President Donald Trump has become the country’s first white supremacist-in-chief, columnist Earl Ofari Hutchinson writes. The president has eliminated diversity, inclusion and equity programs, tried to bring back statues of Confederate Army generals, assaulted the Voting Rights Act and sent National Guard troops into Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.
Courtesy photo
By Earl Ofari Hutchinson
Contributing Columnist
White supremacy, not the Constitution, is now the law of the land, courtesy of Donald J. Trump. It is no mean exaggeration to brand him America’s quasi-official white supremacist-in-chief.
Here is the latest in the ever-lengthening litany of Trump’s racist horrors since he took office a second time. It’s the Department of Homeland Security’s recent advertising/recruitment pitch for ICE agents. It featured a quote from an avowed white supremacist, to be more specific, William Galey Simpson.
He penned a book in the 1970s, “Which Way, Man, 1978.” He touted Hitler as a good guy. Now, we’ve heard this before, a white supremacist and white nationalist defending Hitler. The Hitler adoration has been a staple within white nationalist and anti-Semitic circles for decades.
Simpson gave many rationales, more accurately the usual storehouse of falsehoods about Hitler, always in his case to make a robust defense of white supremacy. So, we’ve seen this tired drama, this tired act, repeatedly through the years by white supremacists. The Department of Homeland Security would not have used the quote if it didn’t have full confidence in Trump’s approval of it.
The Trump administration, within the span of his first few months back in office, has been an unabashed promoter of white nationalism, white supremacy white racism, white domination and just any and everything white, white, white.
Let’s take a minute and review the drumbeat of white supremacist acts by Trump over the last few months.
First, diversity, inclusion and equity. Remember that? It’s almost now a forgotten issue.
Diversity, inclusion and equity were practically wiped from the landscape by Trump through one executive order after another. Then add his hectoring, harassment, nonstop bullying and overt threats to withhold federal funds, and lawsuits to purge DEI programs.
The target has been corporations, universities, businesses and public agencies. Trump has had a special and perverse obsession with the major universities, especially Harvard.
That’s no surprise since Harvard is generally regarded as the gold standard for higher education in America. Trump bullied, sued and threatened to cut tens of millions in federal funding from the university if it didn’t toe the Trump line and scrap DEI programs.
He tossed into the bullying campaign the allegation that Harvard and other universities such as UCLA were hot beds of antisemitism. That was just a smokescreen since Trump has mollycoddled all stripes of white nationalist, violent antisemitic groups.
Second, when it comes to the Confederacy, there’s an ongoing love affair Trump and his Department of Defense honcho have with Confederate generals — bring back the statues and rename military bases after these old traitors That’s what they were, traitors to the U.S. In fact, the ultimate insult is the renaming of military bases, federal military bases after these traitors.
Third, Trump has made it clear that when we talk about whites, or excuse me, history, to be more specific, he goes apoplectic over so-called woke in any aspect of American life. In other words, let’s talk about history without demeaning whites.
Let’s talk about history without playing up the contributions of Blacks, Hispanics, LGBT, women, Native Americans and Asian Americans while supposedly demonizing whites and not appreciating the “beauty” of what America once was. Let’s just have white bread American history.
Fourth, from white supremacist in chief, Trump. Voting rights. It’s under assault again, what’s left of it that is. The Voting Rights Act is the last vestige of some degree of equality and justice in the voting process, which was won through blood, sweat and tears over the decades. To get equity in fair political process, voting rights legislation was enacted.
The fresh assault on it is orchestrated by Trump and the Supreme Court, of course, backed by the Republican Party.
Fifth, immigration. Now, to hear Trump tell it, he wants to be able to racially profile people of color to allow federal agents to identify and sweep the streets of those here illegally more readily. We’re not just talking about Hispanics. We’re talking about Blacks: Haitians, Panamanians, Cubans, Nicaraguans, Hondurans and of course, Africans. Trump wants to racially profile them.
Finally, Trump has unleashed the military in blatant violation of the Constitution on Washington D.C., with threats of similar military takeovers in Chicago, Los Angeles, and other cities. All done under the lying, and mythical claim that crime is so out of hand in those cities that the military must intervene. It’s of course no accident that DC, Chicago, and L.A., are majority Black and hrown cities. His inflammatory rhetoric, loaded with the usual stock racial code words about murderers, rapists and looters running amok are purely designed to play to his racist followers.
So, between the Confederate generals, the old traitors, getting rid of DEI, turning immigration enforcement into a white supremacist operation, and warring on woke, and imposing quasi martial law in selected minority-run cities, white supremacy is back in the nation’s saddle again. And it’s all courtesy of something America has never at least openly had. That’s a white supremacist-in-chief. The result, white supremacy, and not the Constitution, is now the law of the land.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His latest book is “Trump for Sale” (Middle Passage Press).
