Trump is to blame
ONE week after 9/11, Martin Amis minted the phrase “species shame” to express the totality of his revulsion. Sixteen years on, that phrase echoes with the ugly brutality of the neo-Nazis in Virginia who, in league with their presidential demigod, bring it storming back to mind.
You cannot divide them, those neo-Nazis and Trump, and not only because they were chanting “Hail Trump”. You cannot divide them because Trump is their enabler, just as they are his.
Creatures like these existed long before Trump launched his political career. He didn’t make them. He brought them back out of the shadows.
Trump has no belief in anything other than the glorification of Trump, and white supremacy qualifies as a belief.
Being elected president is the high point of that glorification, of course, and to achieve that he needed the unreconstructed racists. No one knows how large a bloc that is. But at press time, beneath Breitbart’s report on the atrocity in Charlottesville were more than 52,000 messages – the massive majority joining Trump in declining directly to criticise those neo-Nazis in general, or specifically the man suspected of driving into anti-fascist protesters.
You can’t extrapolate that into anything like a precise number of white supremacists, but you may assume from it that there are many millions without whose support Trump would have no hope of extending the glorification with re-election in 2020.
Which is the more repulsive – someone who genuinely admires Hitler, or someone who cynically courts that person for electoral advantage – is impossible to say when the choice is too bleak to contemplate. Enveloping revulsion isn’t an intellectual judgment. It’s an indivisible moral instinct.
Time and again over the last two years, pundits have gazed in awe at a Trump outrage and declared the beginning of his end. Each time we have forgotten or wilfully ignored something far more chilling than the nuclear brinkmanship with North Korea.
This is exactly what many millions of Americans want. They hunger and thirst for it. Some waited decades for the tangerine deus ex machina to descend on the Trump Tower escalator to make them feel better about hating brown- and black-skinned people, Jews and gays.
In January, days before taking his oath of office, Trump spoke with his trademark bombastic insincerity about the document he was about to swear to protect. “I feel very strongly about our Constitution,” he told Fox News. “I’m proud of it, I love it.”
It hardly needs stating that the First Amendment guarantees the right to free speech exercised in Charlotteville by a young woman at the time of her death. The time for painfully obvious observations about Trump has long since passed.
But one part of the Constitution for which he has discernible affection, in so far as it motivates the base, is the part known as America’s Original Sin: that line about calculating an enslaved black person as having three-fifths the value of a white.
By using his silence to enable, encourage and collude with those to whom that valuation is too generous, Trump’s calculation is that it is to his electoral advantage to rally his troops behind General Lee’s standard, and fight a modern version of the Civil War.
The result will surely be the same. The neo-Confederates will lose. What Martin Luther King said about the arc of history bending towards justice is right. He also said it bends slowly, and he was right there too.
But while this may be no more the beginning of Trump’s end than his raving about Mexicans, or any of his toxic imbecilities, the lividly visceral reaction to his calculatedly unvisceral reaction (the reference to “hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides”) feels like the start of a zig.
This was clarified beyond the slightest confusion on Sunday. If you aren’t now nauseated by this president, if the idea of him does not yet cause you a jag of species shame, you are allying yourself with those who marched in Virginia chanting Hail Trump. – The Independent