There is a 100 percent chance that Donald Trump has, at some point in his life, said “nigger.” Those odds stay at 100 when assessing the chance that he currently thinks of black people as niggers, and then they slightly dip (87 percent? 92?) when wondering whether he 1) currently says it and 2) has been recorded saying it. I have few doubts that, if Omarosa doesn’t have a nigger tape stashed in the same bottomless pit she houses her soul in, someone does.
I am also certain that no one gives a shit.
Of course, if a recording of the president of the United States using the country’s most powerful racial slur is released, it will immediately spawn a contained pandemonium. Righteous indignation will rain down on our heads like hard candy from a busted piñata. The kinetic energy of the outrage maelstrom will burn for weeks. People who don’t matter will resign from positions that matter even less, but they’ll do it to prove to everyone that they just can’t stomach working for a racist man who said/says nigger, and we will reward their bravery with retweets. Kanye West will eat a frittata.
But once this period of performative pomp and circumstance passes, nothing will change. He will still be president. His base will not leave. In fact, the storm surrounding “their guy”’s use of a word that they use and think and tweet and type will just encourage them to form a tighter circle around him, a mobile MAGA escutcheon. The feckless motherfuckers in Congress and in the House and in the White House and wherever else his endorsement is necessary for them to keep their jobs will stay firmly perched on his dick, fighting each other for prime space. The story of the racist man who was caught saying a certain racist thing will pass like a burp through an irritated esophagus.
And then, once Omarosa—or whoever else possesses and releases a Trump nigger tape—realizes that her efforts did nothing, changed nothing and was nothing, she will return to that same bottomless pit and scream. Everything is dead down there, though, so it won’t be heard.