A week ago, Donald Trump took to Twitter to level a familiar racist trope squarely at four nationally-known freshman congresswomen: Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan. In a tweet, Trump said of the four Black and brown women, “Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime-infested places from which they came. Then come back and show us how it is done.” If there’s anything racist loves, it’s telling someone that isn’t white to “go back where they came from” absent of irony and history.
Yet, instead of simply focusing on the most famous white supremacist in the world using the biggest platform on the planet to target four nonwhite women, select pundits, columnists, and cable news anchor instead chose to dissect whether or not Trump’s display of bigotry had ulterior motives, i.e. some distractive tool to blind us from some more pressing issue. As if that really matters in terms of issues like say, the president of the United States inciting violence rooted in a racist pretext against members of Congress.
In “Trump’s tweets are a distraction for something else he doesn’t want us to see,” Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker writes “This is Trump being his usual nativist, racist, xenophobic and shameless self, while directing a manufactured drama in his usual, charming way.” To Parker, Trump’s tweet was a means of escaping his relationship to “Jeffrey Epstein: financier, sex offender, globe-trotting gallivant and alleged sex trafficker of teenage girls.”
This was a popular theory shared by many last week.
In a USA Today piece themed around Trump and the politics of distraction, Lawrence Douglas, a law professor at Amherst College who has previously written about the topic, said the tweet in question, “fits Trump’s pattern of rule by distraction.” He went on to add, “I wouldn’t say that Trump woke up and said to himself, ‘better send out some racist tweets impugning the loyalty of four House members of color so my base doesn’t notice that the promised ICE raids failed to materialize,’ but we know he is awed by his own power to monopolize media attention.”
Well, a separate report from the Washington Post confirms Douglas’ hypothesis, but I have a single question to all who continue to speculate as to whether or not Donald Trump is being a “master manipulator” as once shouted by Quad Webb-Lunceford on the underappreciated Bravo series Married to Medicine: What does it matter?
I don’t believe Trump is intentionally trying to distract us with tweets like this. I believe he is simply being himself: a lazy president who sits around all day watching television and live-tweeting in real-time his reactions in real-time. Regardless of Trump’s intentions, the end result is the same: he has put these women’s lives at risk.
Trump feigned disapproval of the bigoted crowd at his de facto Klan rally masquerading as a campaign event in North Carolina for chanting “SEND HER BACK!” about the Somali-born Omar, but soon after proceeded to defend them as “patriots.” These “patriots” are on par with supporters of the confederacy and Jim Crow. Some of these “patriots” have a history of reacting violently to nonwhite people who effectively act like the ingrates Trump categorizes them as.
Does he see the benefit of playing to the racism of his base after the fact? Probably, but to assign strategy to it is to give him far too much credit. And again, what does it matter? Regardless of whether or not you look at it from a strategic standpoint, the end result is that the members of the Yung Caucus (I prefer that to “The Squad” which has already been abused more than “on fleek”) are in more physical danger than they’ve ever been because Trump won’t stop demonizing them as anti-American and a threat to the nation.
It’s hard to keep up with the consistent chaos of the Trump administration, but before this “distraction” was another the week prior: the reported ICE raids ordered by Trump in various cities across the country.
Democratic presidential candidate Senator Amy Klobuchar described the raids a distraction based on Trump’s effort to “make news.” Such revelation didn’t make the lives of millions of undocumented immigrants any less terrified then or now when considering what may come next from the impulsive bigot with perpetual axes to grind who now has the power of the federal government at his disposal.
Klobuchar’s choice of words recalled the time one of her Democratic colleagues, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, dismissed Trump’s use of Twitter to announce a military ban on trans people as a “distraction.” Speaking on CNN’s The Situation Room at the time, Whitehouse said: “[It] doesn’t have the aura of seriousness. It looks like he’s trying to throw yet another shiny object out there to distract people from what’s going on with Russia. And as usual, when he throws a shiny object, he figures out a group that he thinks is vulnerable and just tries to be mean to them.”
This, too, was a familiar talking point from far too many people in media. It, too, is an awful way to look at the impact of Trump’s rhetoric. Trans people, like four congresswomen, like the undocumented immigrants living in our communities, and like all of the Black and brown people impacted by the racist rhetoric seeping out of Sweet Potato Saddam, are human beings. To look at these outbursts are “distractions” is to dehumanize us. To look at his as mere pawns in a political game is to display an unfortunate disregard for us and our plight.
Most of them do this because they are white and unimpacted.
Last week, the New York Times editorial board published “How Do You Not Give Donald Trump What He Wants?” — wrestling with the question of how to respond to Trump and his purported means of distraction. They can start by encouraging their political reporters to call something racist “racist” and to stop acquiescing to a demagogue in the name of access journalism. More than anything, it’s imperative that they and others responsible for framing the national political narrative, recognize that rhetoric often works in tandem with policy, thus many of us don’t have the luxury of just ignoring what comes out of the bigots mouth because it has real consequences for us one way or another.
Speaking to MSNBC on Monday, Congresswoman Barbare Lee said of Trump’s recent remarks: “Those are racist comments. They are dangerous. Hate speech perpetuates and sets the stage for violence and is very despicable. And here you have four women of color who have come with their life experiences … and they’re here to stay. I’m here to stay.”
Indeed. On Monday, Trump continued his attacks — accusing Ocasio-Cortez, Omar, Pressley, and Tlaib of being in “a racist group.” It’s another familiar line from the bigot playbook: I’m not the racist, you are. It’s the sort of retort Trump’s political forefather, George Wallace, would have been proud to hear once upon a time. I imagine some will look at that tweet and continue to speculate if it was just “Trump being Trump” and “distracting” us from something like Bob Mueller’s testimony or some other issue believed to be of greater urgency.
Those that do will continue to miss the point.