Puerto Rico looks like a game of Pick-Up Sticks after Hurricane Maria, as seen from a U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Air and Marine Operations, Black Hawk during a flyover Sept. 23. Photograph by Kris Grogan, U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
Is President Donald J. Trump racist?
It’s a question that has threaded his virulent response to the NFL players kneeling before the National Anthem to protest racism and his passive-aggressive approach to Puerto Rico’s suffering in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria.
I don’t think Trump is a racist. Indeed, I don’t like to think of any American president as one. But I do think that he is a joyless, mirthless person who takes no pleasure in other people and strikes a misanthropic tone. (How then do you explain the way he feeds off an audience? But an audience is an abstraction. You don’t know an audience individually, nor can it make the demands on you that a person can. Contrast Trump as performer with Hillary Clinton, onstage stick in the mud, who’s said to be fantastic one-on-one.)
Trump is not the first president to curse those who oppose him. In Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s “The Vietnam War,” President Richard Nixon calls Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg a “son of a bitch.” Nor has foul language been Republican presidents’ province alone. Presidents John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B Johnson, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have all had choice words for those who have crossed them. You don’t become president without a killer instinct.
But until Trump there has been a sense of public politesse toward those who disagree with us. Some would say Trump’s excoriating style is a kind of telling it like it is, the product of the internet and reality TV. I would say civility is neither hypocritical nor phony. Rather there’s something to be said for acting in a manner you aspire to.
When Trump publicly called the NFL protesters “sons of bitches” – impugning their mothers as well – it had a massively corrosive effect. You could see it in the glum faces and hurt eyes of not only the protesters but those who stood and linked arms with them, like alpha male Tom Brady. The players – black and white, kneeling and standing – had to a man been blindsided.
If Trump used a machete to try to cut the NFL down to size, he’s used a stiletto to address the nettlesome problem of getting aid to Puerto Rico. Giving himself high marks, Trump noted the difficulty of getting aid to an island out in a big ocean. (It’s in the Caribbean Sea, but let’s assume that’s a metaphor.) He also underscored, in Scrooge-like fashion, Puerto Rican debt, a debt that would have to be repaid to Wall Street. It’s like nursing a patient with lung cancer and beginning by saying, “Well, that’s what happens when you smoke three packs a day.”
Maybe Trump is merely performing to his base or distracting it from his administration’s lack of legislative accomplishments. Maybe he is going for the jugular in the concrete jungle that still shapes him.
But the net effect is to appear to be trying to rob people of their joy. And since those people are often people of color, the president appears to be racist when in fact he may not be.