If it weren’t for their sick obsession with race, the national media would have next to nothing to talk about.
The October issue of The Atlantic magazine features a long essay by Ta-Nehisi Coates on President Trump being “The First White President,” a lament about the shame Americans should feel in electing a white man after a black one.
It’s been heralded by Coates’ media peers as a “blockbuster” and something to “admire,” since it goes on and on about racism and nothing else.
Legitimate reasons voters had for choosing Trump are legion (the suffocating politically-correct culture, immigration, Hillary Clinton’s laugh) but Coates chalked up the entire 2016 outcome to white racists and Trump’s whole agenda to bigotry.
“Replacing Obama is not enough—Trump has made the negation of Obama’s legacy the foundation of his own,” wrote Coates. “And this too is whiteness.”
Trump is attempting to undo the healthcare law, some of former President Barack Obama’s immigration directives, and maybe the nuclear deal with Iran.
In real life, that’s called “a somewhat-Republican president reversing a Democrat’s policies.”
For Coates, though, it’s “an entire nigger presidency … targeted for destruction or redemption, thus reifying the idea of being white.”
Trump has repeatedly threatened to terminate NAFTA, which was negotiated by Bill Clinton, another Democrat, but he’s white and doesn’t fit as neatly into Coates’ argument. So NAFTA went unmentioned in the essay.
A footnote might also have added that Trump, despite having been labeled a xenophobe and a racist in nearly every news article, outperformed 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney among both black and Latino voters. But that detail wasn’t there either.
Coates’ biggest screw-up, however, is the rest of his essay’s premise.
Reacting to Trump’s emotionally upsetting win, Coates wrote, “It is as if the white tribe united in demonstration to say, ‘If a black man can be president, then any white man—no matter how fallen—can be president.'”
This works if Coates’ admits that the “white tribe,” so nauseated by a black man in power, is the same one that elected Obama twice.
A Washington Post analysis in November found that Trump seized 209 of the 700 counties that voted for Obama both in 2008 and 2012. On average, the counties Trump flipped were about 80 percent white.
As the analysis put it, “Of the nearly 700 counties that twice sent Obama to the White House, a stunning one-third flipped to support Trump.”
Among the 207 counties that voted for Obama only once in either election, Trump took 194 of them.
Is the “white tribe” blind or did it simply believe Obama enjoyed a remarkably even Caribbean tan?
Did the white tribe mistake Obama’s soulful reprise of Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together” for an audio recording of Mein Kampf?
Coates’ theory suggests that the voters who twice elected Obama (or even just once in 2012) suddenly woke up on Election Day in 2016 to a shock reveal that Obama didn’t have blonde hair and blue eyes.
“Wait, he’s black? Save us, Trump!”
Two seconds spent Googling would lead anyone to view Coates’ argument as a mash-up of paranoia, victimhood, and (what is presumably) willful ignorance; otherwise known as — what media dreams are made of.
The New York Times last month ran an article on Trump’s “complicated” history with race.
It’s “complicated” in the sense that of all five black people the New York Times interviewed for the story, only one, the liberal MSNBC host Al Sharpton, would say that Trump is “racially exclusive.”
Everyone else, including Trump’s bi-racial ex-girlfriend, said they couldn’t recall any racial animus in their personal history with him.
Liberal New York Times columnist Charles Blow endlessly wallows in race victimhood. Last week, after Trump said he was ending Obama’s policy protecting illegal immigrants brought to the U.S. as children — Trump asked Congress to pass a new law to address it — Blow said Trump was sending a message that “continues to say in every way possible that power and privilege in America is primarily the provenance of people who are white, male, Christian and straight…”
He called support for Trump “an uplifting of whiteness to the detriment of non-whiteness.”
Unwilling to give in to the racial oppression apparently inspired by Trump, Blow berated 90-pound Trump supporter Kayleigh McEnany for touching his arm during an appearance on CNN in February.
Making the point that some in the media assume “sinister” motives by the president, McEnany put her arm on Blow’s shoulder and referred to him as her “left-wing counterpart,” who she said is, “unfair to Trump.”
As if she had just threatened to snatch his purse, Blow snapped back, “That’s not going to happen tonight, ma’am.” Making a shooing motion with his hand, he said, “No you’re not, no you’re not, no you’re not.”
It’s as if the collective media need a sympathetic friend to ask, “Is something wrong?”
The national media’s angry reflex to an election result they don’t like is to imagine a mass movement of whites pushing a new Jim Crow era.
But imagination isn’t reality, and this isn’t racism. It’s an obsession.
Eddie Scarry is a media reporter for the Washington Examiner.
