Gaslighters-In-Chief Are a Proud American Tradition
The racism, bigotry, and White supremacy of this administration is nothing new
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After two White men shot dead more than 31 mostly people of color in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, in the space of 14 hours last weekend, President Donald Trump corralled the White House press corps on Monday so that he could deliver a prepared statement. The United States, he said, must condemn racism, bigotry, and White supremacy.
I literally laughed out loud.
To hear a president who has incited racism, bigotry, and White supremacy condemn the very things he has come to be associated with, was as if the satirical newspaper the Onion had written the prepared statement that Trump read — and fumbled. He slurred some words and now infamously called Dayton by the name of another Ohio town, Toledo. It was gaslighting on a national scale.
And still, the American media duly delivered. Having exhausted the thesaurus of every euphemism for racism — racially charged, racially infused, etc. — to describe Trump since Election 2016, media timidity when it comes to calling Trump what he is — a racist — remained as high as the bar they set for him was low.
“Trump Urges Unity vs. Racism,” a New York Times front-page headline gushed. Unironically. After criticism — Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York tweeted it was “a reminder of how White supremacy is aided by, and often relies upon, the cowardice of mainstream institutions,” the newspaper changed the headline, which Danielle Rhoades Ha, vice president of communications for the Times described in an emailed statement reported in USA Today as “flawed.” But the damage was clear, and it was already done, and the new headline “Assailing hate but not guns,” was a further exercise in denial of Trump’s hypocrisy and the race of most mass shooters in the U.S. As two CBS correspondents enthused “that was a step further than the president has taken in the past.”
When Donald Trump was elected, many truths that White Americans were either willingly or naively oblivious to were forced onto their consciousness. It was impossible to deny that racism was a driving force behind his election, and yet analysts and pundits insisted it was the “suffering…
