An Escalation of Racist Militarism and Weaponized Ignorance
As Donald Trump's rule begins, it appears that Americans are entering a period in which civic formations and public spheres will be modeled after a state of racist warfare. During his presidential campaign, he provided a nativist language that targeted the most vulnerable in American society, including immigrants, Blacks and Muslims. He also provoked society's vilest impulses, energizing a range of extremist racist and anti-Semitic groups, including authoritarians, fascists, neo-Nazis and white nationalists, some of whom seek to normalize their bigotry under the umbrella of the "alt-right." According to The New York Times, members of various racist and ultranationalist groups have been energized by Trump's election.
One of the founders of the neo-Nazi website, The Daily Stormer, was quoted as saying that Trump's victory has resulted in a "reboot of the White Nationalist movement." The same article also quoted Richard B. Spencer, another prominent figure in the so-called "alt-right" movement, who without apology argues that his organization, the National Policy Institute, is dedicated to "the heritage, identity and future of people of European descent" and that "Race is real, race matters. Race is the foundation of identity." This is simply neo-Nazi dribble dressed up in the discourse of difference. There can be little doubt that these antidemocratic and racist tendencies will play a major role in shaping Trump's presidency.
The call for regime change, a term used by the White House to designate overthrowing a foreign government, seems certain to intensify under Trump's administration. This means a more militant foreign policy under Trump. But it also signals a domestic form of regime change as well, since this authoritarian neoliberal government will deregulate, militarize and privatize everything it can. With this regime change will come the suppression of civil liberties and dissent at home through the expansion of a punishing state that will criminalize a wider range of everyday behaviors, expand mass incarceration, and all the while enrich the coffers of the ultra-rich and corporate predators. The hate-filled discourses of intolerance, chauvinism and social abandonment are already creeping further into the ever-widening spheres of society bent on blending a militarized war culture with a totalizing embrace of corporate capitalism.
Under Trump, ignorance has been weaponized and will continue to be used to produce a profoundly disturbing anti-intellectualism. It is important to remember that in his various speeches, Trump emptied language of any meaning, giving credence to the charge that he was producing with his endless lies a kind of post-truth in which words did not count for anything anymore, especially when informed judgments and facts could no longer be distinguished from opinions and falsehoods.
Words for Trump are reduced to emotions, shock and effects that mimic tawdry reality-TV-style performances. He continues to speak from a discursive space in which everything can be said, the truth is irrelevant and informed judgment becomes a liability. Under such circumstances, it is extremely difficult to grasp what he knows about anything. He steals words and discards their meaning, refusing to own up to them ethically, politically and socially.
There is more at work here than the registers of incoherency, ignorance and civic illiteracy. There is also an inconsistency that errs on the side of a militant racism and a racist militarism. For instance, the only moments of clarity in Trump's discourse are when he uses the toxic vocabulary of hate, xenophobia, racism and misogyny to target those he believes refuse to "Make America Great Again."
The Suppression of Dissent Has Already Begun
Under Trump leadership, a war culture, a culture of aggression and state violence are set to intensify. There will almost certainly be a widespread suppression of dissent -- a suppression similar to the police violence used against those protesting the Dakota Access pipeline in Standing Rock, North Dakota, along with the arrests of journalists covering the protests.
It is reasonable to assume that under the Trump administration there will also be an intensification of the harassment of journalists similar to what happened to Ed Ou, a renowned Canadian photojournalist who has worked for a number of media sources, including The New York Times and Time magazine. Ou was recently detained by US border officers while traveling from Canada to the US to report on the protests against the Dakota Access pipeline. According to Hugh Handeyside, "Ou was detained for more than six hours and subjected ... to multiple rounds of intrusive interrogation. [The border officers] questioned him at length about his work as a journalist, his prior professional travel in the Middle East, and dissidents or 'extremists' he had encountered or interviewed as a journalist. They photocopied his personal papers, including pages from his handwritten personal diary." In the end, he was refused entry into the US.
Given Trump's recent insistence that protesters who burn the American flag should be jailed or suffer the loss of citizenship, his hostile criticism of the Black Lives Matter movement and his ongoing legacy of stoking white violence against protesters, it is reasonable to assume that his future domestic policies will further legitimate a wave of repression and violence waged against dissenters and the institutions that support them.
For instance, his tweeted threats regarding the burning of the American flag can be read as code for threatening dissent, or worse, unleashing the power of the state on them. How else to explain the motive behind Trump's consideration of Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke as a potential candidate for secretary of the Department of Homeland Security?
Clarke has referred to the Black Lives Matter movement as "Black Lies Matter" and compared it to ISIS. Grace Guarnieri reports in Alternet that Clarke has "proposed that terrorist and ISIS sympathizers in America need to be rounded up and shipped off to Guantanamo, and has stated that 'It is time to suspend habeas corpus like Abraham Lincoln did during the civil war'.... He guessed that about several hundred thousand or even a million sympathizers were in the United States and needed to be imprisoned." It is difficult to believe that this type of egregious call for repressive state violence and a disregard for the Constitution supports rather than disqualifies somebody for a high-ranking government office.
Expanding what might be called his Twitter battles, Trump has made a number of critical comments regarding what he views as dissenting criticism of either him or his administration. For instance, after Brandon Victor Dixon, the actor in the Broadway play Hamilton, addressed Vice-President-elect Mike Pence after the curtain call, stating, in part, "We are diverse Americans who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us, our planet, our children, our parents, or defend us and uphold our inalienable right," Trump tweeted that Pence was harassed by Dixon and that the actor should apologize. Trump also took aim at a "Saturday Night Live" episode in which Alec Baldwin satirized a post-election Trump in the process of trying to figure out what the responsibilities of the presidency entail. Trump tweeted that it was "a totally one-sided, biased show -- nothing funny at all. Equal time for us?"
As cyber-bully-in-chief, Trump has taken to Twitter to launch tirades against the cast of the play Hamilton, against "Saturday Night Live" and against Chuck Jones, president of United Steelworkers Local 1999. Trump's verbal takedown of the union chief was a response to Jones accusing Trump of lying about the number of jobs he claimed he prevented Carrier Corporation in Indiana from shipping to Mexico. Actually, since 350 jobs were slated to stay in the US before Trump's intervention, the number of jobs saved by Trump was 850 rather than 1,100.
To some, this may seem like a trivial matter, but Trump's weaponizing of Twitter against critics and political opponents functions not only to produce a chilling effect on critics, but also gives legitimacy to those willing to suppress dissent through various modes of harassment and even the threat of violence. Frank Sesno, director of the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University, is right in stating that "Anybody who goes on air or goes public and calls out the president has to then live in fear that he is going to seek retribution in the public sphere. That could discourage people from speaking out." Such actions could also threaten their lives, as Chuck Jones found out. After the president-elect called him out, he received an endless stream of harassing phone calls and online insults, some even threatening him and his children. According to Jones, "Nothing that says they're gonna kill me, but, you know, you better keep your eye on your kids. We know what car you drive. Things along those lines."
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