Nearly 74,000,000 Americans Who Voted for Trump Are Not All Racists, But Nearly 74,000,000 Americans Voted for One. Why Black Votes Are "Illegal" in Trump World.
November 26, 2020
“Nearly 74,000,000 Americans Who Voted for Trump Are Not All Racists, But Nearly 74,000,000 Americans Voted for One” (Tim Pierce)
MARK KARLIN, EDITOR OF BUZZFLASH
Trump’s baseless claim of a landslide victory in 2020 centers on the tacit assumption that Black votes are illegitimate because Blacks are not true Americans. White supremacy is at the core of his empty lawsuit claims of voter fraud, with Blacks casting “Illegal votes” because they are descendants of slaves from “Shithole countries,’’ as Trump would have you believe. But he and his followers can’t say what they are thinking out loud.
Many in the Trump cult are vociferous about indignantly claiming that they are not racist. However, if that were true, how did nearly 74,000,000 of them march out of the swamps to vote for an avowed white supremacist?
It’s not hard to prove Trump’s visceral animus toward Blacks (and Browns). It goes back to the documented federal settlement in which he and his father admitted to discriminating against Blacks in their rental units back in the ‘70s. One could discuss everything from his full page ad in The New York Times calling for the execution of the eventually exonerated Central Park Five to his full embrace of birtherism to his seething and virulent attack on cities such as Baltimore as being filled with vermin (which was a thinly-veiled execrable Trumpian vilification of its Black inhabitants). The language echoed Adolf Hitler’s characterization of the Jews as an infestation of the Aryan Homeland.
The list of Trump’s racism is deep and long. White supremacy is the key underpinning of this appeal to the MAGA cult, along with his unrelenting attacks on the media as an “enemy of America” and his ginning up of contempt for the “elites.”
Indeed, racism is front and center in the threadbare and insultingly vapid election lawsuits that Rudy Giuiiani and Jenna Ellis have filed, while large corporate law firms abandoned the clown car Trump “legal team” for fear of tarnishing their reputations. The Mad Hatter news conference last Thursday, with the now thrown-under-the-bus attorney Sidney Powell ludicrously claiming that the ghost of Hugo Chavez had bribed Georgia Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and Governor Brian Kemp to throw the election for Biden, was focused on alleged massive voter fraud in cities with large Black populations. There was no proof, just claims by whites of Blacks acting suspiciously or even a polling worker wearing a “Black Lives Matter” T-shirt.
There is a line that can be drawn from Black slaves being enshrined in the “originalist” Constitution as 3/5’s of a person to historical efforts to suppress Black votes because Blacks are not considered Americans by white supremacists or even in the subconscious of those who think that they are free of prejudice but regard Blacks as “the other.” Indeed, Trump’s incessant boasting of winning an electoral landslide would only work with the Jim Crow system of disenfranchising Black male voters (women couldn’t vote then) that came about as a result of the 1877 Hayes-Tilden presidential compromise that ended in Union troops leaving the South. This allowed Southern States to create obstacles to Blacks voting to the extent that by 1905 almost no Black males were allowed a ballot in the former Confederate states.
Over time, white supremacist views and voter suppression of people of color has migrated to many of the Western States and Midwest States west of the Mississippi.
Then came Trump, a thoroughbred racist who reportedly wanted Black workers off the floors when he visited his casinos in Atlantic City, He could not tolerate Barack Obama as a Black president, so, he promoted his “illegitimacy.”
Trump’s baseless claim of a landslide victory in 2020 centers on the tacit assumption that Black votes are illegitimate because Blacks are not “true Americans.” It relies on an unspoken repudiation of the 15th Amendment. But he and his followers can’t say what they are thinking out loud.
When fanatical Evangelical attorney Jenna Ellis trumpets counting “every legal vote,” she is signaling that Black votes are not legal because Blacks are not actual “freedom-loving” white Christian Americans. What is cleverly messaged to appear to be an inclusionary election challenge, in actuality, is an exclusionary Jim Crow empty-hat strategy.
As a Vox article noted in a post-election analysis:
This year, the majority of white Americans voted for Trump, even after a recession and a botched response to a pandemic that has left more than 250,000 dead. And if we simply treat this fact as obvious while Black and Latinx votes are worthy of analysis, we essentially give white voters a pass for backing a racist campaign — twice.
“White voters seem even more likely to vote for Trump in 2020 than in 2016, in large numbers in the majority,” Chryl Laird, assistant professor of government at Bowdoin College and coauthor of the book Steadfast Democrats: How Social Forces Shape Black Political Behavior, told Vox. “What does that say about the progress that we’ve made?”
This is the landslide Trump is talking about. He won among white voters, who to him and most of those who voted for him are the only “real” voters. Blacks are descendants of people brought here in chains from Africa, and, therefore, are unworthy of voting.
Trump’s failed attempt to conduct a coup based on winning the majority of white votes has been a thinly-disguised racist undertaking.
We must ensure that democracy’s victory is not short-lived. There are many Republicans working to still establish an authoritarian one-party state, ruled by whites. The Electoral College still gives undue power to predominantly white states, and the Senate, at this moment, has the Republicans in the majority while representing only about 44% of Americans. This is the legacy of appeasing the Southern slave-holding states in creating a Constitutional compromise.
These are the cards we have been dealt, but it is time to start changing the deck. Yes, Mitch McConnell is a snake in the grass, as evil as Trump, and he is as racist too, having openly declared in 2008 that his only job was ensuring that Barack Obama would not receive a second term. He has no interest except power and increasing corporate and personal oligarchy.
Our work is cut out for us. We must work to do the impossible and get two Democrats elected in Georgia. Then we must reconstruct the guard rails to ensure that a well-financed delusional minority cannot ever again hijack democracy.
Trump is not an aberration. We know that now.
Authoritarians be warned.
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