Targeting Black Women: Killer Cops, Trump, Misogynoirism, and the Idea of America

“This fucking bitch is crazy.”

—Sean Grayson, killer cop

“We’re going to defeat Crazy Ka-MAH-la.”

 — Donald Trump, felon

July was not a good month for black women in Illinois.

In Springfield, Sonya Massey is shot in the face and murdered by police in her own home. She joins a growing list spanning decades of other black women, including Eleanor  Bumpers, Alexia Christian, Rekia Boyd, Mya Hall, Kayla Moore, Sandra Bland, and Breonna Taylor, to name only a few. Black women are 1.4 times more likely to be killed by police than are white women, according to a 2019 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, which noted that while black men and boys have the highest risk of being killed by police, among women, black women and girls and Native American/Alaska Native women and girls have the highest risk. Massey’s murderer did not see her as a human being, but as a “crazy bitch” that had to be put down with a headshot. Her crime: she said something (“I rebuke you in the name of Jesus”) that disrespected her killer’s authority, a capital offense.

In Chicago, rabid misogynoirism takes center stage at the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ), where Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump delivers a demented performance. Then again, what else did one expect? However, unlike her white CNN colleagues Kaitlan Collins, Jake Tapper, and Dana Bash, Rachel Scott did not pull punches and allow Trump to bulldoze his way through the interview. She did her “black job,” asking tough questions, persisting until they were answered or provoked a response that revealed her interviewee’s character. For doing her job, she has been demeaned and received death threats.

Introducing Trump’s NABJ tantrum on a MSNBC panel, Prime Time Weekend host Nicole Wallace issued a caution: “Well, let’s not do what happens sometimes when Trump is disgusting and racist in his attacks against Fani Willis or Tish James or Tanya Chutkin. We say, well, he hates all women, but he especially hates a black woman who’s trying to hold him accountable, right? That feels like letting him get away with something that is for him a trigger. Let’s put all of that aside and let’s not do that.”

No, let’s.

Trump has a long history of making demeaning statements about women, particularly black^[1] women, and his NABJ performance was no exception.^[2] What was new is that the NABJ, controversially, provided him with a platform to vent his racist misogyny unfiltered for what would have been an hour had Trump’s wranglers not cut the interview short after thirty-four minutes, sensing that Trump, unable to control his outrage at being interrogated by “rude” and “nasty” representatives of “fake news,” had disastrously gone off the rails.

Or, was it because, sensing that his now band-aid-less ear was insufficient to generate  sufficient sympathy that night, they feared Trump would repeat Hulk Hogan’s RNC striptease and tear off his jacket and shirt to show the audience the copious, if delusional, stigmata he claims he bears to spare his supporters the abuse he has suffered on their behalf?

Despite these messianic sacrifices, Trump was seriously disappointed that NABJ’s trio of black women moderators – CNN’s Rachel Scott, Semafor’s Kadia Goba, and Fox News’ Harris Faulkner – did not kindly welcome him and express their gratitude that he had almost taken a bullet for their sins.

Trump hoped to convey two possible messages by consenting to the interview. First, he may have hoped to demonstrate his love for “the blacks,” “his African Americans,” and expand his support beyond the Ben Carsons, Tim Scotts, Bryon Donalds, Candice Owens, Clarence Thomas, Mark Burns, Mark Robinsons, and Judge Joe Browns, who loyally slave on the MAGA plantation. In the past, Trump has proven this love by demonstrating to the black community (or communities, as Faulkner prefers) that he is a man of conviction, or, more accurately, a man of numerous convictions, whose numerous legal travails have purportedly inspired black folk to shell out hundreds of dollars to buy his gaudy gold sneakers, mugshot-emblazoned tee-shirts, and idolatrous pendants to celebrate him as one of their own systemically oppressed, felonious brethren. In this deluded wet dream, Massa Trump loves his blacks so much he went after the race imposter Kamala Harris to protect their racial integrity with the same gatekeeping vigor he applied to keep his properties white in the 1970s. This was because Trump pretends to see Harris as an opportunistic, black-passing South Asian fraudster who is trying to steal another black job – the presidency – a job for which, as a woman of color (i.e., “DEI hire,” the ubiquitous, newly minted slur that, in the wake of the “pro-life” Supreme Court’s abortion of affirmative action, replaces the now obsolete “affirmative action baby”), she is inherently unqualified.

However, the matter of deceit and job qualification does not end with the presidency. Hobgoblin of inconsistency that he is, Trump muddied the waters by naming J. D. Vance his vice-president. Vance, a Yale graduate, self-described elegiac hillbilly (who apparently satisfied the university’s hillbilly quota), New York Times bestselling author, blink-your-eyes-and-you-missed-him senator from Ohio, and alleged sectional devant, is eminently qualified to serve as his VP. Also, like Trump, so far as I can determine, he may have decided cash in his controversies.

Political pundits often suggest that vice-presidential candidates are used as attack dogs, sparing the presidential nominees from the need to maul their opponents. Although according to Trump, vice presidential picks don’t really matter, Vance seems to relish this role. Not content with Trump’s denial of Harris’ blackness, he has accused her of being a “chameleon.” Mind you, this is the same “police-hating” J. D. Vance – or is that JD Vance, James Donald Bowman, James David Hamel? although redubbing him DJ Vance or JDEI Vance may win over black voters – who once described his running mate as “America’s Hitler,” labeled him a “noxious,” “reprehensible,” “idiot,” described himself as a “Never Trump guy,” supported reparations, and attended a Pride Day parade.

Vance is not alone in protean shapeshifting. Ripping a page from the playbook of Roseanne Barr, who, after “jokingly” likening Obama advisor Valerie Jarrett to an ape, claimed she “thought “the bitch was white,” not only has Trump declared he did not know Harris was black and insinuated that he was taken in by her Indian persona but, unlike Harris, the German-descendent Trump has lied about his ethnic heritage, claiming until the late 1980s to be of Swedish descent, a fact that, although it has recently resurfaced in interviews with former Trump aide Omarosa ManigaultNewman, was initially revealed by the press some seven years ago, when the self-appointed guardian of the gene pool attacked Sen. Elizabeth Warren for claiming Native American ancestry and nicknamed her “Pocahontas.” However, the Swedish Chef himself reportedly concealed his German roots for fear that Jewish customers would be reluctant to deal with a German. Trump has since reclaimed his German heritage, perhaps to draw neo-Nazis support for his unified Reich.

No, Roger Rosenblatt, irony is not dead. Nor is hypocrisy.

Second, Trump’s hostile NABJ appearance may have been designed to show his acolytes that he would put these uppity niggers in their place, melanated sycophants like Harris Faulkner excluded. Here, Trump did not disappoint. After all, he had already practiced the art of misogynoiristic disparagement on April Ryan, Yamiche Alcindor, and Abby Phillip. Still, in MAGA World, Trump’s hostility towards black people is taken as a sign of his love for them. Trump’s is not the wimpy, beta love of woke cucks, but the tough love of an alpha winner who, like the homicidal patriots in blue he supports (unless they are defending the Capital from Jan. 6 insurrectionists), point-blank orders the crazy bitches surrounding him to drop their boiling complaints about him and his prior presidency, or else.

At least two of the three NABJ co-moderators who questioned Trump were not content to pitch softballs, though of the three, Scott was the MVP. FOX News’ Harris Faulkner lobbed Nerf balls that were largely undetectable, as they were too close to the former president’s foundation to be noticed, and she has since criticized Scott – not Trump – as being “too emotional,” as if calmly stating facts were an exercise in hysteria. No, she insists, Scott should have welcomed the former president and said something about the assassination attempt on his ear. Lost in her complaint is the fact that her colleagues treated Trump with more respect than Trump – or FOX News, for that matter – treated Nancy Pelosi’s husband, the victim of an assault that, unlike Trump’s superficial and virtually invisible flesh wound, has had lasting medical consequences.

Still, anyone who expected Trump to behave like a decent, rational, coherent political candidate or human being is woefully naïve. These are the same Pollyannas who thought that being grazed by a would-be assassin’s bullet would transform him into a “kinder, gentler” demagogue, or who still believe that his talk of terminating the Constitution and “fixing” things so that his evangelical Christian supporters (and all Americans) will never have to vote again are simply standup routines. More troubling, these self-deluded souls have convinced themselves that Trump is the Bobby Fischer of 4-dimension chess and that his petulance is a masterful, strategic ploy rather than a reflection of his real, rancorous, authoritarian self.

It’s an overworked Maya Angelou quote, but it’s still worth repeating: “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” Thanks to the panopticonic eye of a corporate media that cannot get enough of him, Trump has become his own body cam; he has shown us who he is over and over and over again, so why the chronic disbelief?  Why is it greeted with the same recycled “oh-my-god” disbelief that follows the release of videos of police killings?

Perhaps Americans tolerate Trump because they do not want to face what they, or, more generously, a sizeable hunk of the country, have become. Perhaps it is because they do not want to admit that he belies the idea of what America is and stands for. Perhaps it is because if Americans actually embraced those ideals, Trump would not have been elected president in 2016 and he would not once again be the Republican nominee. Have we too generously given Trump the benefit of the doubt because not to do so would cast doubt upon ourselves, since ultimately he (and we) would not be in this position without a sizeable portion of the population accepting a mentally unhinged, cognitively challenged, convicted felon as qualified to run the country, carry its nuclear codes, and represent it on the world stage? What are we to make of the fact that his alarmingly successful efforts to regress the country back to its less than stellar past and to betray the “idea of America” are seen, unironically, as a bold holy crusade to make America great again?

In a recent op-ed, The New York Times’ Farah Stockman distinguishes between those who see America as an idea, a “creedal nation,” and those who see it as a homeland. Writes Stockman, “People who speak of America as an idea tend to have a global outlook, arguing for more immigration, free trade and a robust role for the United States around the world. Those who emphasize that it’s also a homeland see the country’s resources as being squandered on outsiders, while the needs of its citizens are brushed aside.”

As Trump’s pathetic denial of Harris’s biracial roots suggests, binaries are never as neat as we construct them. From Crispus Attucks, Dred Scott, and David Walker to Rosa Parks, Claudette Colvin, and Barbara Jordan, to Russell Means, Mildred and Richard Loving, and Frank Emi, to James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner to Harvey Milk, Marsha P. Johnson, and Bayard Rustin, and others too numerous to list here, American history is full of “creedalists” who demanded that the nation live up to the idea of America and devoted and sometimes sacrificed their lives to bring it to fruition.

On the other hand, Stockman’s “homelanders” (not to be confused with the psychopathic superman from Amazon Prime’s “The Boys,” although they display, if not his superpowers, some of his violent petulance and penchant for wrapping themselves in the American flag), are convinced that that the nation squanders its resources not only on outsiders but also on undeserving insiders who just happen to share Harris pigmentation, which in their eyes marks them as job-robbing, DEI grifters whose true contributions to the nation are erased from school curriculums because they uncomfortably remind them of the nation’s past and present imperfection.

Stockman continues, “I’ve spoken with American workers who compete with undocumented immigrants for low-wage jobs in home construction and landscaping and they speak of the downside of the notion that America is an idea – anybody can walk across the border and claim it.”

And what, one wonders, is wrong with such border crossings? Harris’ parents are border-crossers. As are the parents of Usha Vance. As is Melania Trump, even though hers was facilitated by an “Einstein Visa” (granted, no doubt, for her revolutionary discovery of the ability of nude modeling to distort space-time – or, at best, immigration policy). As are we all.

The problem is that we are not talking about “newcomers” but their descendants, which all newcomers eventually produce. Barack Obama, Kamala Harris, and even Vivek Ramaswamy are not tired, poor fresh-off-the-boat immigrants yearning to breathe free. They are American-born citizens. Yet this has not prevented them from being cast in the role of eternal interloper. Just ask Ann Coulter, who, despite admitting to sharing many of the same ideas about America as Ramaswamy, told him to his smug face that she could not vote for him “because you’re an Indian.” (I guess she won’t be voting for Harris either.)

Stockman cites conservative Claremont Institute fellow Carson Holloway as saying that stressing liberal ideas like “freedom and equality” has resulted in the country being “hijacked by novel and radical notions of freedom” that, she adds, has “left America adrift, full of young people who believe in gay marriage and an immigration policy that seeks low-wage workers rather than virtuous citizens.”

This is a lot to digest, all the more so because it is unpalatable pablum.

Fascism comes in installments, in incremental but escalating doses of intolerance. 9/11 stirred the pot. It birthed the Department of Homeland Security, which, in turn, has  produced the state-of-siege mindset that has led to threats like Project 2025, ‘which ironically calls for its dismantling and whose vision of an American “unified Reich” is the next logical goosestep in the America First playbook.

Like it or not, black people, particularly black women, have been holding America to its ideals. Women like Fani Willis, Letitia James, Tanya Chutkan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson are “creedalists,” not, as Trump habitually insists,“low IQ” cretins. Black women will not put up with Trump’s bullshit. Which might explain why the master of Fake News felt it necessary to deep fake a photo of himself surrounded by adoring black women.

It won’t work, though his assault on democracy might.

Notes

[1] I have chosen not to capitalize “black” until there is substantive reform of American police enforcement and the criminal justice system that results in the criminal prosecution of those who use excessive force and a systemic, long-term reduction in the number of police killings and brutalization of black people.

[2] Trump’s verbal assaults against black women have also led to physical assaults on them by his supporters at rallies, including incidents in 2016 ,2021, and harassment and death threats against Ruby Freeman, Shaye Moss, Tesha Green and other black female election officials.

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