The Racist Protector of Rapists

A million mentions in the Epstein files and counting

“I didn’t make a mistake.” Sound like anybody you know? That’s what Donald said when pressed by reporters about his posting an AI-generated video that depicted former President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle as apes. Any sentient human in America should know that that racist trope hearkens back to the days of the slave trade.

“I didn’t make a mistake.”

About eight years ago, I was visiting my Aunt Maryanne, Donald’s oldest sister, at her apartment on the Upper East Side and she told me something about my grandfather, Fred Trump, I hadn’t known. Apparently, he never took responsibility for his mistakes. Whenever anything went wrong, he found somebody else to blame. This is something he passed on to Donald.

We’ve seen this pattern time and again. Donald does something outrageous or ill-advised, then he refuses to admit he was wrong, refuses to course-correct, refuses to take responsibility. When he gets called out, he looks for a scapegoat to throw under the bus to deflect blame. When his underlings come out in full force to defend him, no matter how egregious his behavior, he doubles down.

In this case, after Donald reposted the racist video, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters that they should turn down their fake outrage. (Yes, because how dare anybody be outraged the president of the United States is an unrepentant racist.)

But Leavitt’s protestations didn’t hold and Donald’s post was removed from his social media account. Then, inevitably, came the doubling down because not only can Donald never admit to making a mistake, but he can also never be wrong. That’s when he said he hadn’t made a mistake. In other words, he stands by the content of that vile video he reposted.

This tweet by @Microinteracti1 sums up just how badly America is failing this moment:

In any other major democracy, this behavior from a head of state would trigger a constitutional crisis. Paris would burn. Berlin would convene emergency sessions. In the Nordic countries, resignation would follow within hours. Across functioning democracies, the public, institutions, and political class would recognize this for what it is: an assault on the dignity of the state itself.

As of today, it’s been a week since Donald posted the video depicting the Obamas as apes. It’s as if it never happened at all. We could say that it’s because of the relentless news cycle, but we should not have turned the page.

But this is America now. This country has been in a toxic relationship with Donald for well over a decade in part because, as so many in the media have been telling us over the course of those years, that his awfulness—the racism, the misogyny, the cruelty, the corruption—is baked in. “That’s just who he is,” we’ve been told more times than I care to count.

We’ve been told this by the banks that kept bailing him out of his multiple bankruptcies. We’ve been told this by the corporate media, first in New York City and then everywhere else—those corporations that made money off him and then repaid him with billions of dollars’ worth of airtime. And, of course, the Republican Party.

But “it’s baked in” is just another way of saying that there is nothing Donald can do, no line he can cross, that will matter. Nothing will change how we respond to him. Donald can act, always, with impunity.

It’s reasonable to wonder, as I have, if Donald is the racist, the corrupt grifter, the incompetent idiot, the misogynist—why the fuck would anyone want to give him power at all? And yet, because he’s always been useful to people smarter than he is—those who have their own desires for influence and wealth—he’s been given almost unfathomable power by tens of millions of American voters (most of whom will benefit not at all); by the corrupt, illegitimate supermajority of the Supreme Court, which continues to grant him a near-imperial presidency; and by his party. This has virtually ensured that Donald will never be held accountable for anything.

Why, then, would we think that Donald would pay any price at all for posting something so viciously and openly racist?

The Republicans who have remained silent in the wake of Donald’s post—and that is the vast majority of them—know that allowing his attacks on the Obamas to go unchallenged will put Black Americans in even more danger than Donald has already put them with his racism. But that’s just who he is.

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At the beginning of this week, we were told that Donald’s name was mentioned in the Epstein files 38,000 times. Yesterday, Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland, informed us the number of mentions is closer to a million, and that’s with half the files yet to be released. Yet it’s Hillary Clinton, whose name is not mentioned once in the three million pages, currently in Congress’s possession, who is being compelled to testify.

It’s these double standards and the blatant hypocrisy that are partially responsible for the rot at the heart of the Republican Party. As they continue to give a pass to the person most responsible for trying to destroy our democracy, with their not inconsiderable help, they demonstrate the extent of their own desperation and complicity.

There’s no daylight between what Donald believes and what the Republicans do. There’s no denying that they embrace and support a leader who is a racist protector of the rapists and sex traffickers of teenage girls and young women.

We need to be outraged by this, by what the Republicans condone and enable. We need to recognize that while Donald is a huge part of the problem, he is not the only problem. At this point, I think it’s fair to argue that the bigger problem is the Republican Party, of which the corrupt, illegitimate supermajority of the Supreme Court is decidedly a part, and the oligarchs they support and enrich.

Let’s be outraged by that. And let’s hang on to that outrage. Let’s stoke it so that when we finally have the opportunity to get these people out of our government—and hopefully into prison—we’ll finally have the strength, the motivation, and the momentum to build this country from scratch.