This past week saw two highly significant fifth anniversaries, snapshots of what modern America means as a society, each of which helped set the course for where the country now finds itself at this current, dangerous moment.

Five years ago on Wednesday, a white supremacist gunman senselessly murdered nine people at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. It was an incident that shocked the nation and prompted an intense debate about race: from the legacy of the Confederacy and its symbols, to the impact on the American psyche of segregation and the original sin of slavery. 

Black Lives Mattered then, just as much as they do today.

The previous morning, Donald Trump began his campaign for the presidency by descending a moving staircase in his Manhattan building and proceeding to tell America who it should blame for all its ills. Five years later, with the country he purports to lead in a turmoil unprecedented in recent times, he is still telling us – and in his recounting, of course, no responsibility ever falls at his own feet.

There have been too many days within the lamentable political parentheses of Trump’s presidency that have acquired a significance beyond their moment; from his chilling inaugural speech promising to end “American carnage” to that carnage being made real on America’s streets in an explosive, frustrated reaction against systemic racism and the seemingly unrestrained levers of institutional power.  

The catalyst for the unrest, of course, was the police killing of George Floyd on the streets of Minneapolis, but even as the global movement that grew in response sparked an overdue confronting of human rights abuses past and present in countries around the world, the US president turned up the heat under an already boiling pot; provoking rather than consoling a nation in desperate need of guidance.

Today, Friday, is “Juneteenth”, the anniversary of news of Abraham Lincoln’s emancipation proclamation of 1863 reaching the last people to be held in slavery, in Texas, more than two years later. It is the African-American Independence Day. 

For a president remotely concerned with equality, social justice or even simply national cohesion, it would have been a perfect opportunity for outreach and reconciliation. But for Donald Trump, it was a chance to show yet again that he considers himself the president only of the people who voted for him.

Despite a Coronavirus pandemic that offers few signs of abating, Trump has been desperate to be back onstage in front of adoring crowds ready to cheer his every word – the more vindictive, the louder the cheer – and so announced he would hold his first public rally since March on Juneteenth, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, no less; the site of the worst racist massacre in American history.

With apparently a million people applying for tickets for the rally, at an arena that holds fewer than 20,000, the whole exercise may well have been more about harvesting email addresses to solicit potential donors than it was about organizing a gathering where people could safely social-distance, but the reaction was understandably brutal – not just in terms of the sensitivity of the date and place, but also amid fears for potential Covid infections, leading to the city pleading with the campaign to cancel the event. Even the Republican Mayor of Tulsa said he wouldn’t be attending.

The campaign’s perfect Trumpian response to warnings of a spread of the disease was to require attendees to sign a waiver promising not to sue the president if they caught it.  The White House strategy for dealing with the virus now appears to be to ignore it and hope it goes away.

Robert Reich wrote recently in The Guardian that “since moving into the Oval Office in January 2017, Trump hasn’t shown an ounce of interest in governing. He obsesses only about himself. But it has taken the present set of crises to reveal the depths of his self-absorbed abdication – his utter contempt for his job, his total repudiation of his office.”

Eventually the White House – sort of – relented, delaying the gathering until the following day, but not before they chose to double-down on the dog-whistles by announcing that Trump would be formally accepting his party’s nomination in Jacksonville, Florida, on the 60th anniversary of “Ax Handle Saturday”, when a mob organized by the Ku Klux Klan attacked civil rights protesters.

This was not so much the president playing the race card as laying his whole hand down on the table. He even gave a typically ludicrous interview to the Wall Street Journal in which he took credit for raising awareness of today’s holiday. 

While the president’s recent actions have been unsurprisingly consistent with the divisive rhetoric that has characterized his tenure, they are significantly more provocative amid the country’s current heightened tensions over the deaths not just of George Floyd, but of Breonna Taylor and Rayshard Brooks. 

As the national debate rages over police reform, in an ugly appeal to white voters, Trump appears to be basically demanding that they pick a side. 

Meanwhile, the scene is set for a perfect storm in Tulsa this weekend.

Unconventional

Going to Jacksonville to accept the nomination that day – August 27th – likely also serves the purpose of getting the president out of the nation’s capital and may spare him another trip to inspect the White House bunker the following day, when a March on Washington is due to take place, on the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr’s “I have a Dream” speech.  

The decision to move the Republican convention to Jacksonville from Charlotte, North Carolina, came after local authorities insisted on social distancing measures. With some hotels in Jacksonville already sold out for the week, there has been talk, with almost perfect Coronavirus irony, of bringing a cruise ship in to accommodate the overflow. 

Also, because the RNC hasn’t put together a new party platform they’re just going to roll over the one they used in 2016. The only problem with that, as Reid Epstein and Annie Karni point out in the New York Times, is that some of the holdover language attacks “the current president”.

He’s unlikely to read it anyway, apart from the bits where he’s mentioned by name.

Democrats are still going ahead with their – scaled back – convention in Milwaukee in mid-August, with Joe Biden set to announce his vice-presidential running mate in the coming weeks.

The Presidential Debates Commission announced dates and locations for three debates: Sept. 29 at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, Oct. 15 at the University of Michigan, and Oct. 22 at Belmont University in Nashville. A vice-presidential debate will be held Oct. 7 at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. The Trump campaign apparently wants more debates, starting earlier, and has put Rudy Giuliani in charge of lobbying for the changes.

In an increasingly fraught and surreal world, the best thing that probably happened to the president this week was his birthday, with his campaign and the RNC enjoying their biggest-ever online fundraising day, hitting some $14 million. 

But the party was spoiled by the advance release of the controversial book by former National Security Adviser John Bolton, with allegations that, well, read them for yourself…

While his claims may not, in the end, do anything other than confirm what many people already knew or believed about the president, Bolton has been predictably attacked for not testifying before Trump’s impeachment hearings. 

Last weekend, the president’s trip to West Point for the cadets’ graduation ceremony was overshadowed – not just by questions over his physical health – but by a continued rumbling of criticism of him by current and former military commanders including former Defense Secretary James Mattis, and by an ongoing row over the potential renaming of military installations named after Confederate leaders.

Polls have indicated a potential fall-off in support for Trump among military personnel and their families, just as some potent symbols of his base, such as NASCAR and the NFL, have been distancing themselves from his positions in the wake of Black Lives Matter.

Elsewhere this week, Facebook removed some of Trump’s campaign ads because – and I’m not kidding – they featured “symbols once used by the Nazis”, while his administration lost two highly significant Supreme Court rulings, on LGBT rights and immigration.

Yet after the decisions went against him Trump wasted no time using the setbacks in appealing to his supporters to ensure he gets another term so he can make more appointments to the highest court.

And all the while, Senate Leader Mitch McConnell continues the relentless churn of appointments to the federal judiciary – about to hit 200 – a process that will shape the legal direction of the nation for years after Trump leaves office.

That shift is likely to be the longest-lasting impact of Trump’s presidency and is undoubtedly a reason many Republicans, if not directly assisting in the appointment-palooza, continue to look the other way at literally everything else he does. It is perhaps the thing he brags about most while caring about the least, since it does not benefit him personally, beyond energizing right-wing supporters and donors.

As Tom McCarthy explains at The Guardian: “In case after case, the rulings of Trump’s picks represent not the preference of a majority of the public, but the preference of a shrinking American conservative minority whose grip on power runs through the US Senate and its exclusive power to confirm federal judges, here exploited mightily.

“The latest census projections in 2018 suggested that the US will become “minority white” in 2045, yet Trump’s judges are almost uniformly white and male, in direct opposition to the changing demographics of the country. Experts caution that many Trump appointees are very recent arrivals on the bench and the extent to which they have shifted or will shift the law of the land won’t be clear for five years or more.”

If Trump were to lose in November, we can probably expect pressure to intensify on older conservative judges to retire so McConnell can replace them before January. Of course, if Trump loses in November, that could well be the least of our problems.

As Jennifer Rubin wrote at the Washington Post, “The Trump presidency will be bookended by two violent explosions of racial animus. In some ways, the true start of his presidency, which set the tone for everything that followed – the racist appeals, the refusals to take responsibility, the selective condemnation of violence, the spinelessness of his party – was Charlottesville. A president who sides with “very fine” people, a.k.a. neo-Nazis, was one intent on destroying the prospect of multiracial, rational self-governance. The presidency ends – we pray – with the explosion of violence triggered by the killing of George Floyd.”

“Joe Biden had it right,” Rubin says, the upcoming election is “a battle for the soul of the nation.”

And it’s a battle where, at least for now, the incumbent appears to be heading for defeat. As Watergate lawyer John Dean told the Post’s Philip Rucker, “Trump is becoming what he hates most, which is being a loser,” while historian Douglas Brinkley believes this week stands out in an already extraordinary presidency.

“I think Donald Trump has finally gotten his comeuppance,” Brinkley said. “Right now, he is a grounded vessel, trapped by Covid-19, by the social justice movement, by the Supreme Court saying he circumvented the law, and by Bolton saying that he’s an idiot – and maybe a treasonous one.”

“It’s a plague of locusts around Trump,” Brinkley added. “They’re piling up and starting to break his spine.”

We’ll see. It’s a very long way to November and before that a long, hot, angry summer is stretching out as the campaign only gets uglier, under the umbrella of record unemployment and a disease that will have killed more than 200,000 Americans by election day. 

If we know anything, we know it’s unlikely that this grotesque week that’s just ending will be the last, or worst, of its kind before the country, utterly exhausted by all of it, finally gets the chance to turn a cathartic page.

For more of our recent articles trying to make sense of US politics, see also:

‘We Hold These Truths’ – June 4

None of us Can Be Silent – June 1

Biden’s Choice – May 10

Tipping Point for the Bully Pulpit? – Apr 28

L’Etat, C’est Moi – Apr 16

In Pivotal Week, Virus Leaves Politics in Disarray – Apr 10

Faith and Moral Bankruptcy – Mar 26