All the usual scapegoats in one package

Vilification comes to Donald Trump as naturally as predation to a shark. President Donald Trump needs scapegoats like a nicotine addict needs a cigarette. And, in a long, well-documented career, Trump’s choice of scapegoats has followed a remarkably consistent pattern.

Since 1989, when he waged a campaign through paid media against five young black and Puerto Rican men falsely accused and convicted of raping and beating a woman in New York’s Central Park, Trump’s favorite targets have been black and brown people.

Reps. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, first-year members of Congress, the latest targets in the president’s crosshairs, follow the pattern almost too perfectly. Young, progressive women—a naturalized Somali American, a Puerto Rican, an Arab, and an African American. Who could be better candidates for Trump’s political (and personal) predation?

By now, the president’s vicious attack on The Squad, as the four have come to be known, is neither surprising nor shocking. Trump has long exhausted the capacity for surprise and shock. For a long time, the Trump presidency has been as much farce as tragedy. The rhetoric of the Republican Party as a whole has become farcical too. Even the media chatter about Trump’s attack against the progressive sisterhood of Omar, Ocasio-Cortez, Tlaib and Pressley has turned ridiculous. Can anybody take seriously the question of whether Donald Trump is a racist? Not anyone who has been listening with even one ear for the last three years, certainly no one who has at least a passing acquaintance with his track record.

Why are we still discussing this? It’s another instance of the American innocence complex. Some countries have a guilt complex that has led them to try vigorously to make amends (Germany), and some countries have an innocence complex that makes it unthinkable for them to admit guilt (Turkey regarding the massacre of Armenians). The United States is in the latter group.

We reject independent judgment (the International Criminal Court) then judge ourselves and acquit ourselves; we acquit even a confessed special forces murderer. The military and the police have special exemptions against guilt. Eric Garner was accosted by New York City police who suspected he was selling cigarettes by the unit, put him in a chokehold which was maintained even as he cried out eleven times that he could not breathe. He died. The prosecutor said there was no evidence, despite a damning video. How is it possible? Prosecutors and cops see themselves as partners in bringing down the bad guys. In their eyes, Eric Garner, at worst a petty criminal, was a bad guy.

Just as it’s unthinkable within the American innocence complex—we are innocent even if proven guilty—that a green beret or a police officer could be guilty of murder, it is psychologically unacceptable that the president, elected by the votes of almost 63 million people, is a racist. The innocence complex makes it almost impossible to accept that 63 million Americans are racist, racism-friendly, or racism-tolerant, but that is the plain truth.

That the president is a racist was evident before he was elected, and denial is possible only through willful blindness. Let’s bracket the housing discrimination Trump was complicitous with when he worked for his father and mentor on racism. Let’s start with the Central Park Five. Trump could not possibly judge their guilt. He went after them anyway. They were black. They were convicted. New evidence exonerated them. Trump continues to maintain their guilt to this day. Never admit. Never recant. Never apologize. Never explain. Donald Trump is the best example of the American innocence complex.

Skipping over the numerous examples of racism Trump displayed during the years of the reality show “The Apprentice,” let’s zero in on the “birther issue.” That’s the lunatic conspiracy theory that claims Barack Obama was not born in the United States. The facts belied the theory, sensible people ridiculed it, Trump persisted.

There was something very familiar when Trump said to the Ocasio-Cortez quartet—no disrespect in the name, they play excellent music—if you don’t like it here go back to where you came from. It’s not just that I have been told that a million times myself. Trump is prone to symbolically denaturalize Americans he thinks should not be Americans in the first place.

This was all before the Mexicans as rapists thing and the shithole countries thing and the place the portrait of Indian killer Andrew Jackson in the face of Native American war heroes and then mention Pocahontas thing, and all the other vile racist things Trump has done in the last three years.

We might as well reopen the question of whether the earth revolves around the sun or the other way around as to debate whether Trump is a racist. He is. He has proven it more times than Einstein’s theory of relativity has been proven. Recently, the last bit of relativity was proven with the discovery of gravity waves. If a final proof of Trump’s racism was needed, the Omar, Ocasio-Cortez, Tlaib Pressley affair seals it.

From now on, let’s stop asking the obvious. Let’s give anyone like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnel a noisy Bronx cheer whenever he says, as he recently did, with a straight face “the president is not a racist.” Let’s stipulate it and go on from there to look at what it means and what we can do about it.