by Keith Boykin
But eight years later, the same party that heralded John McCain’s military service chose a nominee who derided that same service. “He’s not a war hero,” Donald Trump said of McCain. When pressed, Trump begrudgingly acknowledged McCain’s service. “He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured,” he said.
Trump had not only dodged the draft, he received five deferments from service, including a suspicious health-related deferment for alleged bone spurs in his feet. Yet during his campaign, in the midst of America’s years-long military battle against terrorists from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), Trump declared, “I know more about ISIS than the generals do,” and he promised voters, “I will be so good at the military, your head will spin.” His record in office suggested otherwise.
Trump refused to receive regular intelligence briefings during his transition and his presidency and compared US intelligence agencies to “Nazi Germany.” Once in office, he repeatedly questioned and undermined the military and the intelligence community. Instead of taking responsibility for a failed 2017 raid in Yemen in which a US Navy SEAL was killed, he blamed the generals. And when four American soldiers were killed in Niger in 2017, it took Trump twelve days to mention it. When a flag-draped coffin of one of the soldiers returned to the United States, Trump was too busy golfing to even acknowledge the young man’s sacrifice. And when Trump finally did call the African American widow of Sergeant La David Johnson, who was killed in the mission, he told her: “He knew what he signed up for.”
This was the same president who contradicted his own intelligence community and flatly denied Russian interference in the 2016 US election. The same president who stood in front of the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) Memorial Wall of Agency Heroes and whined about the news coverage of his inauguration, bragged about how many times he had been on the cover of TIME magazine, and told the audience: “Trust me, I’m like a smart person.” The same president who announced a change in US military policy toward transgender service members on Twitter without telling the Pentagon. The same president who met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, Finland, and announced that he believed Putin over his own government’s military and intelligence analysts. The same president who said that North Korea’s communist dictator Kim Jong-un “wrote me beautiful letters,” and “then we fell in love.” The same president who withheld military aid to Ukraine, a key US ally, after it had been invaded by Russia, in order to extort the Ukrainian government to dig up dirt on his potential 2020 opponent, Joe Biden. The same president who abruptly ordered the withdrawal of troops from northern Syria to pave the way for Turkish troops to invade that country. And the same president who then bragged about a US raid that killed Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, a mission that had been made more difficult because of his own decision to withdraw from Syria. US credibility was so severely damaged by the president’s sudden decision to withdraw from Syria that American military officers told the New York Times that their country had broken its trust with the Kurds and that that they were “ashamed” of what had happened.
When Navy Secretary Richard Spencer resigned from his post in protest of Trump’s decision to intervene in a war crimes case in the fall of 2019, he issued a blistering critique of Trump’s conduct as commander in chief of the armed forces. “I cannot in good conscience obey an order that I believe violates the sacred oath I took in the presence of my family, my flag and my faith to support and defend the Constitution of the United States,” Spencer wrote in his resignation letter.
When Trump used the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, in his infamous June 2020 church photo op after tear-gassing protesters, General Milley had to issue a public apology. “I should not have been there.… It was a mistake,” he said. Five months later, when Trump hinted that the military might remain loyal to him as he plotted to stay in power after losing the election, General Milley was forced to issue another public statement separating himself from Trump’s authoritarian power play. “We do not take an oath to a king or a queen, a tyrant or a dictator,” Milley said. “We do not take an oath to an individual.… We take an oath to the Constitution.”
Two weeks before the last day of his presidency, when Trump sat in the White House watching an unprecedented attack on democracy unfold on live national television, it become obvious that the nation’s military commanders demonstrated more respect for our democracy than our civilian commander in chief. On the day of the deadly Capitol insurrection, it took the Trump administration three hours and nineteen minutes to approve an urgent request to send in National Guard troops, District of Columbia National Guard Commander William J. Walker told Congress after the incident. Yet many of the same Republicans who relentlessly attacked President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for not sending US troops in time to save four Americans five thousand miles away in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012 were perfectly willing to absolve Donald Trump for not sending troops just two miles away to save five Americans during a deadly coup attempt at the US Capitol. With Benghazi, they conducted eight congressional investigations, held thirty-two hearings, published eleven reports, and forced Hillary Clinton to testify for eleven hours. But with a violent insurrection in their own workplace, in America’s celebrated temple of democracy, Republicans simply wanted to move on.
If President Obama had acted as dishonorably toward the military as Trump did in office, Republicans would have appropriately impeached him. But with Trump, they enabled him, consistently creating new excuses to justify and rationalize their support for a man who stood for nothing that they had previously claimed to represent.
And with the third leg of the GOP stool finally slashed by Trump’s self-absorbed, irrational decision-making, the modern Republican Party had nothing on which to stand. The moral conservatives, economic conservatives, and national security conservatives who continued to support Trump had sold their souls for the luxury of power. The Republican Party apparatus had become little more than a cult devoted to the worship of one man.
Trump’s final year in office would also invalidate two of the Republican Party’s most popular slogans—“Pro-Life” and “Law and Order.” After fearmongering senior citizens during the Obama administration with false claims that the Affordable Care Act would institute “death panels” to decide who could live or die, Republicans embraced their own form of “death panels” in 2020. As casualties mounted from the coronavirus pandemic, Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick claimed, “There are lots of grandparents out there in this country” who “don’t want the whole country to be sacrificed” to keep them alive. “Let’s be smart about it and those of us who are 70-plus, we’ll take care of ourselves,” said Patrick. This would become the attitude of numerous state and federal leaders in the “pro-life” Republican Party. They openly and repeatedly chose the economy over the lives of the American people.
Then, after spending most of the summer of 2020 chastising racial justice protesters with the slogan “Blue Lives Matter,” leading Republicans incited a mob that attacked Capitol police officers during the January 6 insurrection. The “law and order” Trump supporters broke windows and knocked down doors, smashed officers’ helmets, attacked them with bear spray, trashed them with flagpoles, and clubbed them with fire extinguishers. Yet even after this dramatic outburst of violence, a dozen Republicans in the House of Representatives voted against a resolution to award Congressional Gold Medals to police who protected the US Capitol. Meanwhile, Republican Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, in a seemingly intentional display of cognitive dissonance, claimed he “wasn’t concerned” for his safety during the insurrection because the rioters “truly respect law enforcement” and “would never do anything to break the law.” But if the protesters had been with Black Lives Matter and Antifa, he admitted, “I might have been a little concerned.” It was the same racist double standard that Trump expressed when he condemned Black Lives Matter demonstrators as “v
andals,” “hoodlums,” “anarchists and agitators.” “They’re bad people. They don’t love our country. And they’re not taking down our monuments,” Trump said in June of 2020. But when the violent white mob tried to take down the US government and its most conspicuous monument to democracy in January of 2021, Trump praised the attackers. “We love you. You’re very special,” Trump said. “I know how you feel.” For half a century, every Republican presidential nominee since Nixon had run on a promise of “law and order,” and when the day finally came to protect the nation from attack, the party tacitly admitted that the promise was just a charade.
The sad truth is that nearly every leader in the Republican Party knew that Donald Trump was toxic, but they embraced him anyway because he, alone, could speak to the party’s base of angry white voters. The very Republicans who had once condemned Donald Trump in his 2016 campaign were later forced to grovel for his approval. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina had once described Trump as a “race-baiting, xenophobic bigot” who was “unfit for office,” but he became one of Trump’s most loyal supporters, even after the disastrous plot to overturn the 2020 election. Senator Mitt Romney of Utah had described Trump as “a phony” and “a fraud” and became the only Republican member of the Senate to vote to convict Trump in both of his impeachment trials, but he teetered between support and opposition during much of the president’s term. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas had called Trump “a pathological liar” during the presidential campaign, but he hailed Trump’s leadership once in office and offered to defend Trump before the Supreme Court in his unconstitutional scheme to overturn the 2020 election. Senator Marco Rubio of Florida had called Trump “a con artist,” but he too praised the president until the end. And House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy had once told his colleagues that Trump was on the payroll of Russian President Vladimir Putin, but McCarthy, like nearly every other Republican, simply backed down when Trump entered the White House.
Trump’s own staff knew very well what kind of person he was, but they worked for him anyway. Former secretary of state Rex Tillerson reportedly called Trump a “fucking moron.” White House Chief of Staff John Kelly described the president as “unhinged.” Energy Secretary Rick Perry had once called Trump “a cancer on conservatism.” And United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley had previously condemned Trump for his refusal to disavow the KKK. “That’s not who we want as president,” Haley said. “We will not allow that.” Nearly every serious Republican in federal government must have known that Donald Trump was unstable, intemperate, and incompetent. He entered the White House woefully unprepared for the solemnity of the moment, blissfully ignorant of the responsibilities of office, and negligently unwilling to learn the essential tasks needed to perform his duties. Yet Republicans continued to elevate the man they knew, from their own words, was unfit for office.
Republicans had spent half a century mining white racial resentment that flourished abundantly just below the surface of America’s political discourse. From there, they built a gold-plated monster of racism, bigotry, and xenophobia that one day they could no longer control. It was a creature larger than Donald Trump or any demagogue who might conveniently choose to harness its power for his own interest. Months after Trump was defeated, when he had left office and begun his virtual political exile in Florida, a February 2021 poll conducted by the conservative American Enterprise Institute revealed just how determined the GOP had become to resist a changing America. A majority (56 percent) of Republicans agreed with the statement that “the traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it,” and 39 percent of the party explicitly supported Americans “taking violent actions” to achieve their goals. This would be the dangerous future of the Republican Party.
For his temperament and misconduct in office, Trump was unprecedented in American history. But in his racism, Trump was neither outlier nor aberration from past presidents. Nor was he the culmination of decades of racist Republican policies, for this language suggests that his departure from office would end the nightmare. Rather, he was the logical extension of centuries of American racism that had moved effortlessly from generation to generation, and from party to party, transforming itself along the way to fit the needs of the times in which it existed.
It had once been the Democratic Party that boldly embraced racism to defend its interests. Half a century after Republicans adopted their own cynical political strategy, they continued to feign a connection to the legacy of their party’s famous Civil War president. But it was Donald Trump who hammered the final nail in the coffin of the Party of Lincoln that Barry Goldwater had begun to seal decades earlier. If Trump accomplished nothing else, he successfully and unwittingly exposed the hypocrisy of the party he led. By the time he left office, it was no longer a party of “conservative values.” It had become, more clearly than ever, a party of racism.
PART THREE
LET US MARCH ON
“Facing the rising sun of our new day begun
Let us march on till victory is won.”
—James Weldon Johnson,
“Lift Every Voice and Sing”
9
TILL VICTORY IS WON
It may be hard to hear this right now, but our history need not be our destiny. No matter what you’ve been told, we are not doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past. Just as surely as the colonists changed the course of America in the eighteenth century, the abolitionists in the nineteenth century and the civil rights activists in the twentieth century, we, too, can chart our own path, and we can finally break the cycle of progress and retreat.
But to create this change, we must first be “brave enough to see it,” as Amanda Gorman, the youngest inaugural poet in US history, reminds us. Lin-Manuel Miranda, creator of Broadway musical Hamilton, explains it this way: “I know that we can win. I know that greatness lies in you. But remember from here on in, History has its eyes on you.”
So, let’s make history and imagine a vision of a possible new future.
It’s now Tuesday, February 10, 2060. A Black woman with beautiful, flowing locs walks into a crowded auditorium filled with hundreds of dignitaries. She stops a few steps after she enters the chamber and waits. A white woman and a Latina notice her entrance and rise from their chairs in the front of the room. The Latina picks up a heavy wooden gavel and slowly strikes it three times against the desk. The audience quiets. All eyes turn to the back of the room to face the woman with the locs. She opens her mouth and speaks: “Madam Speaker, the President of the United States.”
The audience cheers.
A beaming Indigenous woman in a wheelchair enters the floor of the United States House of Representatives, shaking hands with and fist-bumping smiling members of Congress from the fifty-two states, who stand or sit to her left and right. As she proceeds down the hall, she greets each of the eleven Black US senators, equivalent to the total number who served during the first 245 years of the nation’s history. Even her opponents from the three other political parties scramble to greet her. Pausing repeatedly for photos, she takes a few minutes to arrive at the well of the House. For continuity-of-government reasons, her space secretary cannot attend tonight, but the president shakes hands with the remaining cabinet members, a dazzling and talented cross section of America. Next, the president is ushered toward the six women, four men, and one nonbinary member of the US Supreme Court. They greet her warmly. Then the Joint Chiefs of Staff salute her. All the while, applause continues uninterrupted as the president wheels herself up the accessible ramp and the automatic podium adjusts to her height.
It is a historic night. She is the third woman president, the second woman of color to hold the office, and the first Indigenous president, and this is her final address to a joint session of Congress. The Latina woman in the front of the room gavels the crowd to order and speaks for the first time: “Tonight, I have the high privilege and distinct honor of presenting to you the president of the United S
tates.” The audience roars again in applause. The president finally has reason to celebrate. Thanks to the national health care law passed decades earlier, the nation was able to mobilize quickly and vaccinate 95 percent of the population against a deadly contagious virus. The Black and Hispanic unemployment rates for the past three years remained slightly below the white unemployment rate for the first time in history. The Reparations Act of 2036 has finally started to eliminate some of the nation’s racial disparities in annual income, household wealth, and educational attainment. The number of police shootings of civilians has dropped dramatically, while a police officer involved in a high-profile shooting incident was recently convicted by a multiracial jury. And despite the ongoing concerns about climate change, the president is prepared to report that, for the tenth consecutive year, the country continues to meet its annual net-zero emissions policies. After a challenging year, she allows herself to breathe a sigh of relief. She thanks the Speaker of the House and acknowledges her vice president behind her.