As Trump Marinates in Rotting Racism, Too Many of Us Remain Complicit. Why?
Does Trump’s racist video mirror a darkness in our collective conscience? Or will we dance with Bad Bunny?
The felony arrests of independent Black journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort on Jan.18 for covering anti-ICE protests at Cities Church in St. Paul, Minnesota set off flashing red lights for activists and journalists reporting on the anti-Trump resistance movement.
The disruption intended to draw attention to Church pastor David Easterwood, who serves as acting local ICE field director. But the arrests symbolize a much broader attack on the media – which Donald Trump has called “the enemy of the American people” – with the Justice Department producing an absurd 14-page propaganda-filled indictment that criminalizes routine non-violent protest pre-planning and other free speech activities that are fundamental First Amendment rights.
“At one point, the indictment said, Mr. Parnell [the pastor delivering the sermon] and members of the congregation perceived ‘hostile’ gestures made by the protesters as ‘threats of violence and a potential prelude to a mass shooting.’ At another point, it said that Mr. Lemon and Ms. Fort, the two journalists, ‘largely surrounded’ Mr. Parnell and ‘peppered him with questions,’ describing the episode as an ‘attempt to oppress and intimidate him,’” according to the New York Times.
Watch any news conference. “Peppering” a possible newsmaker with questions is what journalists do to elicit answers to public-interest questions.
Lemon’s arrest by FBI/DHS agents on Jan. 29 while covering the Grammy Awards in Los Angeles was immediately considered a violation of the First Amendment. He was later released without bond or being asked to enter a plea. His arraignment is scheduled for Friday, Feb. 13, in federal court in Minnesota.
“The First Amendment is not just a legal guarantee. It is breath in the lungs of a democracy. And when that breath is threatened, you feel it before you can explain it,” Lemon said at the Human Rights Campaign’s New York gala Feb. 7. “Last week, I felt it. I felt the smothering and suffocation. I saw how quickly a voice can be targeted. How easily truth can be distorted. ... I saw how fast a story can be turned into a warning. But I’m not an activist. I’m not a protester. I’m a journalist.” (See Lemon’s full comments here.)
Trump doesn’t care. Nor do his White Supremacist/Christian National acolytes and minions, who not only follow orders from America’s Orwellian 1984 Big Brother – they anticipate the dictator’s desires. And Trump wants a big show of force to chill free speech. After all, as the old saying goes: “He who controls the narrative wins.”
Meanwhile, militarized ICE/Border Patrol agents act like Trump’s private army, assuming blanket immunity for lies, intimidation and violently attacking anyone with impunity. Protesters are immediately labeled “domestic terrorists,” including white US citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti, murdered by federal agents while protecting their neighbors. Unlike the May 25, 2020 murder of George Floyd, where police officer Derek Chauvin was filmed pressing his knee into Floyd’s neck for over nine minutes, the murders of Good and Pretti have yet to be investigated.
Americans strongly condemned domestic terrorism in Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa. In fact, on October 22, 1986 Congress overrode President Ronald Reagan’s veto of The Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act, “the first time in the twentieth century that a president had a foreign policy veto overridden,” according to one historian. The subsequent sanctions helped end the apartheid government.
Americans largely rejected apartheid, the system of white supremacist in South Africa. The Civil War was supposed to end our own institution of slavery and square the contradiction of Founders working to “form a more perfect Union” by establishing Justice and securing “the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity” – as described in the Preamble to the Constitution - while Founding Father Thomas Jefferson owned more than 600 slaves.
But Americans still do not know how to define “We the People?” Do the “Blessings of Liberty” apply only to “worthy” individuals and their progeny – or equally to us all?
The Declaration of Independence should have settled the issue: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
The Founder’s phrase “all men are created equal” actually meant white male landowners, and – like the literal interpretation of the Bible – assumed the subjugation of women. Abigail Adams wrote to her esteemed husband John Adams, who would become America’s first Vice President and then America’s second President after George Washington, pleading with him to include women at the 1776 Constitutional Convention.
“Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could,” Abigail Adams wrote.
“Why then, not put it out of the power of the vicious and the Lawless to use us with cruelty and indignity with impunity.”
That didn’t happen. It took many arduous years to pass the Equal Rights Amendment, guaranteeing equal rights under the law for all persons regardless of sex. And while the ERA secured all requirements for ratification in 2020, there is still debate over whether it is actually part of the Constitution.
Today, sexism is a practiced male privilege. At the end of cellphone video captured by Jonathan Ross, the ICE officer who fatally shot Renee Good, a male voice said ”fucking bitch” before Good’s car crashed.
Alex Pretti, an intensive care unit nurse at a Veterans Affairs hospital, was shot and killed by federal agents after Pretti interceded to help a woman being shoved to the ground by agents.
So far, neither Ross nor Pretti’s killers have been held accountable for the murders.
Racism was also consciously baked into the Constitution through the “Three-Fifths Compromise” conceived at the 1787 constitutional convention in Philadelphia as states determined representation. “It seemed now to be pretty well understood that the real difference of interests lay, not between the large & small but between the N. & Southn States. The institution of slavery & its consequences formed the line of discrimination,” James Madison said during the debate.
“The three-fifths compromise, written into Article 1, Section 2, resolved the conflict,” Patrick Rael wrote in Black Perspectives in 2016. But it “raised an obvious question: on what rationale were slaves to be counted? If they were being counted as people, how could they be excluded from a government of the people, and dedicated to the proposition that all men were created equal? And if they were being counted as property, why were no other forms of property to be included?”
“Gouverneur Morris of Pennsylvania wondered ‘upon what principle is it that the slaves shall be computed in the representation? Are they men? Then make them Citizens and let them vote. Are they property? Why then is no other property included?’”
But William Patterson of New Jersey “could regard negro slaves in no light but as property. They are no free agents, have no personal liberty, no faculty of acquiring property, but on the contrary are themselves property, & like other property entirely at the will of the Master.”
“Their commitment to union, though, overmastered their commitment to liberty,” wrote Rael. “Finally, they agreed that each enslaved human would count toward three-fifths of a full person for purposes of representation only. Gouverneur Morris capitulated, conceding that ‘it is in vain for the Eastern States to insist on what the Southn States will never agree to’; he had come ‘to form a compact for the good of America.’”
Seventy-six years later, in 1863, President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation declared that “all persons held as slaves within said designated States, and parts of States, are, and henceforward shall be free.” The Proclamation legally changed the lives of more than 3.5 million enslaved Blacks from Africa and other countries in the secessionist Confederate states.
Many Southern states rebelled by electing white supremacists to their regional governments with systems that mimicked slavery.
Memphis, Tennessee, for instance, had de facto Black Codes with the complicity of police, lawyers, judges, and jailers. With the post-war collapse of the cotton trade, angry, resentful white people pressed the military to force Black people to work plantation jobs. Top military brass determined that people deemed “worthless, idle” did not have the same rights as “the industrious and honest are entitled to” and ordered troops to pick up “vagrants” and force them into plantation labor contracts.
Reverend T. E. Bliss wrote to General Nathan Dudley, who established this labor policy for the Memphis Freedmen’s Bureau: “How is it that the colored children in Memphis even with their spelling books in their hands are caught up by your order & taken to the same place & there insolently told that they ‘had better be picking cotton.’ Is it for the purpose of conciliating’ their old rebel masters & assisting them to get help to secure their Cotton Crop? Has it come to this that the most Common rights of these poor people are thus to be trampled upon for the benefit of those who have wronged them all their days?”
Today those “colored children in Memphis” look like Liam Ramos, 5, who ICE deported to Texas with his father, returned to Minneapolis under court order, and now faces deportation again as the Trump administration appeals the order. The Marshall Project found that under Trump ICE held around 170 children on an average day.
But in Memphis in May 1866, the cruelty was meted out by white supremacist mobs who massacred Black people in major “race riots.” A subsequent joint Congressional Committee report on the Memphis massacre and other cruelties resulted in a backlash from 1865-1870 when the 13th, 14th and 15th Civil War Amendments were ratified, formally abolishing slavery, establishing equal protection under law, and giving Black men the right to vote.
President Andrew Johnson, however, continued to tout racism. “He had a vision of America as a white man’s government,” Johnson scholar Annette Gordon-Reed told NPR. He thought the country would go back to pre-war normality, minus slavery, where Blacks would be “not citizens but serfs, totally under the dominion of white people, except white people would not have the capacity to turn them into legal chattel.”
In 1867, Congress approved the First Reconstruction Act, a process by which the Confederate states could be readmitted to the Union. Johnson vetoed the bill as an attempt to “coerce the [Southern] people into the adoption of principles and measures to which it is known that they are opposed and upon which they have an undeniable right to exercise their own judgment.”
Congress overrode Johnson’s veto and subsequently passed three more Reconstruction Acts. Meanwhile, individual states created draconian “Black Codes” that empowered a violent white resistance to impose campaigns of terror against equality. The ”Codes” led to the lawless and deadly anti-Black Jim Crow laws that lasted until the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Today, Donald Trump’s world is awash in White Supremacy. In fact, a 2024 Wikipedia page devoted to Trump’s racial views opens with a publisher’s note: “This article may be too long to read and navigate comfortably. When this tag was added, its readable prose size was 19,000 words,” asking for it to be condensed.
In 2019, Eric Foner, author of “The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution,” explained: “Many Americans feel that we are living at a time like the end of the 19th century, when, in the words of Frederick Douglass, ‘principles which we all thought to have been firmly and permanently settled’ were ‘boldly assaulted and overthrown,’”
“Donald Trump is much more dangerous than Andrew Johnson,” political professors Sidney M. Milkis and Daniel J. Tichenor asserted in 2019. “The powers of modern administrative government have become joined to partisanship in a polarized nation. This fusion has turned the contemporary party system into a weapon for the promotion of the president’s agenda and fostered a visceral base of supporters who disdain the virtues of deliberation, compromise and pragmatic government.”
Restoring our constitutional democracy “requires us not only to hold an unprincipled president accountable, but also to address the fevered partisanship and vast executive powers that enabled him in the first place,” they write.
Why do Trump’s followers ignore common decency and empower Trump’s cruelty?
The Great Replacement theory and remigration, Steven Gardiner wrote in July 2025, refers to ethnic cleansing. “The idea flows from what I’ve called demographic dystopia, the modern white nationalist movement’s fixation on the idea that high rates of non-white immigration to the U.S. combined with low fertility rates among white people is a recipe for ‘white genocide.’ And while the bulk of MAGA mass deportation-rhetoric is directed at the undocumented, the underlying ideas don’t rely on legal status, so much as they do on who is entitled to be here by virtue of race, religion, and ideology.”
Top of Trump’s list is Barack Obama, America’s first Black President, who is still more popular than Trump. And the Epstein files saga and ICE’s violent tactics have angered some of his 77 million voters. But Trump’s post of a racist video depicting former President Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama as apes had even members of his loyal Republican Congressional base condemning the video. Characteristically, Trump refused to apologize - though the video has been deleted.
“Across Mr. Trump’s administration, racist images and slogans have become common on government websites and accounts, with the White House, Labor Department and Homeland Security Department all having promoted posts that echo white supremacist messaging,” the New York Times reported Feb. 6. “But the latest video struck a nerve that appeared to take the White House by surprise. The depiction of Mr. and Mrs. Obama as apes perpetuates a racist trope, historically used by slave traders and segregationists to dehumanize Black people and justify lynchings.”
The Obama Foundation responded simply with class and joy, posting several images of the loving couple on Instagram.
But how many people shared Trump’s post with a wink and thumbs up?
“President Trump and his supporters find community by rejoicing in the suffering of those they hate and fear,” The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer wrote in his 2018 essay “The Cruelty Is the Point” about the first Trump administration. Pondering the Museum of African-American History and Culture featuring stories of “unlikely triumph” and displaying “the artifacts of inhumanity and barbarism,” it’s the photographs of lynchings that persist.
“But it’s not the burned, mutilated bodies that stick with me,” Serwer writes. “It’s the faces of the white men in the crowd,” assuming mutual appreciation. “[T]hese grinning men…were human beings, people who took immense pleasure in the utter cruelty of torturing others to death—and were so proud of doing so that they posed for photographs with their handiwork, jostling to ensure they caught the eye of the lens, so that the world would know they’d been there. Their cruelty made them feel good, it made them feel proud, it made them feel happy. And it made them feel closer to one another.”
And here’s the hope: Bad Bunny, Grammy winner for Album of the Year made millions happy, proud and feel closer to one another, too, during his love-filled, energetic mostly-Spanish halftime Super Bowl show. He reached 128.2 million people in the US, 61,400,906 views (as of Feb. 10) on YouTube, and an unknown number internationally.
It’s been 250 years. Can we learn to respect one another? Can we learn to trust one another?
Trump was unhappy – but millions more felt like this sports guy:
