How Do We Fight Back?

“Flesh on the Ground in the Trump Era”

By Talib Kweli Greene

When Trump started his campaign by saying Mexicans are rapists and kicking Mexican reporters out of his press conferences, he was exhibiting the same behavior I saw him exhibiting when he demonized the Central Park Five. When he bullied Elizabeth Warren with that Pocahontas slur and disrespected Ghazala Khan, a Gold Star mother, I saw the same misogynist who had been famously busting into girls’ dressing rooms unannounced at his pageants for years. Despite this sordid history, the GOP handed Donald Trump the nomination. Soon after, Trump would hire the executive chair of Breitbart News Inc. as his campaign manager. Steve Bannon is notorious for his advocacy of white supremacy. He is on record publicly advocating for white nationalism over and over again. He is anti-diversity, anti-immigrant, and anti-Muslim. He has been accused of saying he didn’t want his children to attend school with “whiny Jews.’ So, when Donald Trump himself RT’d neo-Nazi accounts over 75 times during his campaign and then hired an admitted white nationalist to run the said campaign, that wasn’t just a coincidence.

Even if people missed Steve Bannon’s love of white supremacy, it was impossible to miss how Breitbart.com became a Trump cheerleading site while they weren’t printing stories about how “Gays Need to Get Back In The Closet,” “Renegade Jews,” “How Birth Control Makes Women Crazy” and how the confederate flag has a “Proud And Glorious Heritage.” This is not hyperbole, these are actual Breitbart headlines. Between Breitbart.com and its louder, dumber cousin Info Wars, run by Alex Jones, Trump had the only news outlets he needed. It didn’t matter that Info Wars posted stories about Obama being a demon who smelled of sulfur and hard-hitting pieces about how the Sandy Hook massacre was staged. As long as they said good things about Trump, he considered them his primary sources of info. Everything else was ironically dumbed fake news. By using his Twitter account to spread the lies he read on Breitbart and Info Wars, Trump effectively reached his core base without having to deal with the fact checkers and investigative journalists who would call him on his bullshit. While we went high and ignored the trolls as they went low, they used Twitter and Facebook to spread enough lies to help win Trump the election. Especially the Russian sock accounts. America elected a troll for president.
By the time the tape surfaced of Trump bragging about sexual assault, I had learned my lesson. Trump’s base would support him no matter what he said or did, and his base was a very vocal minority that chose social media as their venue while mainstream media was busy patting itself on the back. I could no longer afford to dismiss Trump as a joke. The man was caught on tape saying he gets to “grab them by the pussy” without permission because he’s a star, and it somehow made him more popular with his core, family values supporters. These people would clearly do whatever it took to win this election, even if it meant contradicting everything they claimed to stand for. Racist white people in America knew that making the most famous birther in the world president would be the ultimate fuck you to Obama. They relished the thought of electing Trump to stick it to the nigger president with unabashed glee.

There are those who say that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are at least as bad, maybe worse, than Donald Trump. There are Bernie Sanders supporters who began to support Trump after Bernie lost the primary. Fact is, every presidential candidate who has ever had a real shot at the presidency has been an imperialist, because America has always used imperialism to support its interests around the world. So yes, Obama utilized the very immoral drone program more than any President and deported many immigrants. Yes, Hillary Clinton supported, then later apologized for her support of, mass incarceration policies. However, these politicians, including Bernie Sanders, respected the system of checks and balances that keep our country from descending into dictatorship.
When I see former GOP president George Bush — who I could’ve sworn was the most evil president we’d ever seen until Trump — also challenge Trump’s knack for fascist rhetoric, I know it’s not just my lefty bias that is making me see Trump as a far worse existential threat to democracy than any American “politician” that has come before him. Many say that Bernie Sanders was cheated out of the DNC nomination. What Bernie Sanders himself said was that he would campaign for and support Hillary Clinton for president because he acknowledged where we were, not where he wanted us to be. Did Sanders want to be the nominee? Of course. Did he deserve to be the nominee over Hillary? Quite possibly. But he wasn’t. Blame that on money in politics and the 2 party system. But in the meantime, Bernie knew that the work to stop Trump still needed to be done. He knew that Hillary Clinton was the only politician with a chance to defeat Trump. Sadly, many of Bernie’s supporters only supported Bernie as long as they thought Bernie could be president. Once Sanders didn’t get the nomination, they were all too willing to hand Trump the presidency out of spite for Hillary Clinton, which was the exact opposite of Bernie’s messaging post-primaries.

This is part 2 of a 3-part essay, “Flesh On the Ground in the Trump Era” written in 2016 by hip hop artist, activist, and writer Talib Kweli Greene and republished with permission of the author.
Talib Kweli is one of the world’s most talented, accomplished, and socially conscious hip-hop artists. His book, Vibrate Higher: A Rap Story (MCD, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2021), is a first-hand account of hip hop as a political force. Kweli commands attention by delivering top-tier lyricism, crafting captivating stories, and showing the ability to rhyme over virtually any type of instrumental. In 2011, Kweli founded Javotti Media, a record label and platform for independent thinkers and doers.