Racism: What Motivates the Felon

In addition to overwhelming greed and a total lack of morality, perhaps  nothing motivates the Felon more than racism.   This bigotry was on display when the Felon posted a late night video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes - part of a centuries long effort to depict blacks (and by extension other non-whites) as inferior and little more than animals.  Even the historically racist Southern Baptist Convention has condemned the racist video. The Felon's racism is nothing new: his companies settled a DOJ lawsuit in Norfolk in the early 1970's for discrimination against blacks and he ran a full page call for the execution of young blacks who later were exonerated of any crime.  Sadly, I believe that this overt racism of the Felon is what attracts much of the MAGA base which is increasingly comprised of uneducated, lower class whites. Yes, members of the media continue to push the meme that financial insecurity is the real motivator for this demographic, but post-election studies have shown that the Felon's blatant racism is also attractive to these voters as well as white Christian nationalists who have an overweening need to be able to feel superior if for no other reason than skin color.  A column in the New York Times looks at this latest overt racism which in many ways defines the Felon.  Here are column excerpts:

The best way to understand the [Felon's] president’s motivations is to find him at his most unfiltered, which is to say, on social media, late at night. And Thursday night, Trump posted a video to his Truth Social account that depicted President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama as apes. The clip, which runs for roughly a minute and shows the Obamas at the end, is set to “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.”

I try to avoid superlatives in my writing, but there is simply no question that this is the most flagrant display of presidential racism since Woodrow Wilson screened D.W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation” in the White House in 1915. And for a sense of the racism of Griffith’s film, recall that it both reinvigorated the Ku Klux Klan and gave the organization its modern iconography.

I doubt that [the Felon's] Trump’s video — less a creative product than half-baked agitprop — will have the same effect. But it carries many of the same messages. It uses an old white supremacist trope to denigrate the Obamas and, by extension, every American who shares their racial background. It presents people of African descent as little removed from beasts, an insult used to great effect in “The Birth of a Nation,” as you can see in this clip from the film.

Initially, the White House defended the video as a joke. “This is from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from the Lion King,” Karoline Leavitt, the press secretary, said. “Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public.” . . . .But then Republicans began to speak out.

Here, I should probably note that Barack and Michelle Obama are among the most popular political figures in the United States. Trump, on the other hand, is barely treading water with the public, and majorities of Americans say the country is headed in the wrong direction. It makes sense, then, that some Republicans would use this as an opportunity to distance themselves from an unpopular incumbent.

Let’s walk back to where we started. What motivates [the Felon] Trump? The answer is simple: racism. You might also say ego and raw self-interest, but the two are connected. Racism, among other things, is a kind of chauvinism, a belief in one’s inherent superiority, based on nothing other than a meaningless accident of birth. It’s an ideology that papers over feelings of inadequacy, that tells you that — no matter what you have or have not accomplished in your life — you’re still better than someone, some group.

For years, a cottage industry of political observers has contorted itself to obscure and occlude the obvious. That regardless of what others see in him, Trump’s entire political career — from his embrace of birtherism to his hatred of birthright citizenship — cannot be understood outside the context of his bitter, deep-seated racism.

Trump is not profound. He has been the same person this whole time. The question is why so many others have refused to see what he has never bothered to hide. . . . . I wrote about the ways that the president has rejected his responsibility to the whole country in favor of governing for a select few.

A hallmark of the president’s language since he stepped onto the national political stage is that some Americans are just a little more American than others, and that this is a function of race, nationality and, above all, allegiance to Trump.