The State of the President’s Mind

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The State of the President’s Mind

I was a high school coach for forty years. I spent a lot of time in locker rooms, preparing athletes for competition and supervising their actions. I knew what locker room talk was, and I demanded from my athletes that they control their mouths, and their minds. It wasn’t that profanity was “banned,” they were, after all, high school kids. There were two elements of control: that the profanity be private, not public, and that the profanity be general, not personal.

Using profanity to characterize a person, as opposed to their actions, was unacceptable, not only because it always elicited an extreme response from the victim, but also because it could never be “fixed.” Once that insult was used, once it was out there, you couldn’t walk it back.

And the final rule: if you couldn’t figure out the difference between public and private, or make a distinction between a person and their actions; then you shouldn’t use profanity at all.

The President of the United States does not use profanity without thought. He chooses what he says: profanity is a tool he uses for its effect on the audience. He gains attention by it; the shock value of his words gets him the personal and political notoriety he craves. For the purposes of his “audience,” especially his core supporters, he characterizes the words as “tough language,” implying that tough, strong men use this tough, strong language.

(See John Wayne Had It about Trumpian views of manhood.)

The President’s use of profanity is a window to his mind. In September, he spoke about NFL players taking a knee during the National Anthem at a rally for failed Senatorial candidate Luther Strange. In the speech he made the following statement:

“Get that son of a bitch off the field right now, he’s fired. He’s fired!”

The players taking a knee were overwhelmingly African American. Trump was more than willing to use profanity when describing these players. But perhaps the next statement gives an even greater insight into Trump’s mind. He stated that if an NFL owner followed the above advice:

“For a week, (that owner would) be the most popular person in this country. Because that’s a total disrespect of our heritage. That’s a total disrespect for everything we stand for…”

The “profanity” there is the term, “our heritage.” His “our” does not include marching for civil rights, nor civil disobedience, nor minorities. It is not a “dog whistle;” it’s a bullhorn shout-out to “white heritage,” the same shout he made when he stated that: “…there were some very fine people on both sides…” of the Charlottesville protests.

Which brings us to the meeting of last week, when the President described the nations that African and Haitian immigrants left to come to the United States as “shitholes.”

There really is no controversy about what was said. The faulty memory of the Secretary of Homeland Security, and the outright changing lies of Senators Cotton and Perdue, remind me of a bunch of freshmen high school boys trying to cover up some infraction. That aren’t very good at it, they didn’t get their story straight, and they end up looking foolish and making Senators Durbin and Graham look clear and truthful.

It’s countries where black and brown people come from. Lilly white Norway, why those people are welcome to come to the US. But those other countries, well, we see what he thinks. And again, this is NOT a mistake, NOT just “tough talk” in a heated argument. This was a clear window into the President’s mind, and another bullhorn shout to his base. He even discussed with advisors and friends how it might appeal to them.

No doubt Congressman John Lewis is right and the President of the United States is a racist. He sees black and brown peoples as living in “shitholes” (not just Nigerian “mud huts,” but Chicago) and not welcome in HIS America. This is not new. What is new is the ongoing public commentary that somehow normalizes this view. It is the undercurrent that the President is simply saying out loud what everyone is thinking, that his views represent our national “secret.”

It isn’t what everyone is thinking. It isn’t OUR national view. It is the view of a small anachronistic group, wishing for a mythical past, grasping for one more claim to power.

As a coach in the locker room, I occasionally had to make a point to my team. If I really needed to demonstrate where the limits were, the best move was to crack down on the “star” athlete, the one everyone looked up to. Correcting him made it clear to all what was acceptable and what was not. Let him go, and you could never get control.

President Trump, the “star” of the political right, is making it clear that this racism is now acceptable, at least to him. As he has done with so many other issues, he is unbinding America’s wounds and causing us to re-fight the battles of the 1960’s. Starting from election day in 2016, and continuing through today and 2018, we will be required to re-litigate the battles of that era in order to “bind up the Nation’s wounds” again. I guess it’s appropriate that it happened over the Martin Luther King’s memorial day, Dr. King would have probably said – I told you.  He also would have repeated:

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”

We will need to do some bending.