I am old enough to remember the original George Wallace, a hateful racist who was Governor of Alabama. He ran for president as a champion of white nationalism. His base is now Trump’s base. Trump is the second coming of Wallace.
This post says it succinctly.
Trump channeled Wallace in front of Mount Rushmore.
Racism is alive and living in the White House.
On June 10 the Lincoln Project, the effort of former-Republicans to defeat Donald Trump, posted this on Twitter: “Today @realDonaldTrump became the Confederacy’s Second President.” The reason: Trump’s relentless defense of “Confederate generals who fought against the United States of America to preserve slavery and uphold white supremacy.”
In the weeks that followed, Trump has only doubled down on this defense, denouncing Black Lives Matter protesters as “vandals” attacking “our heritage,” and making clear that his re-election strategy centers on the stoking of white racial resentment, perhaps to the point of race war…
If last year Trump abused the legacy of Lincoln, this year he celebrated an edifice that has come to symbolize white supremacy and the illegal dispossession of native American lands, created in 1927 by a man with KKK sympathies who also created the monument to the Confederacy on Stone Mountain, Georgia, that features Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee, and Jefferson Davis.
Following Trump’s Juneteenth weekend rally in Tulsa, the site of the 1921 massacre of hundreds of local Black citizens, the explicit racism of Saturday’s site was obvious, and made more obvious by Trump’s neo-fascist diatribe of a speech. CNN’s description is apt:
In a jaw-dropping speech that amounted to a culture war bonfire, President Donald Trump used the backdrop of Mount Rushmore Friday night to frame protesters as a nefarious left-wing mob that intends to “end America.” Those opponents, he argued, are engaged in a “merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values, and indoctrinate our children.”
Trump did reference the egalitarian promise of July 4 as a celebration of the Declaration of Independence. He cynically nodded to Lincoln’s “Emancipation Proclamation” and to the example of Martin Luther King, Jr, and he listed a pantheon of “heroes” that included Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and Muhammad Ali. But these were rhetorical flourishes, dissimulations designed to furnish a veneer of plausible deniability for the otherwise racist force of the speech. For Trump made clear to his white base that it is the current followers of Douglass, Tubman, and Ali who constitute a clear and present danger to “American Greatness.” The speech was nothing less than a call to arms, not simply to re-elect Trump but to vanquish enemies of the people: “Here tonight, before the eyes of our forefathers, Americans declare again, as we did 244 years ago: that we will not be tyrannized, we will not be demeaned, and we will not be intimidated by bad, evil people. It will not happen.”
While Trump cynically invoked King, it is hard to imagine a rhetorical performance more different from King’s “The American Dream” speech, delivered on July 4, 1965, at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia, at the height of the struggle for civil rights that Trump is intend on repudiating. King’s speech was a serious moral appeal, a call to realize the “promise” of American freedom. Trump’s speech, especially when considered in the broader rhetorical and political context in which it was delivered, is a cynical incitement to a racially-inflected culture war….
There are obvious differences between Wallace and Trump. Trump is in many ways a postmodern racist, a shapeshifter perfectly capable of denouncing “shithole countries,” describing cities like Elijah Cummings’s Baltimore as “disgusting . . . rodent infested messes,” mocking Black journalists such as Yamiche Alcidor, and demanding that women of color who oppose him “go back to where they came from,” while simultaneously glorifying “Louie Armstrong” and Jesse Owens. Trump’s Mount Rushmore speech was thus more rhetorically complex, and in many ways more insidious, than Wallace’s 1965 speech.
But both men are at heart reactionaries for whom July Fourth is an occasion to commemorate not Lincoln’s inclusive vision of a strong national government that emancipates its citizens from oppression, but the neo-confederate opposition to this emancipation. Trump celebrates not a nation of free, rights-bearing, democratic citizens, but a homogenous populace unified in struggle against against imagined enemies: “Uplifted by the titans of Mount Rushmore, we will find unity that no one expected; we will make strides that no one thought possible. This country will be everything that our citizens have hoped for, for so many years, and that our enemies fear — because we will never forget that American freedom exists for American greatness. And that’s what we have: American greatness.”
To this extent, Trump, like Wallace, appeals to a genuinely Confederate reading of the Declaration of Independence itself.
Donald Trump is our George Wallace, our Jefferson Davis, a man who yearns to restore the Confederacy.
He must be defeated.
Trump’s Mt. Rushmore declaration of war against minorities and liberals will do one thing he is too stupid to be aware of.
The Russian propaganda that helped elect Trump in 2016 focused on getting black voters, liberals, and independents in battleground states that would have voted for Hillary Clinton to not vote, and that manipulating campaign of lies succeeded.
But, what worked in 2016 will not work in 2020.
This time they will vote. Nothing will stop them. Trump has made sure of that, and I do not think Trump’s MAGA hat-wearing deplorable base running around maskless with their Confederate battle flags, American flags with Trump’s face on them, and AR 15’s slung over their shoulders will be able to intimidate those voters either.
If Trump doesn’t get the Civil War he wants by election day in November, then his base is spineless, cowards and bullies, just like him, and they will crawl back to their remote armed camps to hide like Trump wet himself when he hid in the White House bunker.
I, too, am old enough to remember all three of George Wallace’s presidential campaigns–1964 (for the Democratic nomination), 1968 (as an independent) and 1972 (for the Democratic nomination). I see several possibly relevant distinctions between Wallace and President Trump:
Wallace lost all three times. President Trump won his only try.
Wallace was not extremely wealthy, and did not have close ties to finance or big industry (if he had, he might have won).
Wallace supported expansion of American small industries and expansion of trade schools, things President Trump with his big money associates couldn’t care less about.
Toward the end of his life, Wallace repented of his racism.
I suppose none of these distinctions look particularly good for President Trump, do they?
When George Wallace saw that he was beaten by the civil rights movement, he moved his political stance and actually went to the governor’s chair with a majority of the black vote, if my memory serves me correctly.
In the last few weeks, with the coronavirus and the George Floyd Affair giving him ample cover, he could have tacked to the center without losing his base. He chose, instead, to double down on harsh rhetoric. He is betting that the people who come to the polls to vote for his opponent will be turned away. Then he can go on ruling in the name of the minority.
Yes, you are correct. At the end of his life, Wallace repented and demonstrated contrition (unlike the Lincoln Project darlings). Wallace’s legacy will never find a consensus, but I believe living the last third of his life in a wheelchair made a difference, a difference he would not have traded for anything. He was no devil and he was no saint. I believe equivocating him with the Idiot is not appropriate. https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-1995-03-11-1995070104-story.html
And since I’ve been listening to music all day, it’s a good time for some Patterson Hood to highlight how Wallace’s legacy will never be definable:
No, I don’t credit George Wallace for recanting when he was powerless, crippled, and deaf. When he had a national megaphone, he used it to spew hatred and encourage violence and hatred. Too late to matter.
I respect and accept that point of view. Patterson would agree with you (and I loves me some Patterson anytime). I honestly don’t know where I fall on this. Some days I’m generous, on others I’m not. But that’s the South I grew up in, nothing is simple. Ever. And that’s why I would never live there again and always feel like an outsider when I visit. Not that where I live is simple or always wonderful. Never comfortable with the warts, but I have to live with them nonetheless.
I have always felt that Wallace just did what many politicians do: he changed his political camouflage. The black vote was going to complete his career, retire him to his home so he wised up.
How apt on Wallace/ Trump parallel: “campaigns tailored to resentful voters brimming with the conviction that society’s deck is stacked against them.”
Are folks here aware that many Americans [conservatives/ Trumpistas] have gleaned from their news sources nothing about weeks of mostly-peaceful anti-racism protests other than “rioting/ looting” and “setting things on fire”? This just anecdotal, heard regularly over the last month on CSPAN’s daily Wash Jnl show from roughly 20% of callers-in on the Rep line…
Not that that’s surprising. I remember the same phenomenon awhile back during a spate of campus protests against rw-muckraker speakers on campus, when all were tarred as violent student riots, by virtue of the Berkeley fire-setting incident. And similar overreaction to wildcat non-violent teacher protests in 2018. This particular contingent seems to lie awake at night shivering over any sort of lawful peaceful protest, anticipating all hell breaking loose.
Trump’s lunatic Mt Rushmore speech puts the cap on it: he’s got their #, & playing it for all it’s worth.
Seeing Trump spew his culture war invective in front of George Washington was like watching an orangutan take a dump on “The Starry Night”.
very like
The murder of native Americans and theft of their land and the enslavement and subjugation of black people are the Original Sins of this country, and they must be expiated. Trump is oblivious to this, to what is being cried in our streets. Until we do something, in atonement for this sordid history, about native American and black poverty, which is the legacy of the attempted erasure of these people’s cultures and of this history of theft and murder and economic exploitation and shutting out from opportunity, we will not be made clean. It’s time to start teaching history, not the jingoistic fables, not the lies, that made up Trump’s speech. Trump was quite clear in the speech that his agenda is to ensure that the fables are what children learn in our schools.
It is our job as teachers to ensure that he doesn’t get what he wants. To tell the truth. For example, . . .
I was astonished, many, many years ago, to learn that Jefferson the slave owner’s original draft of the Declaration of Independence contained a denunciation of slavery and that the final passage of the Declaration was held up by the debate over this passage, which, in the end, was stricken from the document. Here is the deleted passage:
He [King George] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where Men should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he has obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed again the Liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.
This became, in the final draft,
He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.
Aie yie yie. So much to atone for, to expiate, to set right. It’s long, long, long past time.
And today, Trump went to the sacred Black Hills to reassert white power. Like holding his first campaign rally after the “reopening” in Tulsa, the site of the Greenwood massacre, a dog whistle, the choice of this site was, of course, yet another message to his white nationalist followers, a message saying, this history is what we revere. Sickening. Doubtless, Stephen Miller thinks these choices quite funny.
And, of course, Trump barely understood anything he was saying. He never does. He is profoundly ignorant of history and of just about everything else. The speech was written by Trump’s usual team, led by fascist white supremacist Propaganda Minister Stephen “Goebbels” Miller.
I wonder how much they had to coach Donnie Dumbo in order for him to be able to read Miller’s disgusting, racist screed.
“…waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither.”
I was reading a history of Caribbean pirates in the 1700s last night. The author made the point that the merchant marine of that time was so harsh in their treatment of sailors that they had to “press” a majority of them into service. According to this author, the death rate for sailors on the slave ships equaled that of the slaves themselves.
This is savagery that makes almost anything found among the peoples of North America pale by comparison. Still, once freed from tyranny, elements of the new United States demonstrated equal savagery in dealing with their fellow man.
All savagery starts with the idea that someone or something does not deserve the respect of the individual. “Them” is the pronoun that damns us all. I want to repent of the “them” that I feel.
I want to repent of the “them” that I feel.
Wow. Beautifully said, RT.
“He’s driving drunk and these monkeys just hand him the keys.”
NO RULES FOR DONALD – Randy Rainbow Song Parody
Feb 18, 2020
THE RANDY RAINBOW SHOW
Executive Producer: RANDY RAINBOW
Starring: RANDY RAINBOW
Bob – The stimulating in-depth analysis and lucid clear prose both you and Diane display on a daily basis is not only inspiring to teachers like me it’s likely the reason most readers are such ardent supporters of this site. Thank you!
I’ll second that emotion.
Callisto. Thank you. You are very kind. This means a lot to me.
Wallace’s Segregation Forever Speech Sure Sounds Like White House Occupant
The reality of conservatism
Intercept posted a review (7-5-2020) of Stuart Stevens’ book. The article’s title is,
“The National Review is Trying to Rewrite its Own Racist History”. A Stevens’ quote taken from the review- the modern conservative movement has the same deep ugliness and bigotry that is the hallmark of Trumpism.
In the past couple of years, National Review posted, “Charter schools point toward a better education for all”. Fordham posted, “Charter schools and Catholic schools have been especially effective….”.
Nina Rees, a promoter of charter schools was formerly with the Koch’s Heritage Foundation. Rees is a fellow of the Gates-funded Pahara. She is also on the PIE Network Board associated with Harvard’s Kennedy School.
Trump 20/20!!!!
20 for sexual assault.
20 for money laundering.
Hey, it’s a start.
I LOVE good news! The bad part is more wasting of tax dollars.
………………………
He Built a Privately Funded Border Wall. It’s Already at Risk of Falling Down if Not Fixed.
Trump supporters funded a private border wall on the banks of the Rio Grande, helping the builder secure $1.7 billion in federal contracts. Now the “Lamborghini” of border walls is in danger of falling into the river if nothing is done, experts say.
by Jeremy Schwartz and Perla Trevizo July 2, 5 a.m. CDT
Tommy Fisher billed his new privately funded border wall as the future of deterrence, a quick-to-build steel fortress that spans 3 miles in one of the busiest Border Patrol sectors.
Unlike a generation of wall builders before him, he said he figured out how to build a structure directly on the banks of the Rio Grande, a risky but potentially game-changing step when it came to the nation’s border wall system.
Fisher has leveraged his self-described “Lamborghini” of walls to win more than $1.7 billion worth of federal contracts in Arizona.
But his showcase piece is showing signs of runoff erosion and, if it’s not fixed, could be in danger of falling into the Rio Grande, according to engineers and hydrologists who reviewed photos of the wall for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune. It never should have been built so close to the river, they say…
https://www.propublica.org/article/he-built-a-privately-funded-border-wall-its-already-at-risk-of-falling-down-if-not-fixed