On Aug. 14, CNN anchor John Berman said “I think you can make a compelling case” that the word “dog,” when used by our irrepressible president to refer to a black or a woman, has a different meaning, and one much more offensive, than when applied to a white, or a man.
But how do you make a “compelling case” about something that can never be proven, as it goes to to matters of one man’s motivation, that many can guess at, but no one can know? Racists, by definition, view everything through the prism of race. They hold those in one group in higher esteem than they hold those in others. They evince, in ways overt or subtle, a preference and even a reverence for their own tribe, while treating most others with suspicion or even as sub-human.
But can anyone name one race, sex, tribe, or religion whose adherents or members President Trump has not both praised to the skies and dismissed as “losers” and “bad people, if not the worst people on earth?”
Before and after 2015, when he made his startling plunge into politics, Trump has showered abuse on well-off white men born into privilege — Jeb Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney were his most frequent targets — while raining praise, pique, and spite on a vast range of others. And in general, he has done this not on the basis of gender or provenance, but on the way that they talk and/or feel about him.
This makes him not a racist, whose bias is based on the fact of race difference; but a narcissist, whose center is quite firmly fixed in his ego and the way others think about him. People who feed his sense of importance are his allies regardless of race, creed, or gender; those who attack it, regardless of whiteness or maleness, are always his obdurate foes. No virtue is great enough to make up for not praising him; no sin is heavy enough to blot out a good word tossed by some miscreant in his direction.
For this reason, the courage of John McCain or of Humayun Khan, (the Muslim soldier whose parents’ appearance at the Democratic convention almost made Hillary Clinton our president) is meaningless to him. And the evil of Vladimir Putin and the white nationalists is not foul enough to overcome their faint praise.
Ego, not hate, is Trump’s central deficiency. As for the word “dog,” Trump has a history of using it on everyone from David Gregory to Erick Erickson to Steve Bannon, among many others, and so the effort to find a racial angle for it is somewhat silly. Besides, as an epithet, it is not that potent. Millions of people love their dogs dearly, spend fortunes on them, follow them and their doings for hours on Twitter, and cry bitter tears when they die.
This doesn’t mean that President Trump is not a bad person, or not one with glaring and ugly deficiencies. He is just not the particular sort of bad person that a great many people believe.
In the long history of mankind, racial, religious, and tribal intolerance has killed millions and millions of people, caused wars, caused massacres, caused millions to live in second-class citizenship, in slavery, segregation, ghettos or “quarters,” and often in fear for their lives.
Inadvertently, intolerance created the United States of America, a haven for at first religious and later ethnic minorities to flee to. It suffered its own civil war in the process along with a century-long struggle to end segregation before its full promise at last was fulfilled.
Trump has his flaws, but this kind of racial evil seems simply beyond him. It would nice if he tried making that clear.
