For the sake of argument, let’s take President Donald Trump at his word that he doesn’t have a racist bone in his body. That would mean that the recent race-baiting Twitter storm he directed at four Democratic members of Congress — all women of color — was calculated to exploit the racial animus of his core supporters and capitalize on the country’s divisions. It’s hard to say which — overt personal racism or its cynical use to fan the flames of hatred — is more morally repugnant, but we tend to think the latter.
If the point was to energize his base, it certainly did the trick. At a rally in North Carolina a couple of days after he tweeted that the four congresswomen should “go back where they came from” — although all are American citizens and three were born in the United States — the president’s cheering supporters chanted “send her back” when he attacked one of them. In response, he took a long pause to let the moment wash over him. Watching the video, it struck us that it is perhaps not so long a journey from North Carolina to the Nuremberg rallies in Nazi Germany in the 1930s.
Those who were waiting for Republican leaders to join their Democratic colleagues in denouncing this demagoguery were destined to wait in vain. This is not surprising. They long ago concluded that tangling with the president is not in their best interest politically (which is the only interest they are interested in), and thus any enormity must be ignored, if not applauded. Then, too, they may secretly suspect that when Trump talks publicly about race, he is expressing the private views of many core Republican voters.
Perhaps party leaders also have come to recognize in Trump the instrument by which to finally effect the coup d’etat that has been quietly unfolding for the past decade or more: to lock in place the structural elements necessary to assure the Republican Party a permanent monopoly on the levers of political power.
This can be seen in a nationwide effort to suppress voting by minorities, who are more likely to vote Democratic, and to rig the census in such a way that they will be undercounted; extreme partisan gerrymandering to render Republican seats in Congress unassailable; in tax giveaways to wealthy corporations and individuals to ensure their continuing financial support; in turning a blind eye to Russian election interference that aided Trump’s 2016 victory; and in refusing to grant so much as a hearing to an Obama nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court and the substitution of a Republican justice whose confirmation guarantees a conservative majority on the court for years to come.
So America arrives at a place that bears a striking resemblance to the period leading up to the Civil War. During that time, Southern hubris, vitriol and violence gradually radicalized opinion in the North. A similar process may be at work now. We note that U.S. Rep. Peter Welch of Vermont, a moderate Democrat, just last week overcame what he called his “enormous reservation” and called for Trump’s impeachment. He cited not only the president’s attacks on his four colleagues in the House, but also the administration’s stonewalling of congressional investigations such as the one into the crisis at the southern border and his efforts to derail the special counsel’s investigation into election interference. The cumulative effect of the constant stream of Trump depredations may be to wear away the reservations of other voices of moderation.
How this time of upheaval and turmoil will play out is beyond our poor powers of projection. But a recent Pew Research Center survey found that a sizable majority of Americans thinks that heated political rhetoric increases the risk of violence. It can. We hope that it does not, but we fear that Trump’s incendiary language is sowing the wind; the nation could reap the devastating whirlwind.