July 27, 2019

RACISM IS ALL HE HAS TO OFFER:

Why Trump Spent His Summer Vacation Sending Racist Tweets (Jonathan Chait, 7/27/19, New York)

Trump has decided the answer to "How I spent my summer vacation" will be sending racist tweets, primarily because that was the thing that he felt like doing at those moments, contradicting the pleas of most of his fellow Republicans.

Yet these impulsive thumb-rants amount to some of the most important and revealing communications of Trump's presidency. For one thing, they convey the beliefs that have undergirded his career. As Victor Blackwell points out, Trump reserves terms like "infest" and "infestation" -- which most people use only to describe diseases or vermin -- exclusively for non-whites. As much hate as he might generate for a target like, say, the mainstream media or transnational institutions, he would never describe the New York Times as an infestation.

Trump's professional career began in his father's and his systematically discriminatory housing empire. Excluding African-Americans was the basis of the Trump business model. He did not merely engage in periodic acts of discrimination, but insistently violated federal law and went to war with the Department of Justice rather than amend his ways. Trump's association of African-Americans with crime and filth, and the assumption they must be cordoned off from other Americans, is a conviction so deep it cannot be uprooted.

Trump has brought these patterns of thought with him to the presidency. 

"thought"?
Posted by at July 27, 2019 3:40 PM

  

« BIG ONES: | Main | CORRUPTION, NOT TREASON: »