs, and the list goes on. Such political curation makes clear that Trump intends to allow former managers of big banks, private corporations, and other major financial institutions to run the country’s economy. As Cornel West points out, these appointments serve to “reinforce corporate interest, big bank interest, and to keep track of those of who are cast as other—peoples of color, women, Jews, Arabs, Muslims, Mexicans, and so forth. . . . So this is one of the most frightening moments in the history of this very fragile empire and fragile republic.”11 On the other hand, Trump has filled a number of other high-level appointments with former military generals such as John Kelly as White House chief of staff, James Mattis (since fired) as secretary of defense, and H.R. McMaster as his national security advisor, all of them known as “warrior thinkers.”
Trump’s strongman posturing has become a vehicle for producing the kind of shallow sensationalism and self-promotion once used to market his commercial television program. With Trump, the truth is simply irrelevant. Under such circumstances, it is extremely difficult to grasp what he actually understands about complex situations. He steals words and discards their meaning, refusing to own up to them ethically, politically, and socially. There is a recklessness in Trump’s written and spoken utterances that pushes far beyond the bounds of rationality, potentially inciting the everyday fears and moral anxiety characteristic of an earlier period of fascism.
How else to explain his persistent claims that Barack Obama was not born in the United States, that climate change is a hoax, that terrorist attacks have taken place that no one knows about because they are covered up by the press, and that U.S. intelligence agencies are no different than the Nazis? Such conduct emulates the totalitarian claim not just to power, but to reality itself. With Trump, such claims are further coded with affirmations of white supremacy, ultra-nationalism, anti-intellectualism, and nuclear militancy. The American nightmare we are witnessing is the emergence of fascism in a new hybrid form.
The militarization of culture serves to connect the wars abroad with the ones being waged at home. This is an action-oriented mode of fascist ideology in which all thoughtfulness, critical thinking, and dissent are subordinated, if not cancelled out, by the pleasure quotient and commercialized sensationalism. Trump’s discourse feeds the cultural formation of a right-wing populism that weighs in on the side of a militant racism and a racist militarism. For instance, the only moments of clarity in Trump’s discourse occur when he uses the toxic vocabulary of hate, xenophobia, racism, and misogyny to target those he believes refuse to “Make America Great Again” or are critical of his use of historically fascist-tinged slogans such as “America First.” Trump’s racism has been on display for quite some time, and in January 2018 it emerged once again, provoking condemnation across the globe, when he referred to Haiti, El Salvador, and certain nations in Africa as “shithole countries.”12 These racist stabs followed earlier comments in which Trump said that Haitian immigrants “all have AIDS” and that Nigerian immigrants living in the United States would never “go back to their huts” in Africa.13 He went on to say that the United States should be accepting people from countries like Norway. These statements are reminiscent of those of fascist dictators in the 1930s. His remarks about accepting people from Norway are thinly veiled appeals to racial purity. This is a racist and white supremacist discourse that feeds off upheaval, political uncertainty, and economic precarity through an appeal to authoritarian ideals and policies that offer a fraudulent sense of reassurance and certainty that does little to mitigate doubts, feelings of exclusion, anger, and anxieties.14 This is language in the service of a racist police state.
Unapologetic Racism and Military Mania
As Trump’s presidency unfolds, it appears that Americans are entering a period in which civic formations and public spheres will be modeled after a state of perpetual warfare. More militant U.S. foreign policy can be expected abroad, while an intensification of economic warfare can be expected at home. Corporations will seek to deregulate, militarize, and privatize everything they can, and Trump will be there to help them irrespective of the consequences.
Trump’s open intolerance, which has targeted American citizens in addition to immigrants and refugees from foreign countries, has been accompanied by affirmations of white supremacy at home. As Chauncey DeVega points out in Salon,
Since the election of Donald Trump in November, there have been almost 1,000 reported hate crimes targeting Muslims, Arabs, African-Americans, Latinos and other people of color. At this same moment, there have been terrorist threats against Jewish synagogues and community centers as well as the vandalizing of Jewish cemeteries. These hate crimes have also resulted in physical harm and even death: An Indian immigrant was shot and killed by a white man in Kansas who reportedly told him, “Get out of my country.” [A] white man shot a Sikh man in Washington State after making a similar comment.15
Heidi Beirich, director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, has stated that the increase in hate crimes in the United States corresponded with Trump’s endless hate-filled discourse during the presidential primary, which included “xenophobic remarks, anti-immigrant remarks, anti-Muslim remarks, racist remarks, trading in anti-Semitic imagery and misogynist comments. Let’s not forget that during the campaign there were hate crimes committed—very severe ones—in Trump’s name.”16 Such violence and coded bigotry coincides with Trump’s symbolic embrace of the Andrew Jackson presidency. For African Americans and Native Americans, few periods of U.S. history were more miserable and violent than that of Trump’s great hero, President Andrew Jackson.
What is urgent to recognize is that Americans are entering a historical conjuncture under President Trump in which racism will be a major force used to rouse support and impose social control. As mentioned in previous chapters, not only did Trump make “law and order” a central motif of his presidential campaign, he also amplified its meaning in his attacks on the Black Lives Matter movement and his depiction of Black neighborhoods as cauldrons of criminal behavior, suggesting that the families who lived there be treated as enemies and criminals.
An especially disturbing sign can be found in the hiring a number of intolerant and racist ideologues to top White House posts. Some of the most egregious thus far have been the appointment of Jeff Sessions as attorney general, Betsy DeVos as secretary of education, Mike Pompeo to head the CIA, and Tom Price as secretary of Health and Human Services (who has now resigned after reports surfaced of him spending $1 million in taxpayer money for personal travel on private and military jets), all of whom promote policies that will further increase the misery, suffering, and policing of the vulnerable, ill, and impoverished Americans. Price’s appointment, given his abysmal record on women’s issues, left little doubt as to the war on women’s reproductive rights will worsen under Trump. As Sasha Bruce, senior vice president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, observed:
With the selection of Tom Price as secretary of Health and Human Services, Donald Trump is sending a clear signal that he intends to punish women who seek abortion care. Tom Price is someone who has made clear throughout his career that . . . he wants to punish us for the choices we make for our bodies, our futures, and our families.17
The racially repressive state will be intensified and expanded, especially under the ideological and political influence of Jeff Sessions. Sessions is a strong advocate of mass incarceration and the death penalty, and is considered a leading spokesperson for the Old South. The Nation’s Ari Berman observes that Sessions is a “white-nationalist sympathizer . . . the fiercest opponent in the Senate of immigration reform, a centerpiece of Trump’s agenda, and has a long history of opposition to civil rights, dating back to his days as a U.S. Attorney in Alabama in the 1980s.”18 Sessions’ extensive legacy of using racist language, insults, and practices includes speaking out against the Voting Rights Act and addressing a Black lawyer as “boy.”19 He was denied a federal judgeship in the 1980s because his colleagues claimed that he made, on a number of occasions, racist remarks. Sessions has also called organizations such as the ACLU, the NAACP, and the National Council of Churches “un-American” because of their emphasis on civil rights, which he believed were being shoved down the throats of the American public. He was also accused of falsely prosecuting Black political activists in Alabama for voting fraud. Not only does Sessions share Trump’s bigoted views of minority and foreign-born residents as “America’s chief internal threat,” he will also use the power of the Justice Department to issue orders “to strengthen the grip of law enforcement, raise barriers to voting and significantly reduce all forms of immigration, promoting what seems to be a long-standing desire to reassert the country’s European and Christian heritage.”20
Sessions’ racism often merges with his religious fundamentalism. As Miranda Blue observes, he has “dismissed immigration reform as ‘ethnic politics’ and warned that allowing too many immigrants would create ‘cultural problems’ in the country. Earlier this year, he cherry-picked a couple of Bible verses to claim that the position of his opponents on the immigration issue is ‘not biblical.’”21
As Andrew Kaczynski points out, Sessions made his religiously inspired racist principles clear while appearing in 2016 on the Matt & Aunie talk radio show. While on the program, Sessions praised Trump’s stance on capital punishment by pointing to Trump’s “1989 newspaper ads advocating the death penalty for five young men of color accused of raping a jogger in Central Park.”22 Sessions made these comments knowing full well that the Central Park Five were not only exonerated by DNA evidence after serving many years in jail, but were also awarded a wrongful conviction settlement that ran into millions of dollars. In doing so, Sessions would have been aware that Trump had later criticized the settlement, calling it a disgrace, while suggesting the Central Park Five were guilty of a crime for which they should not have been acquitted, in spite of the testimony of convicted felon Matias Reyes, who confessed to raping and attacking the victim, and the DNA evidence proving their innocence.
The ramifications of Sessions’ and Trump’s shared racism were made evident when Sessions stated in the same interview that Trump “believes in law and order and he has the strength and will to make this country safer. . . . The biggest benefits from that, really, are [for] poor people in the neighborhoods that are most dangerous where most of the crime is occurring.”23 Sessions’ statements barely conceal a full-on bigoted notion designating disadvantaged communities, mostly inhabited by people of color, as rife with crime.
Under Sessions, a racist militarism can be expected to proliferate as an organizing principle to stoke the fear of crime in order to increase the militarized presence of police in the inner cities. This is one part of a larger agenda that aims to reshape the country in alignment with the Jacksonian national security vision advanced by Trumpism. Another part of this reactionary agenda is to establish ways to restrict the voting rights of minorities. Trump’s tweets that falsely allege voter fraud in order to defend the ludicrous claim that he won the popular vote are ominous, because they suggest that in the future he will allow Sessions to make it more difficult for poor minorities to vote. As the rhetoric of lawlessness and war is applied to inner cities, it provides a rationale for redirecting funds toward policing and denying these communities much-needed economic and social reforms. Far from receiving benefits to aid the “poor,” these neighborhoods will be transformed into gun-filled, violence-ridden outposts and war zones subject to military solutions and forms of racial sorting and cleansing. How else to explain Trump’s call to deport millions of undocumented Mexican immigrants as a “military operation”?
Within the Trump regime, Sessions is far from an anomaly and only one of a number of prominent officials appointed by Trump who are overtly racist. These newly appointed Trumpists argue for everything from a Muslim registry and suppressing voter rights to producing social and economic policies that target immigrants and low-income communities of color. Of all Trump’s appointments, his initial choice of Stephen Bannon as senior counselor and chief strategist was possibly the most disturbing. Bannon is a devious and incendiary figure whom critics as politically diverse as Glenn Beck and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont have accused of being racist, sexist, and anti-Semitic. When he was the head of Breitbart News, Bannon openly courted white nationalists, neo-Nazi groups, and other right-wing extremists. In doing so, he not only provided a platform for the “alt-right,” but helped to rebrand “white supremacy [and] white nationalism for the digital age.”24 Bannon was fired by Breitbart because of remarks he made about the Trumps to Michael Wolff, the author of Fire and Fury.
Bannon is on record stating that only property owners should vote, saying to his ex-wife that he “did not want his twin daughters to go to school with Jews,” calling conservative commentator Bill Kristol a “Republican spoiler, renegade Jew,” and publishing inflammatory headlines on Breitbart such as “Birth control makes women unattractive and crazy.”25 Richard Cohen, the president of the Southern Poverty Law Center, states that Trump’s racist overtones during the election campaign were confirmed with Bannon’s appointment.26 And, of course, they became crystal clear after Trump’s remarks provided moral support for the neo-Nazis who marched through the streets of Charlottesville, claiming some of them were “very fine people.” What we see in Trump and his advisors and appointees is an America that embraces white supremacy’s fears, intolerance, and adulation of authoritarianism. With Trump in office, the menace of authoritarianism is taking on a visible and hideous shape, “exploding in our face, through racist attacks on schoolchildren, the proliferation of swastikas around the country, name-calling, death threats, and a general atmosphere of hate.”27
Trump’s simultaneous appointment of both aggressively racist individuals and warmongering right-wing military personnel to top government positions, along with his ongoing bombast suggesting the need for a vast expansion of the military-industrial complex, signal that conditions are set in place for an imminent intensification of America’s war culture. Following Trump’s election victory, Forbes published an article with the headline: “For the Defence Industry, Trump’s Win Means Happy Days Are Here Again.”28 William D. Hartung makes the point clear by citing a speech Trump gave in Philadelphia before the election:
[Trump] called for tens of thousands of additional troops, a Navy of 350 ships (the current goal is 308), a significantly larger Air Force, an anti-missile, space-based Star Wars−style program of Reaganesque proportions, and an acceleration of the Pentagon’s $1 trillion “modernization” for the nuclear arsenal, [all of which] could add more than $900 billion to the Pentagon’s budget over the next decade.29
Evidence of Trump’s mission to foster an updated and expansive war culture was also visible in Trump’s willingness to consider including in his administration a cabal of racist neoconservatives such as John Bolton and James Woolsey—both of whom believe that “Islam and the Arab world are the enemy of Western civilization” and are strong advocates of a war with Iran.30 Trump has welcomed disgraced military leaders such as David H. Petraeus, former four-star U.S. Army general and director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and has appointed as secretary of defense retired U.S. Marine Corps General James Mattis (since fired), who opposed both closing Guantánamo and Obama’s nuclear treaty with Iran. Mattis was brusquely fired by the Obama administration as head of Central Command.
Trump’s first choice of Lieutenant General Michael Flynn as national security advisor was particularly telling. Flynn had already been fired by President Obama for abusive behavior and had been accused of mishandling classified information, but was a firm supporter of Trump’s pro-torture policies.31 The New York Times reported that Flynn’s occupation of “one of the most powerful roles in shaping military and foreign policy” suggested Trump’s alignment with Flynn’s outspoken belief that “Islamist militancy poses an existential threat on a global scale, and the Muslim faith itself is the source of the problem. . . . [He describes] it as a political ideology, not a religion.”32 In other words, Flynn believed that 1.3 billion Muslims are the enemy of Western civilization. He had also claimed that “Sharia, or Islamic law, is spreading in the United States (it is not). His dubious assertions are so common that when he ran the Defense Intelligence Agency, subordinates came up with a name for the phenomenon: They called them ‘Flynn facts.’”33 A mere twenty-four days after taking up his position as National Security Advisor, it was revealed that Flynn had lied about conversations he had with the Russian ambassador, Sergey Kislyak, while Obama was still in office, talks he had not revealed to the FBI, White House spokesman Sean Spicer, and the vice president, Mike Pence.34 Flynn resigned in disgrace once it was discovered that he had covered up his conversations with the Russian ambassador. In December 2017, Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to about the contacts and agreed to cooperate with Mueller’s investigative team.
The deeper message underlying Flynn’s short-lived appointment is that Trump evidently plans to do nothing to alter a dishonorable foreign policy trajectory that has propelled the United States into a permanent war status “for virtually the entire twenty-first century,” and since the latter part of 2001 has resulted in approximately “370,000 combatants and non-combatants [being] killed in the various theaters of operations where U.S. forces have been active.”35 This is how democracy comes to an end. What is more, Trump’s early decisions in office and professed love of the military suggest that he’s not interested in a holding pattern, but will expand America’s investment in and infatuation with its wars. Unsurprisingly, Trump has asked Congress to provide an additional $54 billion to expand an already obese military budget.
Landscapes of a War Culture
Under Trump’s influence, war culture will spread, and incitements and retaliations to aggression and state violence will intensify. This means growing incidents of the suppression of dissent, similar to the police violence used against those protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline in Standing Rock, North Dakota, which included police arrests of several journalists covering the movement. It is reasonable to assume that under Trump there will be an intensification of the harassment of journalists similar to what happened to the renowned Canadian photojournalist Ed Ou, who has worked for a number of media sources including the New York Times and Time magazine. Ou, who was traveling from Canada to the United States to report on the growing protest at Standing Rock, was detained by U.S. Border Patrol authorities. According to Hugh Handeyside, “Ou was detained for more than six hours and subjected . . . to multiple rounds of intrusive interrogation. [The border officers] questioned him at length about his work as a journalist, his prior professional travel in the Middle East, and dissidents or ‘extremists’ he had encountered or interviewed as a journalist. They photocopied his personal papers, including pages from his handwritten personal diary.”36 In the end, he was denied entry into the United States.
But the harassment of individuals is only one register of Trump’s escalating suppression of dissent. He constantly derides all media who are critical of him and his policies as “fake news” and labels them as part of the opposition. Trump’s attack on the press is about more than discrediting traditional sources of facts and analysis, or collapsing the distinction between the truth and lies—it is also about undermining the public’s grip on evidence, facts, and informed judgment. Such intimidation tactics serve only to stifle the freedom of the press. The result is the purposeful destruction of public spheres that make dissent possible, and the simultaneous infantilizing of the American public to a mob mentality. Given Trump’s further insistence that protesters who burn the American flag should be jailed or suffer the loss of citizenship, his hostile criticism of the Black Lives Matter movement, and his ongoing legacy of stoking white violence against anti-racism activists and protesters, it is not unreasonable to assume that his future domestic policies will legitimate a wave of repression and violence waged against dissidents and the institutions that support them. For instance, his public threats regarding the burning of the American flag can be read as code for green-lighting repression of protesters. How else to explain the motive behind his consideration of Milwaukee sheriff David Clarke as a potential candidate for secretary of the Department of Homeland Security? Clarke has referred to the Black Lives Matter movement as “Black Lies Matter” and has compared them to ISIS.
[Clarke has] proposed that terrorist and ISIS sympathizers in America need to be rounded up and shipped off to Guantánamo, and has stated that “It is time to suspend habeas corpus like Abraham Lincoln did during the civil war.” . . .
He guessed that about several hundred thousand or even a million sympathizers were in the United States and needed to be imprisoned.37
It is difficult to believe that this type of call for repressive state violence, and what amounts to an egregious disregard for the U.S. Constitution, garners one favor rather than disqualification for a high-ranking government office.
Expanding what might be called his Twitter battles, Trump has made a number of scornful remarks regarding what he views as criticism of either himself or staff whom he favors. For instance, when Brandon Victor Dixon, an actor in the Broadway play Hamilton, addressed vice president−elect Mike Pence after the curtain call, stating, in part, “We are diverse Americans who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us, our planet, our children, our parents, or defend us and uphold our inalienable rights,” Trump tweeted that Pence was harassed by the actor and that he should apologize. Trump also took aim at the Saturday Night Live episode in which Alec Baldwin satirized a post-election Trump in the process of trying to figure out what the responsibilities of the presidency entail. Trump tweeted that he had watched Saturday Night Live and declared, “It is a totally one-sided, biased show—nothing funny at all. Equal time for us?”
Trump has taken to Twitter to launch caustic tirades not only against the cast of the play Hamilton and Saturday Night Live, but also against Chuck Jones, president of United Steelworkers Local 1999. Trump’s verbal takedown of the union chief was the result of Jones accusing Trump of lying about the number of Indiana jobs he saved from being shipped to Mexico by Carrier Corporation. Actually, since 350 jobs were slated to stay in the United States before Trump’s intervention, the number of jobs saved by Trump was 850 rather than 1,100. To some this may seem like a trivial matter, but Trump’s weaponization of Twitter against his perceived detractors and political opponents not only functions to produce a chilling effect on critical expression, but gives legitimacy to those willing to suppress dissent through various modes of harassment and even the threat of violence.
Frank Sesno, the director of the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University, is right in stating, “Anybody who goes on air or goes public and calls out the president has to then live in fear that he is going to seek retribution in the public sphere. That could discourage people from speaking out.”38 Such actions could also threaten their lives, as Chuck Jones found out. After the President attacked him on Twitter, he received an endless stream of harassing phone calls and online insults, some even threatening him and his children. According to Jones, “Nothing that says they’re gonna kill me, but, you know, you better keep your eye on your kids. . . . We know what car you drive. Things along those lines.”39
Many of Trump’s tweets have come back to haunt him by drawing unfavorable attention to his own morally reprehensible actions. For instance, he has mocked then-Senator Al Franken for a photo that shows him pretending to grope Leeann Tweeden, a former model, while refusing to comment on the numerous sexual harassment charges lodged against failed Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore. Moore has been “accused of initiating a sexual encounter with a 14-year-old girl when he was in his 30s, sexually assaulting a 16-year-old waitress and pursuing relationships with at least five other teenagers who were much younger than he.”40 Trump’s empty moralism regarding Franken and his cowardly silence regarding Moore, along with his defense of serial sex offenders such as former Fox News chief executive Roger Ailes and Fox News commentator Bill O’ Reilly, has not only drawn attention to his blatant acts of hypocrisy but has also prompted the charge that he is diverting attention away from his own history of sexual misconduct and harassment.
Moreover, in addition to exposing his confused and dangerous state of mind, Trump’s tweets reveal his willingness to use half-baked conspiracy theories, ultra-nationalist views, and white supremacist ideology to continually trigger support from his followers. For instance, on November 29, 2017, Trump retweeted three inflammatory anti-Muslim videos posted by Jayda Fransen, the leader of the far-right extremist group Britain First. Fransen had been previously “convicted of religiously aggravated harassment in November 2016 after abusing a woman wearing a hijab.”41 She was also arrested in Belfast after making a racist and inflammatory speech. The videos were taken out of historical context and misleading, in one case falsely identifying the participants as Muslims. The presidential tweets were not only condemned in the mainstream press, but also by British prime minister Theresa May, who called them “hateful narratives.”42 Republican Senator Lindsay Graham, who increasingly has come to support Trump, flatly admitted that “Mr. Trump was ‘legitimizing religious bigotry’ with the Twitter posts.”43 New York Times columnist Charles Blow went further, noting that Trump’s use of a racial slur in a White House ceremony honoring Navajo veterans of World War II, his stating once again that Obama was not born in the United States, and his endorsement of unverified anti-Muslim videos—all in one week, no less:
[Trump is] unfit to be the president of the United States [with] his lack of impulse control to conceal his [open hostility] to people of color. . . . Not satisfied with his implicit (though obvious) endorsement of white supremacy here in America, Trump has now explicitly endorsed white supremacy in another country. . . . The Trump Doctrine is White Supremacy. Yes, he is also diplomatically inept, overwhelmed by avarice, thoroughly corrupt and a pathological liar, but it is to white supremacy and to hostility for everyone not white that he always returns.44
Trump did get some support for posting the videos to his tens of millions of followers. One notable endorsement came from David Duke, a former Klu Klux Klan leader, who tweeted “Thank God for Trump! That is why we love him.”45 When White House spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders was confronted with evidence that the videos posted by Trump were racist, misleading, and unverified, she replied: “Whether it’s a real video, the threat is real, and that is what the President is talking about.”46 The irony of yet another Team Trump official covering for the possibility that the president is issuing false information speaks volumes. Sanders once again proves that she is willing to work full time as paid defender of an unhinged liar who incites racial discord as a way of appealing to his fascist and anti-Islamic followers.
Donald Trump’s Twitter feed currently has approximately 42.2 million followers; this platform alone grants his remarks considerable audience and reach. His ongoing exchange and battle with former Fox News host Megyn Kelly, especially after her questioning of Trump in the first Republican primary debate, provides a vivid example of the way he has weaponized his Twitter account. After Trump started attacking her on Twitter, she told Terry Gross, the host of NPR’s radio show Fresh Air, that “every tweet he unleashes against you . . . creates such a crescendo of anger.” She then went on to spell out the living hell she found herself as a result of being a target of Trump’s humiliation and derision:
The c-word was in thousands of tweets directed at me—lots of threats to beat the hell out of me, to rape me, honestly the ugliest things you can imagine. But most of this stuff I was able to just dismiss as angry people who are trying to scare me, you know. However, there were so many that rose to the level of “OK, that one we need to pay attention to,” that it did become alarming. It wasn’t like I walked down the street in constant fear of someone trying to take my life, but I was very aware of it. The thing I was most worried about was that I have a 7- and a 5- and a 3-yearold, and I was worried I’d be walking down the street with my kids and somebody would do something to me in front of them; they would see me get punched in the face or get hurt.47
Between Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, Trump has direct communication with tens of millions of people. I am not convinced that these tweets are simply the impetuous outbursts of an adult who has the temperament of a spoiled 12-year-old. It seems more probable that his alt-right advisors view such tweet attacks as an effective way to manipulate allies and diminish rivals, especially since they are waging an all-out online assault on Trump’s critics.48 Trump is at war with democracy, and his online threats and belittlement are consistent with the culture of violence and aggression he projects at home and abroad.
Frank Rich likewise detects more operating behind Trump’s tweets than one might see at first glance. On the surface, Trump’s attacks seem as trivial as they are thoughtless, given the actual issues that Trump should be considering. But, as Rich suggests, the tweets not only amount to an attack on the First Amendment, they likely form part of a strategy, first originated by Bannon, designed to promote a culture war that incites Trump’s “base and retains its loyalty should he fail, say, to deliver on other promises, like reviving the coal industry.”49 These multiple functions performed by Trump’s online attacks aggravate a culture war that represses dissent and diverts the public from more serious issues. Referring to the Dixon incident, Rich writes:
It’s possible that much of [Trump’s] base previously knew little or nothing about Hamilton, but thanks to Pence’s visit, it would soon learn in even the briefest news accounts that the show is everything that base despises: a multi-cultural-ethnic-racial reclamation of “white” American history with a ticket price that can soar into four digits—in other words, a virtual monument to the supposedly politically correct “elites” that Trump, Bannon, and their wrecking crew found great political profit in deriding throughout the campaign. Pence’s visit to Hamilton was a surefire political victory for Trump even without the added value of a perfectly legitimate and respectful curtain speech that he could trash-tweet to further rouse his culture-war storm troopers. The kind of political theater that Trump and Bannon fomented around Hamilton is likely to be revived routinely in the Trump era.50
How concentrated a form of authoritarianism Trump might manage to wield is difficult to predict, though the words of some of his high-level appointees offer a glimpse. For example, soon after Trump’s trip to Saudi Arabia, one of the most repressive regimes in the world, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross gave an interview on CNBC in which he said that “[the] thing that was fascinating to me was there was not a single hint of a protester anywhere there during the whole time we were there. Not one guy with a bad placard. . . . ”51 When CNBC host Becky Quick pointed out that the Saudi Arabian government squelches dissent, Ross replied that “In theory, that could be true. . . . But boy there was not a single effort at any incursion. There wasn’t anything. The mood was a genuinely good mood.”52 Maybe Ross should talk to the thousands of protesters and activists who have vanished into Saudi Arabian prisons.
Ross is either ignorantly unaware or morally irresponsible in refusing to acknowledge that protesting in Saudi Arabia is punishable by death. In fact, soon after Ross left Saudi Arabia, the government sentenced to death Munir al-Adam, a disabled man who was arrested after he attended a protest meeting. The Independent in London reported that Mr. Adam lost his hearing in one ear as a result of being tortured and was forced to sign a confession.53 With no other evidence presented, Mr. Adam was sentenced to death by beheading. Ross’s remarks about how happy he was over the lack of protest in Saudi Arabia and his refusal to speak out against the government’s human rights abuses send the clear and chilling message that the Trump regime has little tolerance for dissent or human rights. Even more puzzling is Trump’s willingness to heap praise on a number of the world’s most ruthless dictatorships while openly criticizing and undermining his relations with long-term allies such as Germany and Australia.
Trump’s rhetoric of violence was on full display in July 2017 when he addressed police chiefs across the country in Brentwood, New York. In a speech about law enforcement that focused on the notorious MS-13 gang, Trump openly endorsed brutality in dealing with alleged gang suspects. Trump called alleged suspects “animals” and once again stoked the flames of fear in low-income communities while disparaging the more productive use of building police-community relations. Among Trump’s incendiary comments:
And when you see these towns and when you see these thugs being thrown into the back of a paddy wagon—you just see them thrown in, rough—I said, “Please don’t be too nice.” Like when you guys put somebody in the car, and you’re protecting their head, you know, the way you put the hand over? Like, don’t hit their head, and they’ve just killed somebody, don’t hit their head. I said, “You can take the hand away, OK?”54
Trump’s advocacy for police aggression is particularly shameful in light of the post-Ferguson racial justice movement that demands police be held more accountable for perpetrating unnecessary violence. Moreover, Trump’s comments reinforce his support “for an attorney general for the Department of Justice who takes the position that institutional reform at police departments is not going to be the fundamental agenda of the Department of Justice.”55
This dangerous and brazen retreat from the rule of law, however shocking, will not only undermine the memories of democratic struggles and possibility—it will also lead to increased state violence and further the criminalization of targeted groups in a variety of sites such as schools and the streets of underserved neighborhoods. It will surely escalate, for example, the arrest of students for trivial behaviors in schools, the transformation of local police forces into SWAT teams, and police targeting of communities of color through entrenched policies of racial profiling.56 And with racists such as Jeff Sessions and Bannon, in spite of being derided by the president, actively serving Trump inside and out of his administration, the fantasy of turning America back into a whites-only public sphere will continue to degrade democracy and incite followers to follow suit.