Impeaching Whiteness
By: Herbert Dyer
Tags: Race, Voter Suppression Laws, Impeachment, Politics, Nancy Pelosi

Rarely does a career criminal’s signature crime or proven modus operandi finally trip him up. After all, it is one’s continuing “success” over time which defines the criminal as a careerist. No, it’s the hardly noticed, ever so gradual settling in of complacency and simple carelessness, the quiet nonchalance and disregard for details over which one once sweated and parsed to the nth degree that inexorably, subconsciously, causes one to lower his or her guard and leaves one open to silly, even stupid — but costly — mistakes.

The career criminal eventually is caught, then, because he begins to take success for granted. He takes success for granted precisely because he has succeeded so many — all — other times in the past. His routine is firmly established and proceeds virtually on autopilot — successfully….until it doesn’t.

Such has been the case with our career criminal president Donald Trump. This 73-year-old white male, born to privilege, has laid down a long and documented history of all manner of crime and no punishment.

Because of his to-the-manor-born status, Trump has always been shielded from any serious consequences of his misdeeds. Whether as a youngster in an “exclusive” military academy, or as a pampered student frolicking on an Ivy League campus, shielded from real military service and a raging war in Vietnam thanks to his father’s “doctor;” or whether helping and learning from Dear Old Dad how to keep “the ‘c’s’” out of their New York City lily white properties, Trump was relentlessly socialized to accept as an article faith that he and his “kind” were physically, morally, obviously, simply, “better” than everybody else.

This means that Trump’s racism runs far deeper, is more insular, and always top of mind, than even those poorer but fellow “white” New Yorkers whose money and status does not allow them to keep “the blacks” at bay. Donald Trump’s racism is the most important thing about him.

And with that racial (he calls it “genetic”) superiority complex also came license to treat us lesser beings as just that — less than. Crimes against “them” (anyone who is not white, male and rich) do not compare or count or matter nearly as much as “real” crime — crime against those few folks who do match his upbringing’s standards.

And so he stiffs contractors and employees just because he can. He can hire the legal experts who specialize in slow-dragging cases through the courts until the other side runs out of money. He can use bankruptcy as a business tool and model for building ever higher buildings and even higher profits. And, he can buy the silence of just about anyone who would expose him and the gilded house of cards in which he really resides.

Lately, of course, Trump has brought this jaded and degenerate “lifestyle” into the once again lily-white White House. Here his shamelessness is on full display. Here he commits world class even cosmic crimes in full and open daylight, knowing that by the time the shock of his behavior, of his intemperate words, of him, subsides, we and the “news cycle” will have moved on to his next scandal.

Writing in The Atlantic, David Frum probably described this aspect of Trump best:

“Trump has never been furtive. He commits his wrongs in the full glare of publicity. Bribes to Trump are not delivered by shadowy men in underground garages. They are collected right on Pennsylvania Avenue, in a garish hotel with Trump’s name right on the door. Trump does not stealthily embezzle Republican donations. The party simply books its events on his premises, every misappropriated dollar counted and disclosed. When Trump invited Russia to hack his opponent and deliver her emails to him, he did it on live television.”

The notorious Chicago mobster and all-round gangster of the “Roaring ‘20s” and ’30s, Al Capone, was eventually, finally, ensnared not for any of his many known or suspected murders, nor for running an industrial-scaled illicit alcohol manufacturing and bootlegging operation, complete with speakeasies, casinos, brothels and bordellos. He was never charged with making political and police payoffs or corporate bribes, nor for extortion of competitors, or for orchestrating outright gangland warfare on the streets of Chicago. No, “Scar Face” got caught up for what at that time, and at first seemed a silly or at least minor infraction (not even a real crime): violation of the tax code.

Likewise, Trump has finally been called to account — not directly, however, for his racism, nor for his misogyny; not for the brazen self-dealings of his far-flung real estate holdings; not for consorting with murderous dictators or bribing actual consorts; and certainly not for separating desperate brown and black migrant parents from their children and then throwing the lot of them into also separate and “private” concentration camps.

On the surface, Nancy Pelosi’s declaration that Trump will be held to account for political self-dealing with Ukraine’s freshly minted president has little to do with white supremacy/white racism. After all, all of the major players in this curious vignette are white, right?

Wrong. Trump is facing impeachment in the House of Representatives because he finally re-crossed a line that he had crossed earlier and had, essentially, gotten away with — enlisting foreigners in skewing the American election process to his personal political benefit.

That previous skewing deeply impacted and involved disenfranchising black and brown voters nationwide. That is to say that all of the methods and means of voter suppression and voter intimidation were deployed against black people and brown people with a fierce vengeance not seen since the height of Ole Jim Crow; and which allowed this man to eek out a razor-thin Electoral College victory, even as he lost the “popular” election by an astounding three million votes.

The ham-handed attempt to extort and blackmail the rookie Ukrainian president into producing political “dirt” on Joe Biden and his son Hunter, and doing so openly and repeatedly only one day after Special Counsel Robert Mueller supposedly “exonerated” him for the exact same conduct with respect to Russia, well…as my late mother liked to say, “that’s just too much sugar for a dime.”

And, Trump finally stiffed the wrong person — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. In the interest of full disclosure, I was against Pelosi’s regaining the House Speakership following the Democrats’ resounding victory in 2018. I had long ago decided that she was too “corporate,” too “traditional” and, yes, too “conservative” for the desperate times in which we live.

Her prolonged procrastination and overly cautious approach in deciding to at least “inquire” as to the feasibility of impeaching Trump, appeared, on the surface anyway, as timidity, even cowardice, and was certainly too politically calculated given the five-alarm fire Trump has ignited throughout the land.

But Pelosi’s final acquiescence to the demands of a fast-growing number of House Democrats and the general voting public has redeemed her personally, and positions her to be written down as a true heroine, if not the savior of this republic’s faltering “democracy.”

As my Medium colleague, Andrea Gonzalez-Ramirez, has written, Trump and his legions of supporters are pulling out all of the racist stops in order to “re-elect” this man.

Make no mistake: As all serious observers agree by now, it was Trump’s appeal to white supremacy/white racism which “won” him the White House in ’16 — not “economic anxiety,” and not a generalized, ephemeral dissatisfaction with the political system, per se.

Racism worked in ’16, and the plan is to double-down, triple-down, quadruple-down on race-baiting his vaunted “base.” The ultimate, and yes, achievable, objective is to continually feed and grow that white angst, that white fear and absolute white terror at the reality of a not-too-distant black-brown-red-and-yellow majority.

Notice that most of the demon Democrats in this Trump retweet are “people of color.” It doesn’t take a degree in political science to figure out why.

Writer Ezra Klein put it this way: “As reams of research show, when white Americans believe themselves losing demographic and political control of the country, they become far more conservative.”

And David French agrees, writing in the conservative National Review:

“The near-total silence (at least so far) [in the face of Trump’s ongoing perfidy] from GOP leaders is deeply dispiriting. Do they not understand the message the leader of their party is sending — especially to America’s nonwhite citizens? Do they not understand that racial malice as a political strategy isn’t just an ultimately losing proposition but also deeply divisive, picking at the scabs of America’s deepest political, cultural, and spiritual wounds?”

The answer to French’s question is this: Of course Republicans and their leaders understand exactly what they are doing and why.

Getting rid of Trump and his whole crew, however, will send the signal that this nation-state is finally beginning to “get over” its 500-year-old obsession with skin color.