Surviving Trump: The KKK and Donald Trump
In mid-September, the EPSN host Jemele Hill tweeted an entirely reasonable series of statements including “Donald Trump is a white supremacist who has largely surrounded himself w/ other white supremacists,” and “Trump is the most ignorant, offensive president of my lifetime. His rise is a direct result of white supremacy. Period.” In response to the ensuing backlash, The New York Times ran an op-ed titled “Is Trump a White Supremacist?”
In the piece, Charles M. Blow writes, “If you are not completely opposed to white supremacy, you are quietly supporting it,” concluding: “Either Trump is himself a white supremacist or he is a fan and defender of white supremacists, and I quite honestly am unable to separate the two designations.”
While Blow offers a thoughtful assessment of Trump’s white supremacism, the fact that the piece’s central question—a query vaguely akin to “Should I Accept Anthony Weiner’s Friend Request on Snapchat?”—needed to be asked in the first place indicates that we’ve officially descended into some surreal, fake-news hellscape where every red-blooded American can choose between facts and alternate facts, attend a lecture by Harvard Fellow Sean Spicer, and wait for the next Official Donald J. Trump Big League Box of the Month to arrive via a privatized U.S. Postal Service.
To state the obvious:
- If you want to build a wall on the Mexican border to keep out all the “rapists,” you’re a white supremacist.
- If Jeff Sessions is your Attorney General, you’re a white supremacist.
- If David Duke enthusiastically endorsed your presidential candidacy, you’re a white supremacist.
- If you think “” attended the white nationalist
