President Trump has always been a racist. But his racism has never been informed: he couldn’t tell you in any historical way why he hated people of color, only that he hates them. For years he’s spouted off uninformed, stereotypical, surface-level race-related reasonings as to his hate for those with melanated skin and well-seasoned food.
He was Remy from Higher Learning before and after he’s been radicalized, but dumber.
So when the president of people who love to kiss their pets in the mouth announced to a room full of his favorite African Americans that he was holding a rally, they all bubbled up with excitement.
“A beautiful new venue, brand new. We’re looking forward to it,” Trump said during a White House with his favorite blacks, NBC News reports. “They’ve done a great job with COVID, as you know, the state of Oklahoma.” This will be Trump’s first rally since March 2 when he had to suspend all his rallies with his rallying ass because of the coronavirus.
When The Root’s Managing Editor Genetta Adams and I heard that the president was holding his first rally in months on June 19, the official end of slavery in the U.S. and in Tulsa, Okla., which just happens to be the site of one of the worst racial terrorist attacks in America history, we immediately thought of one name: Stephen Miller.
Stephen Miller is a learned racist, meaning he spends time researching hate so that he can make sure that his hate is well-thought-out and couched in conversations about upward mobility. He’s also one of the president’s closest advisors.
Just look what New York Times opinions columnist Jamelle Bouie had to say of Miller’s influence over the president’s policy:
Miller is, after all, the architect behind the Trump administration’s most draconian border and immigration policies, as well as some of its harshest anti-immigrant rhetoric.
The first travel ban, rolled out within days of President Trump’s inauguration? That was Miller. Family separation at the border? That was Miller too. The relentless effort to limit asylum, deport protected migrants and block refugees from entering the country? Also Miller. The president’s January address from the Oval Office, in which he spun gruesome tales of immigrant crime and violence (“In California, an Air Force veteran was raped, murdered and beaten to death with a hammer by an illegal alien with a long criminal history”)? Stephen Miller.
And Miller wasn’t just influencing policy inside the White House, he spent his days teaching Breitbart how to be better white nationalists.
From Bouie’s piece:
In June 2015, after Dylann Roof murdered nine black churchgoers in Charleston, S.C., Miller emailed McHugh with an outraged message about retailers pulling Confederate flags from their stores, pointing her toward statistics on Confederate deaths in the Civil War. He then wrote to her about efforts to remove Confederate memorials:
What do the vandals say to the people fighting and dying overseas in uniform right now who are carrying on a seventh or eighth generation of military service in their families, stretching back to our founding?
In a September 2015 email, Miller encouraged McHugh to show “the parallels” between Pope Francis’s pro-refugee statements and “The Camp of the Saints,” a 1973 novel by the French author Jean Raspail. In the book, an influx of Indian refugees — described as subhuman and led by a feces-eating demagogue — storm France, killing, stealing and rampaging until they’ve completely occupied the country. Other migrants follow and eventually overrun western Europe, turning white Europeans into a subject class. The book is popular with white nationalists and is mentioned frequently on VDARE and the Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi website.
There is a difference between a tabacky-chewing, pickup-driving, Confederate-flag-loving racist and the suit and tie, spray-painted hairline (yeah, Miller spray painted his hair for a television appearance), historically informed and fucked racist.
Trump is the former and Miller is the latter.
So trust me when I tell you that Trump doesn’t know the historical relevance of June 19 or that the Tulsa Race Riot is not a NASCAR event.
But you know who likely does: Stephen Miller.
This is by design and I’m not exactly sure what the White House is trying to prove here, but the white nationalism is strong with this one. With the world already smoldering from the Black Lives Matter protests against the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd, holding a white power rally on the day that slavery ended in the place that “remains one of the worst incidents of racial violence in U.S. history,” is low, even for this administration. This has the potential to be a molotov cocktail of destruction and if this all goes to shit, and America will have itself to blame and Stephen Miller—always Stephen Miller.