The First White President. Ta-Nehisi Coates. October 2017..docx

The First White President
The foundation of Donald Trump’s presidency is the negation of
Barack Obama’s legacy.
Jesse Draxler; Photo: David Hume Kennerly / Getty
TA-NEHISI COATES
OCTOBER 2017
I.
IT IS INSUFFICIENT TO STATE the obvious of Donald Trump: that he is a
white man who would not be president were it not for this fact. With one
immediate exception, Trump’s predecessors made their way to high office
through the passive power of whiteness—that bloody heirloom which cannot
ensure mastery of all events but can conjure a tailwind for most of them.
Land theft and human plunder cleared the grounds for Trump’s forefathers
and barred others from it. Once upon the field, these men became soldiers,
statesmen, and scholars; held court in Paris; presided at Princeton;
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advanced into the Wilderness and then into the White House. Their
individual triumphs made this exclusive party seem above America’s
founding sins, and it was forgotten that the former was in fact bound to the
latter, that all their victories had transpired on cleared grounds. No such
elegant detachment can be attributed to Donald Trump—a president who,
more than any other, has made the awful inheritance explicit.
His political career began in advocacy of birtherism, that modern recasting
of the old American precept that black people are not fit to be citizens of the
country they built. But long before birtherism, Trump had made his
worldview clear. He fought to keep blacks out of his buildings, according to
the U.S. government; called for the death penalty for the eventually
exonerated Central Park Five; and railed against “lazy” black employees.
“Black guys counting my money! I hate it,” Trump was once quoted as
saying. “The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys
that wear yarmulkes every day.” After his cabal of conspiracy theorists
forced Barack Obama to present his birth certificate, Trump demanded the
president’s college grades (offering $5 million in exchange for them),
insisting that Obama was not intelligent enough to have gone to an Ivy
League school, and that his acclaimed memoir, Dreams From My Father ,
had been ghostwritten by a white man, Bill Ayers.
It is often said that Trump has no real ideology, which is not true—his
ideology is white supremacy, in all its truculent and sanctimonious power.
Trump inaugurated his campaign by casting himself as the defender of
white maidenhood against Mexican “rapists,” only to be later alleged by
multiple accusers, and by his own proud words, to be a sexual violator
himself. White supremacy has always had a perverse sexual tint. Trump’s
rise was shepherded by Steve Bannon, a man who mocks his white male
critics as “cucks.” The word, derived from cuckold , is specifically meant to
debase by fear and fantasy—the target is so weak that he would submit to
the humiliation of having his white wife lie with black men. That the
slur cuck casts white men as victims aligns with the dicta of whiteness,
which seek to alchemize one’s profligate sins into virtue. So it was with