Trump's "MAGA" And the Defense of White Male Supremacy

I continue to be disturbed - sickened might be a better description - by those I know who continue to support Donald Trump, a thoroughly immoral individual, while refusing to be honest and admit what motivates them: a desperate urge to support white supremacy and white privilege.  I cannot grasp the mindset - something I am thankful for - where non-whites are so terrifying to one's sense of self-worth.  True, for those my southern belle grandmother viewed as "white trash" who refused to better themselves, skin color may be all they have to make themselves feel superior. But that dose not explain the educated and successful whites I know who seemingly are just as desperate to maintain a white supremacy society. Perhaps being gay and having suffered discrimination and job loss for simply who I am my eyes are more open to the evils of a while male, heterosexual ruled society. I just do not comprehend the fear and, let's be honest, hatred, that motivates these Trump supporters.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at the phenomenon.  Here are highlights:

The summer began on May 25, when the police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on George Floyd’s neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds in Minneapolis, Minnesota, suffocating his pleas for life. Largely peaceful demonstrations followed, and Trump tweeted: “These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won’t let that happen.” He added, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.”

The summer ended on August 25, when Kyle Rittenhouse borrowed an AR-15-style assault rifle from a friend and allegedly fatally shot Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony M. Huber and injured Gaige Grosskreutz. These three people had been demonstrating in Kenosha, Wisconsin, against the police shooting of Jacob Blake two days earlier. Trump suggested that Rittenhouse acted in self-defense.

The violence of Chauvin and Rittenhouse bookended the summer of Trumpism. The three long, hot months from May 25 to August 25 compressed 413 years of American history into a cellphone video in which anyone could easily see the history for what it has always been: the violent “self-defense” of white male supremacy. Colonialism, capitalism, slavery and slave trading, Indian removal, manifest destiny, colonization, the Ku Klux Klan, Chinese exclusion, disenfranchisement, Jim Crow, eugenics, massive resistance, “law and order,” Islamophobia, family separation—all were done in the name of defending life or civilization or freedom.

Trumpism is the latest—or last—chapter in the story of this America. Like its antecedents, Trumpism is the violent defense of white male supremacy. Adherents of Trumpism think they are facing a choice between white male supremacy and “anarchy.” And right now, Trump’s federal agents, Trump-supporting paramilitary domestic terrorists, and Trump-supporting police officers from Kenosha to Austin believe they are fighting against anarchy. Which is to say, they are fighting to maintain white male supremacy. . . . . Defending their America—where white men can rule and brutalize without consequence.

Trump’s supporters have been defending their America against this summer of anti-racism. From May 25 to August 25, there were at least 7,750 anti-racist demonstrations in 2,400 locations across all 50 states and the District of Columbia. By Independence Day, when as many as 26 million people had participated in the demonstrations, the anti-racist movement had already been recognized as the largest movement of any kind in American history.

About 93 percent of these demonstrations remained peaceful, according to an analysis by the nonprofit Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project. Only 7 percent of the demonstrations turned violent through clashes with counterprotesters or police—too often sparked by officers—or through property damage on “specific blocks,” the report stated.

But these renegade women, men of color, and white men defying the law and order of inequality and injustice look like “anarchists” to Trump.

All those officers and militiamen protecting the law and order of inequality and injustice are “patriots” to Trump. They are at war. In Trump’s alternative reality, the grand battle is at hand between anarchists who want to destroy America and patriots who want to defend America.

Kyle Rittenhouse lived 20 miles away from Kenosha in Antioch, Illinois, where he was arrested and charged with murder the next day. During his visit to Kenosha on September 1, Trump did not condemn Rittenhouse. But he did condemn anti-racist demonstrators.

White male supremacy has granted the president the power to accost women and “grab ’em by the pussy”; the power to “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody” without losing voters; the power to call the first female major-party nominee for president “such a nasty woman” on live television and still win more white women’s votes than she did; the power to say the first Black president was not born in the United States and still have Black men say at his convention that he is “not racist.” White male supremacy has allowed the president to have a foreign power intercede in a presidential election on his behalf, to call neo-Nazis “very fine people,” to urge his supporters to vote twice, to build a monument of lies, to obstruct justice while freeing friends and punishing foes, to describe Americans who died at war as “suckers” and “losers,” and to look away as hundreds of thousands of American COVID-19 victims’ bodies pile up at cemeteries—and not face any consequences.

And Trump does not want his white male supporters facing any consequences either. Like him, they are always innocent. They are always the victims. Even violent strongmen like Vladimir Putin get a pass.

So do heavily armed groups of white male supremacists in the United States. According to a Politico report, the first draft of a recent Department of Homeland Security “State of the Homeland Threat Assessment 2020” named “White supremacist extremists” as “the most persistent and lethal [terrorist] threat” to the American people. But Trump refuses to acknowledge, let alone protect Americans from, the greatest domestic terrorist threat of our time. Instead he incites carnage, and the victims include people of color demonstrating their humanity, and white people demonstrating against racism, like Heather Heyer.

The presumption of innocence is largely reserved for wealthy cisgender heterosexual white men like Trump, and it remains until disproven beyond a shadow of a doubt. The presumption of guilt is for all practical purposes attached to femininity, to Blackness, to queerness, to Indigenousness, to poverty. To be a poor queer woman of color is to embody guilt. The closer one is to whiteness and masculinity and wealth, the closer one is to innocence.

This is about Trump, but it is not only about Trump. White male supremacy is a governing force as old as America, as new as Trumpism. And it is wholly threatened by anti-racism, by feminism.