Donald Trump’s superpower has long been brazenness. He says the quiet parts out loud, but not quite by accident. Instead he often strikes a tone that allows his cult followers to believe they’re in on the con. That said, I can’t help but feel his recent comments that he really doesn’t care about Americans’ economic suffering feels different. He may actually regret that.

It’s one thing to read his comment: “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody.” But I recommend watching the video. This isn’t Trump’s usual “ain’t I a stinker?” tone that allows his followers to take the ugly things he says less than seriously. He came across as genuinely aggrieved that anyone would waste his time by asking him about the wellbeing of the people who voted for him. His disinhibition really seems to be getting worse. 

The GOP rush to redistrict in defiance of all law and precedent is shocking in its brazen hostility to democracy — but also in its overt racism. Republican politicians have been crowing about how they’re getting rid of “race hustlers” — a longtime dog-whistle for any and all Black politicians — and reportedly dismissing their Black colleagues with words like “boy” and “shut up.” 

It’s may be more comfortable for the mainstream press to follow the Supreme Court’s false assumption that disenfranchising Black voters is merely a partisan concern, an unfortunate side effect of Republican power-grabbing. But all this should remind us that racism predates and predicts the partisan conflict. We’re not talking about accidental or incidental racism. Most white people are Republicans because they are racist. 

Having grown up with these kinds of people, I can tell you it’s personal for many of these white Republican legislators. They resent having to work with Black politicians and can’t wait to get rid of them. It’s obvious from their recent public behavior.

This also goes back to how furious Republican voters and politicians still are that Barack Obama was elected president, not just once but twice. I don’t know that the rest of us will ever understand how much that broke the brains of people who had sincerely invested much of their egos and identities in white supremacy. 

For mediocre people, the myth that simply being white confers inherent superiority is a cheap way to feel good about themselves. Seeing people of color excel, especially in national politics, destroys that delusion. That’s why they’re losing it. Too many of them have wasted their lives being lazy and incurious, confident that whiteness would support their delusions about being smarter and better. Trump, who is always yelling about Black people being “low IQ” and “stupid,” is the perfect avatar for these people, which is a big reason they stick to him no matter what. 

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I enjoyed reading my colleague Sophia Tesfaye’s report on Justice Neil Gorsuch’s disaster of a book tour, at least partly for sheer schadenfreude reasons. His dumb book is another iteration of the phony “originalism” pretext conservatives have constructed to justify their belief that the government should side with racists, polluters and predatory capitalists over ordinary people. But Gorsuch isn’t being rejected just because he’s boring. 

No, it’s more because the right is really over wearing fig leaves. They no longer have the patience for elaborate ruses that reframe reactionary sentiment as adherence to some pure version of the rule of law. As Sophia details, Gorsuch is getting a negative reaction because he continues to insist that we’re a “creedal nation” built on laws and tradition, and not a white Christian ethnostate. Whereas the MAGA movement has moved well beyond that, into the view that Americans who don’t belong to their tribe — in other words, the majority — are not legitimate citizens. 

The irony here is that no matter what lies he tells himself, Gorsuch’s votes on the Supreme Court have undermined the creedal nation he claims to care about. Instead, he’s largely been the best friend of white supremacy, barring a few welcome ventures into protecting the rights of Native Americans. He voted with the conservative majority to largely strike down the Voting Rights Act, sending a message that Black voters don’t have the same right to choose their political representatives that white conservatives do.

To be clear, I’m not saying it’s great that conservative media is getting closer to admitting they believe that only white people (and really, only conservative white Christians) should be citizens. It was easier to keep them in line when they had to pretend they weren’t racist. But watching Gorsuch reap the radicalism he helped to sow is darkly funny. I highly recommend Sophia’s column. 

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