Worst Argument of the Week

ELIE MYSTAL

Donald Trump gave an interview to The New York Times in which he talked about the 1964 Civil Rights Act. I’ll just quote him: “White people were very badly treated, where they did extremely well and they were not invited to go into a university to college.… So I would say in that way, I think it was unfair in certain cases.”

And, there’s more: “I think it was also, at the same time, it accomplished some very wonderful things, but it also hurt a lot of people—people that deserve to go to a college or deserve to get a job were unable to get a job. So it was, it was a reverse discrimination.”

You don’t have to be an expert in white supremacy to understand the core animus Trump is expressing here: White people “deserve” jobs, opportunities, and anything else they want. Non-white people do not. Any non-white person who holds a position holds it at the expense of some more deserving white person, and that is “unfair” to the white person.

Folks, that’s MAGA. That’s Trumpism. That’s the whole freaking reason Trump has been part of our lives for a decade, right there. Any explanation or analysis that seeks to explain Trump without understanding his core racial beliefs, and how popular those racial beliefs are with his racist fans, fails its first contact with reality.

White folks like Trump will never accept equality. They will always see a non-white person as less deserving than a similarly situated white person. All Trump has done is expose that there are more white people who are like Trump than white people would have you believe.

Most white Democrats are still struggling with what to do with this information. But I’ve had 10 years to process it, and I’ve come to one overarching conclusion: fuck ’em. If a majority of whites will not accept equality, then the majority of whites must be defeated by everybody else.

It’s that simple. It’s always been that simple. A majority of whites have never accepted equality. They’ll never like it. But they can be forced to deal with it. NATION