There will be no handwringing here. While there is certainly cause for concern and even panic, I will not afflict my nervous system with clickbait and ragebait, sound bites, memes and GIFs of the Trump administration’s poor and sadistic leadership.

To be sure, these are not “tough times” or “difficult days.” It’s not a “trying chapter” in the nation’s life, but an intentional drafting of these pages.

Consequently, this is make or break for the United States. If its citizens want the country to be a democracy, then they need to start acting like it.

Economic pressure, political deception, manipulation and trickery will not make us stronger. Disappearing people without due process and lawlessness of the highest order, wherein the current occupant of the White House chooses to defy the Supreme Court, will not make us a better country.

There is no lesson in this. It’s just wrong.

And chipping in $10 to the Democratic Party will not make it right. The American people don’t need better ads in “battleground states”; we need better political leadership for a country in crisis.

Some are making a joke of Trump and the Republican Party. But none of this would be funny if it were former President Barack Obama.

Between 2009 and 2017, the presidency was serious business. Kidnapping, deporting and falsely imprisoning Abrego Garcia would never have been reduced to an “administrative error.”

Clearly, there is no bar and no accountability for heterosexual men racialized as white. During Trump’s first term, it was interesting to watch media personalities and political pundits struggle to call him a liar, though he clearly was lying. Now in his second term, who has the courage to call him a despot?

Meanwhile, African Americans have historically been “called everything but a child of God” while being held to a higher standard. In every position, they are expected to be the hardest working, the bigger person, and the moral exemplar.

But, with a convicted felon and “legally defined sexual predator” in office, white-body supremacy is revealed on the world’s stage as a pyramid scheme. Trump was chosen not in spite of his character flaws and his cruelty, but because of them. Cruelty was always the point and for the sake of power.

I grew up hearing, “If you’re white, you’re right. If you’re black, get back.” This kind of social conditioning positions persons racialized as white as infallible and privileged above all others.

It is no surprise when Trump deifies himself with his own “I am” statement: “I am the chosen one.” But in reality, he is a thrice-married misogynist, racist and white supremacist who is the embodiment of “white rage” and “white backlash” against the social gains made in his absence. Between the Red Shirts and those who wear red hats, there isn’t much difference.

It was never about Obama’s tan suit, his experience or qualifications. Instead, Obama, holding the highest position in the country, turns the narrative of white-body supremacy on its head and undermines the credibility of every gaslit stereotype hurled at African Americans.

Likewise, many of America’s institutions don’t want “the best and the brightest” candidates. In all sectors, these American business executives have ditched their commitments to diversity, equity and inclusion because they fear backlash from the Trump administration.

A staple of white-body supremacy is violence: political, physical, financial or otherwise. As illustrated on January 6, 2021, if white supremacists don’t win, then they will take positions of power by force and call an insurrection a “self-guided… tour” of the Capitol.

The chants of insurrectionists—not “rioters”—to lynch then Vice President Mike Pence were “deserved” according to Trump. Violence comes with the territory.

African Americans have seen this kind of rebranding before. A “race massacre” becomes a “race riot.” 

Yet, white-body supremacy thrives on narratives of victimhood while the intention remains to be the victor in a contrived race war. White supremacists do and say anything to remain on top.

Thus, Trump intends to continue expressing hyperbolic, racist, and divisive speech. He uses it with regularity to normalize it.

Trump turned the work of inclusion on its head with an anti-DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) agenda, its anti-discrimination measures even blamed for the deadly American Airlines plane crash in Washington, D.C. That was a lie and he was lying.

It’s just more unnecessary proof that adherents of white-body supremacy will take and defend any position, including cancelling identity-driven celebrations and renaming places already named (It’s the Gulf of Mexico) to support their delusion of superiority. This is just more neo-colonialism, rooted in control, suppression, erasure and domination.

While he has banned books, Trump has still managed to provide illustrations of how white-body supremacy works. True to form, it’s all unoriginal art.

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