FOTUS and Other Likeminded Bigots Need Privilege to Escape Their Boorish Mediocrity*
After American Eagle Flight 5342 and an army helicopter collided midair on Wednesday evening over the Potomac River, killing 67 people, FOTUS did what no (other) president would do. Rather than simply express his sympathies to families and friends of the crash victims and reassure and update the public, he blamed the disaster on “Joe Biden. And Barack Obama. And Pete Buttigieg. And the FAA. And unnamed pilots. And perhaps most importantly, DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) programs within the government.” Trump told reporters, “he was certain it was related to diversity policies because, as he claims: ‘I have common sense.’”
Lydia O’Connor of Huffington Post wrote, Trump’s ‘Grotesque’ Plane Crash Comments Leave Democrats Gobsmacked: “Democrats were left dumbfounded Thursday after President Donald Trump twisted a deadly plane crash catastrophe into an opportunity to attack diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.”
Democrats were Gobsmacked? Dumbfounded?
Really?
O’Connor highlighted adjectives Democratic lawmakers used to characterize Trump’s reaction to the massive F.A.A./military failure and devastating loss of life under his watch, with a link to each lawmaker’s comments. Warning: all but one of the statements were posted on X, leaving me gobsmacked that these D lawmakers continue to use that toxic waste dump: “‘grotesque and outrageous [Sen. Chris Van Hollen],’ ‘downright disgusting [Sen. Chris Murphy],’ ‘disgraceful [Sen. Chris Murphy],’ ‘absolutely shameful [Sen. Tammy Duckworth],’ ‘despicable [Pete Buttigeig],’ ‘absolutely vile [Rep. Summer Lee],’ ‘racist and sexist [Rep. Kweisi Mfume],’ ‘a betrayal [Rep./Min. Whip Katherine Clark],’ ‘monstrous [Rep. Robert Garcia],’ ‘simply un-American [Rep. Robin Kelly],’ ‘craven [Sen. Dick Durin]’ and ‘pathetic [Rep. Nanette Barragan].’”
While each is a correct descriptor of him, no one — least of all Democratic lawmakers — should be flabbergasted, speechless, or incoherent with shock or amazement that FOTUS would use “diversity, equity, and inclusion” initiatives in a time of crisis as a scapegoat for his infantile administration’s catastrophic failure. That will continue. We all have witnessed his unvarnished duplicity, his venomous racism, and his complete disregard for basic decency and humanity, especially toward those for whom he is a supposed steward and the perpetually marginalized he loves to use as a punching bag.
As Jamelle Bouie said, “We knew what he was when we took him in.”
Exactly!
And here are just a few reminders.
Remember the DOJ lawsuit against Trump and his father for refusing to rent to Black tenants?
Remember the Central Park Five?
Remember birtherism?
Remember his 2015 declaration of candidacy when he falsely connected Mexican immigrants and crime?
Remember his family separation policy?
Remember the Muslim ban?
Remember shithole countries?
Remember his monstrously inept response to the pandemic resulting in the unnecessary deaths — some might say murder — of hundreds of thousands of Americans?
Remember his baseless claim that Haitian immigrants were eating pets?
Remember his false claim that immigrant gangs from Venezuela had taken over Aurora, Colorado and turned it into a “war zone”?
Remember when he claimed certain classes of immigrants were genetically predisposed to commit crimes?
Remember him describing certain immigrants not as humans but as animals?
Remember his “blatantly unconstitutional” executive order canceling birthright citizenship?
Remember his pledge, which is well under way, to round up, place in detention camps — now to include Guantanamo Bay — and deport millions of immigrants?
His racism is not just racism. It’s ideology and strategy designed “to divide the country for the benefit of himself and other wealthy Americans. He uses racism by triggering two major sources of anxiety for many white people: economic insecurity and demographic change.”
Remember his sustained attacks on Critical Race Theory (“CRT”) — protesting maybe a little too much? CRT is the doctrine which “acknowledges racial disparities that have persisted in U.S. history and offers a framework to understand how racism is reinforced in U.S. law and culture.”
I have long suspected that an underlying reason bigots and adherents to white (usually male) supremacism ascribe to those views is insecurity, the fear of being exposed — on a level playing field they would fail merits-based scrutiny. Their inadequacies require that to succeed, they must advance and depend on the structural, societal privilege of race (and gender) bestowed by their accidents of birth — precisely what CRT exposes and analyzes. Their toxic mindset created the false construct that “DEI hire” means a person is not qualified for a position if they are Black, female, LGBTQ, or disabled and was employed only because of their race, gender, sexual orientation, or disability. That ruse is a driving force behind the new administration’s sustained attack on everything DEI.
Sadly, universities and many — but not all — companies in the private sector are following suit. Thank you Costco and other companies that continue to support the initiatives that increase diversity and broaden the pool of capable candidates. Fuck you Target, Amazon, Walmart, Meta, McDonalds, Ford, Harley-Davidson, Lowe’s, John Deere, and the others for cowardly abandoning your prior commitments to DEI.
The exact opposite of the administration’s claim is true. Diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives reduce the negative effects of endemic, structural racism and other forms of bigotry and the consequent privilege by leveling the playing field, expanding the field of qualified applicants and, as a result, creating something more akin to an actual meritocracy. Indeed, given the barriers — structural and otherwise — in most sectors, women, nonwhites, members of the LGBTQ+ community, and disabled people often must achieve and excel well beyond their mediocre, structurally favored, white male counterparts even to be considered. And they do.
We know the self-proclaimed “common sense” FOTUS — who publicly proclaimed the American Airlines disaster would not have happened but for DEI — cares not a whit about actual merit. He never has, unless one defines “the best people” as the exact opposite of conventional meaning, something to be found in an Orwellian dystopia. One need only look at his dangerous, morbidly unqualified, and incompetent cabinet picks and the revolving door of conniving crooks from his first administration to appreciate his desperately skewed view of what merit constitutes.
NAACP President Derrick Johnson accurately pointed out some of what is going on, that FOTUS is continuing to use “the tools of race and othering to distract and distort from the dismal start of this administration.” Referring to Trump, he said “you use something that’s extreme to distract the focus on what should be the priority or what’s important so that you can have the nation looking over there, while at the same time in the opposite direction you’re doing things such as reducing the function of federal government, outsourcing those functions and privatizing those functions so you can maximize profit.”
“Merit,” according to the incomparable Jamelle Bouie of The New York Times, “is the key term in his war on diversity, equity and inclusion polices . . . But if Trump does not care about actual merit, then what, exactly, is he going on about?” Bouie gives his view of the direction this administration is headed with its attack on DEI, and it makes perfect sense:
“Trump gave us one answer last week when he revoked a 60-year-old nondiscrimination order and shut down civil rights enforcement at the Justice Department. He gave us another when he issued an executive order mandating ‘patriotic education’ and taking aim at any teaching that dwells on this country’s troubled history of racial hierarchy and subordination. He gave us another answer on Wednesday when Secretary Hegseth paused military recognition of Black History Month as part of his effort to uproot D.E.I. and show that ‘diversity is not our strength.’ And Trump gave us one more, during a Thursday news conference, when both he and Vice President Vance blamed diversity for the midair collision near Washington National Airport that claimed 67 lives the night before.
“‘We must have only the highest standards for those who work in our aviation system,’ Trump said. ‘Only the highest aptitude, they have to be the highest intellect and psychologically superior people were allowed to qualify for air traffic controllers.’ He then went on to complain, falsely, that the Federal Aviation Administration under President Joe Biden and his transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, was ‘actively recruiting workers who suffer severe intellectual disabilities, psychiatric problems and other mental and physical conditions under a diversity and inclusion hiring initiative spelled out on the agency’s website.’
“Further abusing the truth, Trump said that the F.A.A. had ‘determined that the work force was too white,’ but, he continued, ‘we want the people that are competent.’
“Vance also told reporters that the government under Biden had turned away potential air traffic controllers ‘because of the color of their skin’ and that the push for diversity in government ‘put stresses on the people who are already there,’ presumably leading them to make mistakes.
“Neither the president nor the vice president (nor the secretary of defense, who made similar comments) gave any evidence to support the bizarre assertion that diversity efforts caused the tragic accident. They made no attempt to show that either the pilots or air traffic controllers were unqualified or unprepared — although air traffic control at Ronald Reagan National Airport was understaffed.
“But in the mind of the president and his deputy, the mere fact of diversity is evidence of incompetence and unfair treatment. To have women or nonwhites or people with disabilities in sensitive roles, says the president, is to necessarily court disaster.
“What does D.E.I. mean to the president and his administration? It’s the presence — in a skilled or high-status role — of anyone who isn’t white, male and able-bodied, regardless of qualifications or abilities. And on the other end, in the Orwellian formulation of the president and his allies, it is meritocracy to bestow the highest public trust on men like Hegseth, who have, if nothing else, the right look.
“This is run-of-the-mill discrimination, of the kind we tried to banish to the ash heap of history with the Civil Rights Act. And it is part of the Trump administration’s larger effort to subordinate large groups of Americans under rigid hierarchies of race, gender and sexuality, from the attack on diversity to the frighteningly authoritarian assault on the lives and livelihoods of transgender Americans.
“It has been long out of use in American political life, but we do have a word for the kind of people who practice this sort of politics: segregationist. Remember, segregation did not necessarily mean that Black and white Americans could not work together or inhabit the same public space — that would have been impossible, given the actual social relations of the Jim Crow South. What it meant was the rigid maintenance of an explicit hierarchy, along with the racial distribution of resources and respect.
“That is what the administration seems to want. The distribution of resources and respect along lines of race, gender and ability. Seen in this light, the president’s move to end D.E.I. is of a piece with Woodrow Wilson’s successful effort, in his first administration, to resegregate the federal work force.
“We saw, at this news conference, explicit racism and bigotry of a kind that even the most prejudiced presidents usually kept from public view. As chief executive, Trump has a duty to represent the entire country and affirm the basic American value that ‘all men are created equal.’ But at that news conference, he refused.
“Once again, and not for the last time, Donald Trump has disgraced and degraded his office. But then, what else is new? We knew what he was when we took him in.”
(Emphasis added.)
This is designed to advance the Christian nationalist and white supremacist anti-democratic policy that the country must be controlled going forward by white men.
Mediocre, small-minded, privileged, white men.
R.VanWagoner https://medium.com/@richardvanwagoner publishes. https://richardvanwagoner.medium.com/subscribe
**My brother the very talented fiction writer and novelist, Robert Hodgson Van Wagoner, deserves considerable credit for offering both substantive and technical suggestions to https://medium.com/@richardvanwagoner. Rob’s second novel is a beautifully written suspense drama that takes place in Utah, Wyoming, and Norway. This novel, The Contortionists, which Rob himself narrates for the audio version, is a psychological page-turner about a missing child in a predominantly Mormon community. I have read the novel and listened to the audio version twice. It is a literary masterpiece. The Contortionists is not, however, for the faint of heart.
***Richard J Van Wagoner is my father. His list of honors, awards, and professional associations is extensive. He was Professor Emeritus (Painting and Drawing), Weber State University, having served three Appointments as Chair of the Department of Visual Arts there. He guest-lectured and instructed at many universities and juried numerous shows and exhibitions. He was invited to submit his work as part of many shows and exhibitions, and his work was exhibited in many traveling shows domestically and internationally. My daughter Angela Van Wagoner, a professional photographer, photographed more than 500 pieces of my father’s work. The photographs of my father’s art reproduced in https://medium.com/@richardvanwagoner are hers.