Donald Trump Is Not a Racist

Trump's no racist, I muttered to myself while watching a spirited CNN panel enumerate his "racist" comments about Mexicans and "shithole," i.e. poor, countries populated mainly by people of color. 

It's missing the point to call the man a racist. A racist at least has a point of view--a narrow one, a despicable one, a misguided one, an idiotic one, a destructive one, and oh, such a passé one. But a point of view. A belief system.

Don't dignify Trump's tantrums with the idea that any point of view whatsoever is meant to emerge from them. Trump is much worse than a racist: he's a reckless, thoughtless opportunist. To suggest he espouses any point of view, apart from a lust for money and power--and you can't call these points of view, but rather appetites--is to misdiagnose. We were on the mark when we called him a toddler--there is incidentally, a blog, The Ticus Files, you should all check out by a sadly deceased wonderful writer, Andrew Balée, dedicated to Trump as "toddler-in-chief," enumerating his bouts of negativistic, childish behavior. The Republican senator Jeff Flake has just pointed out that Trump's latest rants are borrowed from Joseph Stalin, who was more paranoid and destructive than Joseph McCarthy. Christiane Amanpour, interviewing the Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen, remarked that Putin's style is "very aligned" with that of Stalin. Putin's style, Gessen retorted, is also aligned with that of Ivan the Terrible (killed serfs, slaughtered his firstborn son, threw live squirrels out turret windows, raved in a style remarkably similar to Trump). Here the sixteenth-century ruler is in Sergey Eisenstein's 1944 interpretation: 

This captures the evil pout of the preschooler whose most recent urge hasn't been gratified, and who's going to throw a massive tantrum or bite mom. But a toddler is small, and we expect toddlers to grow. Trump has the urges, the amorality, of a toddler, but he's far more dangerous because he's got the know-how, the cunning, and the money of an adult. If Trump were just a racist, things might actually be easier.

Gessen went on to point out that like Ivan, Putin thinks of Russia as an empire, that in order to make Russia "great again" (a familiar phrase) he's got to position Russia in opposition to an important enemy. Who else but the United States? Putin doesn't get to "be important," Gessen wryly observed, unless he's got a big enough enemy.

 Just imagine Putin positioning Russia against, instead of Trump's America, one of those "shithole" countries! Yes, imagine an alternate universe in which Russian TV, instead of coughing up the usual reports of encountering "American forces" in Syria, announced: "Russian forces fighting in Syria conquered, after a brave struggle, soldiers from Haiti, Nigeria and Chad."

Nope. No wonder Putin enjoys the term "dickhead"--of course he does, because politics has become a peeing contest between two or three empire-builders, each of whom says he has the bigger . . .button.

The line between reckless opportunism and nihilism is a thin one indeed. The man who doesn't give a damn about anything but money, power, admiration and the limelight is the one who doesn't notice, or give a damn about racism or anything else, and so he indulges in one last impulse that brings on the apocalypse. About twenty-five million people died in the wake of Stalin's megalomania.