The new National Museum of African-American History and Culture confronts the paradox of America (and the American presidency) as a nation built on both the ideals of equality and freedom and the realities of patriarchy and slavery. It depicts Thomas Jefferson, author of “The Declaration of Independence” and the third American president, as a slaveholder who built his personal wealth through owning other human beings. Jefferson and his peers – he is one of 18 American presidents who owned slaves – enslaved people from a race that the founding fathers deemed inferior as a matter of birth, even as they framed the national ideal that “all men were created equal.” The museum’s Jefferson exhibit positions a sculpture of him against a stack of boxes of slave-packaged goods, each engraved with the name of a slave he owned. We also are reminded that this American president owned and enslaved some of his own children.
The museum exhibit does not go quite this far, but we can add that Thomas Jefferson was a rapist and his children he owned were the offspring of rape, given that the concept of sexual consent is meaningless in the context of slavery. Donald Trump has said that when you are a “star” – a male star, presumably – then you can grab a woman’s genitals and get away with it, and indeed the American electorate of 2016 proved that Trump could be caught boasting about sexual assault in crude terms and still be elected president. But a modern celebrity has nothing on slave-owners of previous centuries when it comes to taking sex from women and getting away with it. And an American president who, like Trump, has publicly said it was acceptable to have his own daughter referred to publicly as a “piece of ass” has nothing on a president, like Jefferson, who owned his own daughters, children conceived when he raped their mother.
So not only have we seen worse than Donald Trump in the American presidency, in fact we were founded on worse. We must admit that we thought we had overcome the worst of all that, but the outcome of November 8 proved that we were wrong. We are only learning the hard way – through the election of Trump over a woman from the party most likely to defend the interests of black people and other minorities – that we will need to overcome it all again. As if we needed another reminder on top of the election of Trump, the ever-odious Rudy Giuliani compared Trump, in his stunning victory, to Andrew Jackson, intending this comparison as a compliment. Jackson was another American president slave-owner, noted by historians of slavery as the only presidential slave-owner to personally drive slaves in a gang – to literally be a slave driver. Jackson also signed the Indian Removal Act of 1830, and as such was the president most closely associated with our founding national genocide. A president like Trump, who threatens mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, has nothing on a president like Jackson (and others) who uprooted this continent’s original settlers to free up land for white European immigrants. Make no mistake, Donald Trump is not an American aberration. He is, rather, a throwback to a time when white male supremacy, enforced through physical violence, was the recognized law of the land.
How did we fall back so far, so fast? We know it was seething white resentment, even rage, over a black president, Barack Obama, openly stoked by Republicans in Congress, who tried to stymy his every attempt to improve our country, and by right-wing media, which gave demagogues like Trump an open forum to make counter-factual claims that Obama’s presidency was illegitimate because he was born in Africa, not the United States. And surely it was fear of a woman president. The misogyny openly directed at Hillary Clinton by Trump and his supporters was another throwback to a more crude and hateful time, which we now have to recognize as very much part of our present social and political reality. Trump succeeded with his hate by channeling white voter rage over dramatic social, economic and demographic change into simple answers to complicated problems. There are historical parallels to the attraction of harsh, hateful, autocratic leaders in times of political crisis.
To be fair, though, Trump did not win so much because he performed remarkably well at the polls, but rather he won because Clinton did remarkably poorly with her base. Her weakness as a candidate – distrusted and disliked from the left as well as the right, by the youngest and most progressive voters as well as the oldest and most conservative – was integral to our present calamity. Though Trump’s victory was a major win for white racism, even white nationalism, ironically there is one black candidate – Obama – who most likely could have beat him, had he been eligible to run again, yet a white woman lost. This may mean that sexism is even more virulent than racism, but more likely it means that the voters who win elections for Democrats were not that excited about this particular candidate. We stand by both of our endorsements of Clinton – a bright, able, experienced leader – as the best president in the field of contenders in 2016, but she also was one of the worst campaigners. We deeply regret and resent the protest votes on November 8 that would have defeated Trump had they not been wasted on anyone other than Clinton, but no one ever won an election by telling people to vote for a candidate they don’t like. We tried, on this editorial page, but, like almost every other editorial page in the nation, we failed – though, it must be said, Clinton won the popular vote by more than 200,000 votes.
Where do we go from here? The Democrats – especially in Missouri, where Republicans won a clean sweep of statewide offices – need to reinvent themselves as something other than less conservative and less overtly racist Republicans. We don’t believe that Bernie Sanders would have beaten Trump either, but he had a message that resonated with the Democratic base and the Clinton campaign failed to learn from it in time to avert disaster. The Democrats need to learn from that lesson now. We need to go back to the basics of educating and energizing voters in all of the Democrats’ varied communities from the ground up. Donald Trump is essentially American, there is no escaping that, but so is Barack Obama, a mixed-race man with a black family who makes sincere appeals to the noblest elements of the American ideology, all of that equality and freedom stuff that Thomas Jefferson wrote about so eloquently. If we fight to protect voting rights – which is necessary, given that various voter suppression tactics were critical to Trump’s electoral college victory – and to educate and energize voters with a truly progressive agenda, the future is on our side. To the consternation, even rage, of many white Americans, our country is getting less and less white and – as James Baldwin wrote, and despite what many Trump supporters proclaim – it will never be white again. White male supremacy is part of our heritage, and it triumphed in 2016, but we have resisted it before, and we have it in our diverse, conflicted, collective power to successfully resist it again.
