The president is trying to tar Biden by association with BIPOC. As soon as April Ryan tweeted that Stephen Miller was said to be writing a race speech for Donald Trump — the race speech for Donald Trump to deliver in the middle of the revolution — I knew I had to cover it.
I am an immigrant, I was undocumented all my life, and now my green card is expired. My family is undocumented. Miller is widely credited as the architect of Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda. He is a committed white nationalist, but so far his fixation, his hobby, his raison d’être, has been Latinx immigrants. I wanted to see what his range was. Oh, and he’s expecting a baby. Would he have gone soft?
As usual, though, Trump’s speech didn’t seem… written. The Boeing bragging, the ramp stuff, the gratuitous mentions of Hillary Clinton — all Criterion Collection Trump. But I saw some Miller watermarks that were pretty smart, in the way cult leaders know how to earworm their way into your brain if you are exhausted, protein-deprived, overworked, disconnected from independent information sources, and brainwashed. The rally was a cult gathering, and Trump’s followers were hungry.
There was no race speech in that there was no speech, but there was race in this speech in the ways that racism is interesting to Miller.
With Miller as the ventriloquist and Trump as the dummy, Trump coded “radical left” as meaning “Black and Brown” — the BLM protesters, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar — and represented “Sleepy Joe Biden” as an innocent white person who is being controlled and brainwashed by their mob power and white guilt. “Do you want to bow before the left-wing mob?” he asked not just his cult base but all white listeners. “Or do you want to stand up tall and proud as Americans?”
He made laments for the antebellum: “If you want to save … that beautiful heritage of ours … you are so lucky I’m president.”
But he also spoke to a kind of white person — someone who doesn’t consider themselves racist and may be an ally but is just learning what it means to be anti-racist. One who is being made to reckon with their whiteness, even if it makes them uncomfortable, who is buying the anti-racist books, reposting links and fundraisers and black squares ad nauseam, then learning that some of it’s performative and that the real work is harder, a lot harder, and will involve missteps. People like the fashion influencers, celebrities, co-workers, and friends we like and love who are making mistakes and owning up to them — or not. To this group of people, he presents an invitation: not to vote for him but to align their whiteness with his, to align their hurt with his rage.
“They’ll expel anyone who disagrees with them,” he said. “Look what happens when you disagree. You use a term that’s perfect, and they’re not happy with it. They call you a racist. They call you a horrible person.”
And no white person, whether they are allies or whether they are fully white-hooded, wants to be called a racist.
As for his opponent, Trump’s strategy seems to be to paint Biden as a puppet controlled by a BIPOC-dominated radical left, a mob mentality, which is what makes this seemingly innocuous old white man with blue-collar roots dangerous. Trump can’t attack Biden with the vitriol with which he attacked Hillary Clinton, but he’s building up to it if he’s associating him with Ocasio-Cortez and Ilham Omar and Black Lives Matter — and not just an association but an emasculation by association.
He hadn’t previously tried to divide Black and Latinx people, at peak unemployment for our communities, in the middle of a pandemic, in the middle of a Black civil rights movement.
“Joe Biden is a helpless puppet of the radical left, and he’s not radical left,” Trump said. “I don’t think he knows what he is anymore, but he was never radical left. … He is their pawn. He doesn’t even know where the hell he is. Let’s face it. He installed socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.” He called Biden “a very willing Trojan horse for socialism” and said, “he never got more than 1% until Obama took him off the trash heap.” Here he credits Barack Obama for Biden’s success, trying to stoke resentment. But the resentment he is trying to stoke is not directed at his cult. It’s directed at the white people who are reading the anti-racist books right now but who are still being called out and are getting a little tired of promising to do better — he’s speaking to them.
Then there was the specter of interracial crime, as when Trump discussed “a very tough hombre breaking into the window of a young woman whose husband is away as a traveling salesman or whatever he may do,” which frankly sounds like he’s having an affair because that’s not a job anymore. In emails leaked to Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch, Miller recommended a book to Katie McHugh, then editor of Breitbart, called Camp of the Saints, which is a grotesque white genocide novel in which a brown-skinned Indian man rapes a woman to death and other gruesome violence is directed at white innocents. Hegot excited about Department of Justice figures breaking out “Hispanic” crime rates. His far-right ideology about Latinx immigrants has translated into spearheading policies like family separation at the border and using Covid-19 as an excuse to limit immigration.
Eric Trump called the protesters outside the venue “animals.” And Trump called ICE detainees “animals.” That’s top-of-the-yogurt-curdle racism we’ve seen before.
He also said something that made my heart sink but is classic Miller. He accused Biden, and the Obama administration overall, of “hollow[ing] out our middle class, including our Black middle class, with open borders.”
That’s a card he hasn’t really played before. We know his opinions on race. They are explicitly white supremacist, neo-Nazi. But he hadn’t previously tried to divide Black and Latinx people, at peak unemployment for our communities, in the middle of a pandemic, in the middle of a Black civil rights movement. He is trying to divide us just days after the Supreme Court ruled that he could not immediately end Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). And that’s a Miller move.
In 2005, then-college sophomore Miller wrote an article for a conservative magazine about his Santa Monica high school in which he railed against “self-segregation.” Complaining about an “out-of-control race brawl” he did not seem to witness, he wrote ragefully of a school board member, Oscar De La Torre, who explained that “youth violence is a complex social problem that stems from marginalization and disenfranchisement” and who attempted to smooth over tensions by bringing in “known gang members” with tattoos (!) to the school that he says almost started a second riot (!). Miller went up the chain of command trying to get everyone involved in trouble, from the students to the principal, but everyone ignored him — and the students involved in the fight were not punished because, he says, of the “unsupported leftist claim that all blacks and Hispanics — even those in a city as P.C. as Santa Monica — are inherently the victims of some mysterious ‘institutional racism.’”
A commenter on the website where the article can still be found, an alumnus of the high school, says, “Did you stop to ponder the idea that possibly De La Torre brought the two men to discuss with the student body the dangers of gang or racial violence?” But that’s not the point.
Miller doesn’t care about deep-seated anti-Blackness in Latinx communities or what painful problems in a community may drive a young Black teenager to assault a Latinx street vendor. But he does believe in out-of-control race brawls. He says he’s seen them. So why not fan the flames?
This might give us a clue into what a desperate play to tap into (or just depress) the Black or Latinx vote might look like during the general election.
A movement can only be sustainable if it is intersectional. We must retain our focus on anti-racism and anti-Blackness as an evil to be toppled in all its forms but also welcome a queering of the movement if our communities are to survive alongside each other, fight alongside each other, and stand strong against white supremacy’s quest to divide us at a moment when we are dying of a deadly virus at the highest rates and suffering from unemployment at the highest rates. This is not the moment for us to struggle alone, together. Black Lives Matter.
Non-white, non-white-passing, and especially non-citizen Latinx people should put on their armor, rusted by the tears of humanizing legislation we’ve been promised for decades, and join in this fight as if this were our fight because guess what? Their enemies are our enemies. And to white allies — we need your bodies to protect us from the rubber bullets. But joking aside, we really need you. We know it’s uncomfortable, but take note how scared they are of you breaking the social contract you have with whiteness.