Trump Knew Exactly What He Was Doing.
By: Gabriel Brock
Tags: Civil Rights, Racism, Trump Administration, Trump, Class

Photo by Harun Tan from Pexels

As Americans are tuning in to the final chapters of the televised dumpster fire that has been the Trump Presidency. Congress is chugging along with 45’s second impeachment. More and more terrorists are being charged for their involvement in the attempted coup at the capitol, and we turn to see what is in store for the first 100 days of the Biden Administration. From what has been released so far, the administration's primary goal is mitigating the Coronavirus pandemic. Biden has already announced that he plans to enforce a mask mandate and vaccinate 100 million Americans in the first 100 days, a plan that leading health officials say is ‘absolutely doable But one of the most pressing problems ahead for this administration will be reversing the irrefutable damage caused by the previous one. Biden and his team will be fighting an uphill battle, working to rectify four years of lies, deceit, and manipulation from Trump and his hellhounds. A USC survey finds that while over 80% of Americans wear masks outside of their residence, not a day goes by without a video going viral on Twitter of a maskless “Karen” who believes their civil rights have been infringed upon. This now too common occurrence has demonstrated arguably the biggest obstacle to the Biden administration’s plan, the Trump Administration.

Reality Television has been oft-criticized for its overly dramatized and meticulously calculated version of reality, and Donald John Trump is the man made by reality television. When he hit the election circuit in 2015, he became a rockstar overnight. He was drawing crowds of thousands to his loud and exclamatory rallies. His bold and often racist, sexist, and demeaning statements erupted ear shrieking applause from his ever-growing fan base. He gave the people exactly wanting to hear, blaming the loss of factory-work and other blue-collar jobs on illegal immigrants and ignoring that automation was the culprit. This game of pin the tail on the immigrant became the base of his campaign. The now infamous moniker of “Make America Great Again” became their rallying war cry when Trump’s true goal was to make America hate again. For every immigrant Trump called a rapist or criminal, he gained another follower into his cult of ignorance and hatred. There is a reason why you could often see a Trump flag proudly next to the dixie. Donald Trump didn't create any of the hate we have seen on America's rampant incline in these last five years. He only allowed people who have always felt this way to be outspoken and not afraid to air out their demons in public.

Trump convinced millions of people that BIPOC and marginalized people finally receiving equities treatment in this country was a direct attack on the people who had benefited grotesquely from the same institution rather than the dismantling of the system itself. Behind all of the smoke and mirrors, Trump supporters were afraid that they were going to lose their privilege. They were afraid that the world wasn’t going to tie Black people’s shoelaces together in the race of life. They were afraid that people they viewed as lesser than they were going to rise above the poverty line finally or, God forbid, finally be equal to them. They were toddlers throwing a tantrum in their high chair of privilege, and The Donald was there to hold their hands and tell them that everything was going to be okay, nothing was going to change, that America was going to be great again. America would go back to the point where it was easiest for them to succeed, an America where Black people couldn’t vote, and it was legal to not hire someone because of the color of their skin. He promised to return America to it’s

The Trump administration made good on his campaign promises early on in his presidency.

On January 27, six and a half days after he took office, Trump signed an executive order — the first version of his Muslim ban — that discriminated against Muslims and banned refugees. On February 23, Attorney General Sessions withdrew an earlier Justice Department memo that set a goal of reducing and ultimately ending the department’s use of private prisons. On March 17, the Department of Housing and Urban Development removed links to four key resource documents from its website, which informed emergency shelters on best practices for serving transgender people facing homelessness and complying with HUD regulations. On March 29, The Washington Post reported that the Department of Education decided to terminate the Opening Doors, Expanding Opportunity grant program, which helps local districts devise ways to boost socioeconomic diversity within their schools. On April 13, Trump signed a resolution of disapproval under the Congressional Review Act, which overturned the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ final rule updating the regulations governing the Title X family planning program — a vital source of family planning and related preventive care for low-income, uninsured, and young people across the country. On April 26, Trump released an outline of a tax reform plan that was viewed largely as a tax giveaway for the wealthy and big corporations.

And that was all within his first 100 days in office.

That doesn't even cover it all from his first 100 days. The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights has a complete list of every action the Trump Administration has taken over the past four years.

As his administration was working in the shadows to dismantle decades of civil rights work, Trump was front and center tweeting like he was on The Real Housewives of 1600 Pennsylvania. Holding rallies in the middle of his presidency. Flying away to his golf course on the weekends. Saluting North Korean Generals. Doing everything he could to draw focus away from the real menace. His handymen were repealing universal healthcare and making it easier to expel Black and brown students from schools, while he was working to blatantly spread lies and misinformation. All of the energy the American people should have focused on his cabinet and Congress, we spent reading his Twitter rants and worried about if this bumbling idiot was going to launch the nuclear warheads because CNN was talking bad about him. He was the clown to keep the bull from trampling the cowboy and boy was he good. He was so radicalizing that emboldened so his followers sent bombs to prominent democrats and neo-liberal news outlets and in the last weeks of his presidency, he held a rally that incited thousands of his supporters to “storm the US Capitol” which left five dead. The same people who screamed Blue Lives Matter and Back the Blue beat a Capitol police officer to death because 45 convinced them that the 2020 election had been “stolen” from him. He had built a sounding chamber of red hats and white hoods fostered an alternate reality in which he was the all-knowing messiah and where you could air out all your God awful opinions and no “liberal snowflakes” would be there to tell you that you were just racist or homophobic. Trump has created a new Jim Crow, but this time you can’t tell who’s who.