Trumpism, White Supremacy and Collateral Damage Editor’s Blog – Talking Points Memo by Josh Marshall

Trumpism, White Supremacy and Collateral Damage

Editor’s Blog – Talking Points Memo 

 

by Josh Marshall / 9h

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This last weekend’s brutal reckoning brings me back to a transcript that was published in 2016 of a presentation Steve Bannon did at a Vatican conference in 2014. But before that a bit of scene setting. Over recent weeks, in various contexts, President Trump has been pumping up his racist and xenophobic incitement, aimed at people of color generally, the US southern border specifically and often mixing the two together. This morning he appeared at the White House with this brief statement in which he called on the country to “condemn racism, bigotry and white supremacy” much as any other President might have done and many have done without grappling with the fact that he is the biggest and certainly the most high volume promoter of all three in the country.

But I want to step back from that a bit. I don’t think it is overly generous to President Trump or his top advisors to say that they take no personal joy at these massacres. They want to maximize the degree of racial polarization and confrontation, for political and cultural purposes, while having as few racist/”great replacement” inspired massacres as possible.
Trump lives in such a world of self-delusion and enabling thought I’m not entirely sure how he understands these things. But for him and those around him, I don’t think they take any joy in these massacres whether in El Paso or Pittsburgh. Even in the most cynical sense they can probably see they are in fact politically unhelpful inasmuch as they shine a bright light on the near congruity between Trump’s tweets and campaign rallies and messages and the various manifestos of different white supremacist mass murderers. They show the consequences of racist incitement. In this way they are momentarily unhelpful.
But they can see the connection as well as anyone else.
Here’s where I want to go back to Bannon in 2014. And before digging into it I fully agree with those who criticize the media for endlessly trying to prop Bannon up as some sort of intellectual force or Trumpism. But here I think we can see the mix of bad faith, cynicism and at the margins self-delusion up close.
Back in the summer of 2014 The Human Dignity Institute (a Catholic organization focused on the role of Christians in public and political life) held a conference at The Vatican at which Bannon delivered a presentation from the US via Skype. Bannon was there to talk about his role as the guy who then ran Breitbart and his take on populist rightist politics in Europe and the US – what he still then seemed to be calling “Tea Party” politics. Buzzfeed was there as part of their coverage of the European right and they published the transcript a week after the 2016 election.
You can read the transcript but what interests me are the two times when Bannon gets asked or addresses some version of ‘But hey aren’t these folks really racist?’ Bannon’s responses were telling. He neither denied the point nor embraced it. His response was something like ‘This is part of the resentment you have to harness to create a right/populist politics. Every movement has its more extreme factions but this will get worked out over time.’
Here is one passage …

Bannon: Outside of Fox News and the Drudge Report, we’re the third-largest conservative news site and, quite frankly, we have a bigger global reach than even Fox. And that’s why we’re expanding so much internationally.
Look, we believe — strongly — that there is a global tea party movement. We’ve seen that. We were the first group to get in and start reporting on things like UKIP and Front National and other center right. With all the baggage that those groups bring — and trust me, a lot of them bring a lot of baggage, both ethnically and racially — but we think that will all be worked through with time.
The central thing that binds that all together is a center-right populist movement of really the middle class, the working men and women in the world who are just tired of being dictated to by what we call the party of Davos.

And then this (Harnwell is the head of the Institute convening the conference) …

Harnwell: The first question was, you’d reference the Front National and UKIP as having elements that are tinged with the racial aspect amidst their voter profile, and the questioner was asking how you intend to deal with that aspect.
Bannon: I don’t believe I said UKIP in that. I was really talking about the parties on the continent, Front National and other European parties.
I’m not an expert in this, but it seems that they have had some aspects that may be anti-Semitic or racial. By the way, even in the tea party, we have a broad movement like this, and we’ve been criticized, and they try to make the tea party as being racist, etc., which it’s not. But there’s always elements who turn up at these things, whether it’s militia guys or whatever. Some that are fringe organizations. My point is that over time it all gets kind of washed out, right? People understand what pulls them together, and the people on the margins I think get marginalized more and more.

You can interpret these comments in various ways. They all seem to boil down to the adage sometimes apocryphally ascribed to Joseph Stalin: “You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.” But, as Bannon puts it, “over time it all gets kind of washed out”, which I interpret as once we get in power or once we’re solidly on our feet as a movement we’ll try to make sure that part of the muscle doesn’t get out of hand. We’ll do our best, you might say.
All of this comes back to days like today when the President and his top allies shamelessly play the unity card, calling for an end to hate, white supremacy, xenophobia and all the rest. Yes, it’s shameless. Yes, it’s gaslighting. Yes, even Trump can hardly manage the cognitive dissonance as he reads from a teleprompter words that would never in a lifetime spring naturally from his lips. But what strikes me most is the cynicism.
To build a racist white nationalist politics you need racist white nationalist incitement. Or maybe just to gain power or pass tax cuts or get judges on the bench or whatever else … to build the politics you need the incitement. You can pick and choose your motivation depending on whether you’re Donald Trump or Steven Miller or Mitch McConnell. Inevitably some people will take you literally and not figuratively and they’ll send pipe bombs to your political opponents or they’ll commit mass murders to stop the “invasion” you’re always talking about or shoot up a synagogue because your supporters and your media arm says Jews like George Soros are funding the invasion. After all, you’re basically telling them to. You may not want these things to happen precisely. Maybe you prefer to keep it at metaphor rather than going all the way. But really it’s just how it goes. And at the end of the day, that’s okay. It’s the cost of doing business. At some point in the future, maybe, it’ll get washed out.