But it’s too little,
too late. Trump’s unwillingness to denounce hateful violence has been part
of his political strategy from the start.
Weeks after he began
his campaign by alleging that Mexican immigrants were criminals
and rapists, two brothers in Boston beat up and urinated on a 58-year-old
homeless Mexican national, subsequently telling police “Donald Trump was right,
all these illegals need to be deported.”
Instead of condemning
the brutality, Trump excused it by saying“people who are following me are very passionate.
They love this country and they want this country to be great again.”
During campaign rallies Trump repeatedly excused brutality toward protesters. “You know what they used to do to guys like that when they were in a place like this? They’d be carried out on a stretcher, folks.”
After white supporters
punched and attempted to choke a Black Lives Matter protester, Trump said “maybe he should have been roughed up.”
Trump was even
reluctant to distance himself from David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan.
Since becoming
president, Trump’s instigations have continued. As Representative Mark Sanford,
a Republican from South Carolina, told the Washington Post, “the
president has unearthed some demons.”
In May, Trump
congratulated body-slamming businessman Greg Gianforte on his special election
win in Montana, making no mention of the victor’s attack on a reporter the
night before.
Weeks ago Trump even
tweeted a video clip of himself in a WWE professional wrestling match slamming
a CNN avatar to the ground and pounding him with punches and elbows to the head.
Hateful violence is
hardly new to America. But never before has a president licensed it as a
political strategy or considered haters part of his political base.
In his second week as
president, Trump called Wayne LaPierre, CEO of the National Rifle Association
to the White House.
Soon thereafter,
LaPierre told gun owners they should fear “leftists” and the “national media
machine” that were “an enemy utterly dedicated to destroy not just our country,
but also Western civilization.”
Since then the NRA has
run ads with the same theme, concluding “the only way we stop this, the only
way we save our country and our freedom, is to fight this violence of lies with
a clenched fist of truth.”
It’s almost as if
someone had declared a new civil war. But who? And for what purpose?
One clue came earlier
last week in a memo from Rich Higgins, who had been director for strategic
planning in Trump’s National Security Council.
Entitled “POTUS &
Political Warfare,” Higgins wrote the seven-page document in May, which was
recently leaked to Foreign Policy Magazine.
In it Higgins charges
that a cabal of leftist “deep state” government workers, “globalists,” bankers,
adherents to Islamic fundamentalism and establishment Republicans want to
impose cultural Marxism in the United States. “Recognizing in candidate Trump
an existential threat to cultural Marxist memes that dominate the prevailing
cultural narrative, those that benefit recognize the threat he poses and seek
his destruction.”
There you have it.
Trump’s goal has never been to promote guns or white supremacy or to fuel
attacks on the press and the left. These may be means, but the goal has been to
build and fortify his power. And keep him in power even if it’s found that he
colluded with Russia to get power.
Trump and his
consigliere Steve Bannon have been quietly encouraging a civil war between
Trump’s base of support – mostly white and worried – and everyone who’s not.
It’s built on economic
stresses and racial resentments. It’s fueled by paranoia. And
it’s conveyed by Trump’s winks and nods haters, and his deafening silence
in the face of their violence.
A smaller version of
the civil war extends even into the White House, where Bannon and his protégés
are doing battle with leveler heads.
National security
advisor Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster fired Higgins. Reportedly, Trump was furious at
the firing.
McMaster was quick to
term the Charlottesville violence “terrorism.” Ivanka Trump denounced “racism,
white supremacy and neo-nazis.” Reportedly, chief of staff John Kelly pushed
Trump to condemn the haters who descended on Charlottesville.
Let’s hope the
leveler heads win the civil war in the White House. Let’s pray the leveler
heads in our society prevent the civil war Trump and Bannon want to instigate
in America.
ROBERT B. REICH is Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at
the University of California at Berkeley and Senior Fellow at the Blum Center
for Developing Economies. He served as Secretary of Labor in the Clinton
administration, for which Time Magazine named him one of the ten most effective
cabinet secretaries of the twentieth century. He has written fourteen books,
including the best sellers "Aftershock", "The Work of
Nations," and "Beyond Outrage," and, his most recent,
"Saving Capitalism." He is also a founding editor of the American
Prospect magazine, chairman of Common Cause, a member of the American Academy
of Arts and Sciences, and co-creator of the award-winning documentary,
INEQUALITY FOR ALL.
