Unhinged

Now what?

A day or two after convicted felon president Donald Trump suggested that maybe it's a good idea to federalize elections in a dozen or so blue states – which would violate Article 1, Section 4, Clause 1 of the United States Constitution – he tries to evict the African American living perpetually rent free in the back of his brain by posting a racists meme.

It was pretty vile. It took me a moment to find it on Facebook because 12 hours after he posted it on his Truth Social (Untruth Anti-Social),platform, the meme came down. But I did find it. It was a picture of President Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle – both African Americans – with pictures of their heads transposed over the images of apes.

It doesn't get any more racist – or vile – than that. Trump said the image that a staffer – but not he –  posted was that of Trump as the King of the Jungle full of Democrats and that it should not be taken out of that context. Why post it at all? 

And that he won't apologize for it. He knew what he was doing. 

A few weeks ago an apologist for Trump dared folks to find anything at all racist about Trump, as if Trump was the squeakiest clean person ever. But this particular meme by Trump is nothing more than a racist trope with roots dating back not only to Jim Crow, but to the era of slavery and beyond.

Part of the autocrat's playbook is to dehumanize your opponent to make them look weak or subservient. Equating them with animals is a time-tested way to do that.

There are other glaring examples of Trump's racist tendencies. In 1973, Trump and his company, Trump Management, were sued by the Department of Justice for housing discrimination against African American renters. Trump settled the case, but the stench lingers. Then there's the Central Park Five case where Trump said five African American teenagers were responsible for the 1989 rape of a white woman, even calling for their execution even after they were exonerated.

And here comes Obama again, living in Trump's brain, when he basically invented birtherism, claiming falsely that Obama was not born in the United States and thus was Constitutionally prohibited from serving as President.

As if that wasn't enough, Trump launched his 2016 presidential campaign in a speech where he said Mexico was sending criminals to the border, bringing drugs and crime with them. Scare tactics.

Then I started to think a little more about what's going on here, and how interconnected all of this stuff might be.

Everything – and I mean everything – serves as a distraction for Trump as he tries to justify his administration's mostly anti-Constitutional impulses.

There are a number of things Trump doesn't want to discuss, most prominently the Epstein files, in  which his name appears at least 38,000 times and thus implies he was engaged in pedophilia. So create a distraction. How about annexing Greenland? Striking Venezuela and seizing its oil? Or maybe nationalize the vote? Better yet, maybe invoke the Insurrection Act in response to the ICE protests in order to declare martial law? How about the government-sanctioned murder of protestors to distract from the Epstein files?

Could Nancy Guthrie's kidnapping be connected to the Epstein files? After all, her daughter, Savannah – who is an NBC co-anchor of Today – has been involved in covering and interviewing survivors of Jeffrey Epstein. Anything is possible, I suppose.

None of this is normal. None of this is a reflection of the American soul or of the American essence, even in our faults. We are not perfect. But we generally know what's right and what is wrong. We make our course corrections. It's in our DNA. 

Just not in Trump's.