Jack Wellborn

One aspect of this last campaign that puzzled me was Trump’s 2020 slogan: “Keep America Great”. How could this be the slogan of an impeached president in the middle of a grossly mishandled and devastating pandemic?

Here’s the thing though. Trying to make sense of modern Republicans while assuming rationality is a fools game. Trump voters aren’t rational. They are racist. Take Trump’s first campaign slogan and how quickly his sycophants claimed its victory. To them, Trump made America great the moment a white man defeated a woman to replace a black man in office. Everything else was gravy.

“Keep America Great” only makes sense if a) you are a racist, b) “great” means “white”.

I don’t think I am the only one who has struggled to understand the movement that ultimately led to Trump’s election. The media has been unable to put their finger on the seemingly elusive motivations of what has undoubtedly been the dominant party in American politics my whole life. We all understood racists voted Republican and that Republican candidates catered to racists, and as ugly as that was, that was in the background. We didn’t want to acknowledge the even uglier truth that racism was the driving force.

So rather than address it head on, we did what anyone does when trying rationalize something irrational. We talked in circles. Republicans care about small government. No. Republicans are deficit hawks? Not that either. Republicans about personal freedom. Not really. We were afraid to see the racism so we did all this work twisting ourselves in knots trying to find reasonable policy where there was none.

All that did was benefit the racists.

This next decade will continue to be the biggest test of America’s democracy, and I’m not wasting any more energy trying to rationalize the acts of racists. Will you?