The Trumpilantes

Kyle Rittenhouse is a baby-faced 17-year-old who looks about as menacing as your couch-potato nephew. He wasn’t on the family sofa last night, though. He was in the middle of a street in Kenosha, Wisconsin, where he used an AR-15 to murder two people and wound a third.

We’ve gotten used to school shootings. Rather than address their causes and restrict ultra-lethal weapons, we are “hardening” our schools and putting students the same age as Kyle Rittenhouse through shooter drills.

We’ve gotten used to openly racist and fascist statements coming regularly from the White House and White Supremacist Party leaders.

We’ve gotten used to armed people who brandish automatic rifles, storm state capitols, and threaten the lives of public servants in protest of Covid-19 restrictions.

We’ve gotten used to cell-phone videos of white Americans telling fellow Americans of color to “go back to your own country” and anti-maskers physically attacking retail employees.

We’ve gotten used to skyrocketing gun sales—10.3 million firearm transactions so far this year, up 95% over 2019—and even more staggering records in ammunition sales.

We’ve gotten used to the President of the United States flouting the rule of law daily while openly embracing violence and vigilantism. He bragged during his 2016 campaign that he “could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody” and not lose any voters. Trump has wanted to “punch” protesters in the face. He wants his supportees to “knock the crap out of” demonstrators and offered to pay their legal fees. Trump claimed that there were “some very fine people” in the group of white supremacists who killed a protester by running her over. He called anti-Trump Republicans “human scum.” Trump retweeted a video including the statement that “the only good Democrat is a dead Democrat.” He praised a GOP politician who physically assaulted a reporter as “my kind of guy.” He laughed when he asked a crowd at one of his rallies what to do with immigrants and someone shouted out, “Shoot them!” “I have the support,” Trump has boasted, “of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump—I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough—until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad.” In response to the protests over George Floyd’s murder, Trump tweeted “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.” Trump used secret federal police to beat and tear gas peaceful protesters so that he could stage a photo opportunity. He sent secret federal police to several American cities to foment violence in order to help his re-election. Trump and Attorney General William Barr worked tirelessly to convince Americans that the protests against police violence are the work of antifa, even though none of the hundreds of protesters arrested by federal agents are linked to antifa.

“Trump is a little rough around the edges,” his supporters will tell you. “He was just joking,” they will say. “He just says those things to get the libs angry,” they will cluck.

We’ve forgotten that words matter. We can’t seem to recall Hitler’s grisly speeches, or remember Stanley Milgram’s classic electric-shock experiments and a ton of other data that proves that people are much more likely to inflict pain on others when an authority figure tells them to.

And so we don’t flinch when other White Supremacist Party members mimic the raw cruelty of their leader. It’s not a big deal when a state representative in Missouri posts that “Looters deserve to be shot. But not by the government. #2A.” Energy Secretary Rick Perry must have been just kidding when he suggested that the chairman of the Federal Reserve deserved to be beaten up. And Matt Gaetz was just engaging in harmless lyperbole when he tweeted, “Now that we clearly see Antifa as terrorists, can we hunt them down like we do those in the Middle East?”

We’re gotten used to solitary, lone-wolf white supremacists and alt-right extremists killing us—the racist Dylan Roof who gun downed nine black worshipers as they prayed, the anti-Semite who slaughtered eleven innocents in a Pittsburgh synagogue. The proud racist who killed two African Americans in a Kentucky supermarket. The Trump supporter in Florida who was convicted of mailing pipe bombs to journalists, politicians, and celebrity critics of the president. The alt-right maniac in Portland, Oregon who harassed two Muslim women on a commuter train and then slit the throats of two people who came to their aid. The racist white man who wrote a manifesto about “the Hispanic invasion of Texas,” and then gunned down twenty people in El Paso.

We listen with straight faces to Trump and Barr as they downplay right-wing violence to focus on imaginary threats like antifa when statistics show that right-wing extremist violence is this country’s biggest threat. Those are the folks who have committed 70% of extremist-related killings over the past ten years. We don’t listen to the Anti-Defamation League when they point out that thirty-nine of the fifty killings committed by political extremists were carried out by white supremacists, or that another eight murders were committed by killers with anti-government views.

The history of the United States includes a long tradition of vigilante groups, predominantly in the West and South, that has often been used to protect white power—the Ku Klux Klan is the most famous of these. Three things make today’s version of white-supremacist vigilantism especially terrifying.

The first is the fact that the two political parties have become profoundly racialized. The White Supremacist Party is 85% white, and the ranks of its leaders are even whiter. There is a shit ton of data showing that the fear of white displacement is the bond that holds Trump supporters together. Trumpism isn’t a political platform, a collection of core beliefs, or a set of strategies—it’s a fascist cult populated by white people who believe that their racial dominance is coming to an end.

The second is Trump’s panic about the election that is only nine weeks away. Trump is an historically unpopular president who has been losing badly in the polls to Joe Biden all year. His polls are the worst of any incumbent President who ever sought re-election. Thanks to his racism, his totalitarianism, his misogyny, and his spectacular failure to contain the coronavirus, he will lose if the election is a referendum on him. Trump has failed to convince suburban voters that Joe Biden is a radical Marxists or that people of color and illegal immigrants will “destroy the suburbs. Trump needs something big to happen, something that changes the subject, and he needs it to happen now. He’s not going to wait for that something.

The third thing that makes it seem that today we are on the cusp of something far more horrific than the sickening events I’ve already touched on is what we saw last night in Kenosha—a deadly partnership between law enforcement and armed civilians. Kenosah, Wisconsin erupted in violence two days ago after police officers shot an unarmed black man seven times in the back. Last night, a Facebook page belonging to a militia group called the Kenosha Guard called on its 3,000 members to “take up arms and defend our city tonight from evil thugs.”  Kyle Rittenhouse may have been part of a right-wing group that asked the Kenosha police chief on Tuesday to deputize them to assist in keeping the peace in Kenosha. The police chief turned them down, but they showed up anyway. Rittenhouse drove from his home in another state to join a group of armed civilians who were ostensibly guarding a gas station. There is a video showing Kenosha police offering water to the militia members and thanking them for there help. There is also another video, This one shows Rittenhouse, armed with an AR-15, is chased by protesters and falls down. He sits there, right in the middle of the street—not Fifth Avenue in Manhattan but Sheridan Road in Kenosha—and quickly shoots one protestor in the stomach and another in the head. He fires more shots, wounding another protester, and then turns towards police vehicles arriving from the other direction, his AR-15 strapped to his chest and his hands in the air. Rittenhouse is surrendering. The police vehicles go right past him. Nobody lifts a finger against him. After they pass, Rittenhouse realizes he is still a free man and escapes back to his home in Illinois. The next morning he is arrested, without incident and without violence, by the same police who were thanking him the previous night. This evening he will be a poster child for every Trumpist and white-supremacist militia member.

The spectre of a civil war between the police and vigilante militias on the one hand and the rest of the population on the other became very real last night.

We either stop Trump or we get used to his Trumpilantes. No middle ground on this one.

The Bully's Pulpit

Tonight—on a day that will live in infamy—our national television networks will allow the President of the United States to use their airwaves to inject a toxic dose of purposeful misinformation into the American bloodstream.

The news media, which gave Donald Trump five billion dollars in free publicity during the 2016 campaign, will once again surrender their responsibility to accurately report the news in order to engineer another five-billion-dollar boondoggle for Trump. This time the money will be used to enable Trump to build a physical barrier on our southern border—a barrier that began life as a remedial  device to remind Trump to focus on immigration during his campaign appearances, that after three years of discussion no one can describe and for which there is no plan, that no one outside of the White House has asked for, that no one believes will work, that was supposed to be paid for by Mexico, and whose only real aspect is its power as a racist symbol.

Trump’s speech will reportedly be written by Stephen Miller, a man so comfortable with deceit that he is not shy about appearing on television with fake hair sprayed onto his bald skull.

Trump will claim that we have a national emergency on the border with Mexico. He will tell us that vast hordes of illegal aliens are overwhelming our border security system. Trump will insist that many, if not most, of these illegal immigrants are terrorists and hardened criminals. He will paint a terrifying image of an America that is on the verge of being overrun by a brown plague. To do so, he will willfully spout fake data, conflate different categories and different borders, and cite nonexistent experts. He will insist that we cannot secure the border with Mexico unless we build a wall. Trump will blame the Democrats in Congress for shutting down the government. He will threaten that he has the ability—and the willingness—to bypass Congress and get his barrier built by declaring a national emergency, commandeering money allocated to other projects, and ordering the U.S. military to build it. He will remind the country that he was elected on the promise of building a border wall, and will claim that the vast majority of Americans expect him to follow through on that commitment. And Trump will introduce what for him will be a new theme—that the lack of a border barrier has created a vast humanitarian crisis.

None of this is true.

The number of people crossing the Mexican border illegally has been shrinking for decades. The vast majority of people seeking entry to this country through the southern border are refugees fleeing real physical danger in their home countries. A third of them are children. Most illegal aliens in this country are here because they overstayed their visas. Statistics show that illegal aliens are less prone to criminal behavior than native Americans, that most of the drugs that enter our country from Mexico are smuggled through official ports of entry, and that most illegal aliens use airports to enter this country.

No experts in security or immigration, including our Border Patrol professionals, believe that a barrier along the entire border is needed or will work. They have requested not a barrier but better technology and more manpower. None of the Republican leaders from the states bordering Mexico support the wall.

Trump and his spokespeople have recently made false claims that nearly 4,000 “terrorists” tried to cross the southern border this year. Government data shows that the number was six.

Trump himself is the sole cause of the government shutdown. His party controlled both Houses of Congress for two years, but Republicans never made building a wall a legislative priority. Trump signed a budget bill last year that did not include funding for a border wall. He turned down an offer of $25 billion for the wall from Chuck Schumer a few months later. Two weeks ago Trump told Congressional Republicans that he would sign a funding bill that included $1.6 billion for border security but no wall funding, and then, after they passed it, he reneged on that promise when Rush Limbaugh and Laura Ingraham attacked him for caving on his signature campaign promise.

It is not at all clear that Trump could legally use a national emergency to fund and build the wall. Any attempt to do so will be met by immediate legal challenges that will take months to resolve.

Polls show that the majority of Americans do not support the construction of a border wall and blame Trump for the government shutdown. Trump made immigration his focus during the 2016 midterms, and the result was a decisive repudiation by the voters and a new Democratic majority in the House of Representatives.

Trump’s anticipated announcement that there is an humanitarian crisis on the southern border as well as a security calamity may prove to be the most perverse element in his speech tonight. He’s right. There IS a humanitarian crisis at the border, and it is getting worse by the day. What Trump won’t mention is that this crisis, like the government shutdown, is entirely of his own making.

Trump is not just against illegal immigration. His goal is to halt ALL immigration to this country by people of color. His focus, therefore, is on the southern border. (Most people on the terrorist watch list who try to enter this country do so from Canada. Trump has specifically said that he would welcome more immigrants from Norway.)  His strategy is to slow down the processing of asylum requests at legal ports of entry to create a human and bureaucratic log jam; to falsely brand all refugees as rapists, terrorists, and gang members; and to create a phony case for a wall.

The results of this strategy? An unprecedented population of thousands of immigrants housed indefinitely in newly built concentration camps that is growing daily, the separation of immigrant children from their parents, a growing threat of medical epidemics amongst the quarantined migrants, and the deaths of at least two children while in U.S. custody.

So here we are. Our President has responded to his first taste of divided government by shutting down the government. Tonight he will use his bully pulpit to spew a stream of blatant lies from the Oval Office in furtherance of an openly racist agenda. And the media outlets, who understand this sickening reality better than anyone, will offer up the airwaves as the vehicle for this nauseating spectacle.

Our best hope is that Trump’s speech tonight will be no more effective than his countless other stunts and statements in attracting the majority of his fellow citizens to his viciously un-American vision. It may be that Trump will take a header off his imaginary wall and that no amount of racism in this country will be able to put him back together again.

A few days ago I saw a Facebook comment posted by a German immigrant. She said that she supported Trump’s wall because she knew from personal experience how effective the Berlin wall was.

Trump’s biggest con is that his imaginary wall is designed to make America great again by keeping evil people out. The truth is that its purpose is to imprison us in a fearful, xenophobic, white-supremacist, realm—a shithole country.