How Trump's legacy will continue to hurt us, even after he's gone
By ignoring simpler health rules during a pandemic, filling courts with conservative judges, and preventing voters from speaking, Trump is building his political legacy
Just under a year before his second term in the White House ended, then President Barack Obama had nominated Myra Selby for a lifetime seat on the US Court of Appeals. Selby, who is black, never got a chance to start that job: Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell blocked her nomination, reserving it for Obama's successor.
After Donald Trump took office, he nominated Amy Coney Barrett, a law professor and former aide to Conservative judge Antonin Scalia, for that post. Barrett has been confirmed, and it is mainly for this reason that she is now replacing Ruth Bader Ginsburg in the Supreme Court.
It was with all-American symbolism that, a few days ago, we saw the coronation of Barrett by the Senate just as lines of black voters formed in Georgia on the first day of the presidential election. Plus, it was Monday, the anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in America. Both scenes had the appearance of a cancellation, a violation, a theft.
Brad Raffensberger, Georgia's secretary of state for the Republican party, last June called the electoral queues "unacceptable". In the meantime he seems to have accepted them without problems: ignoring the malfunctions of the new voting machines and other problems, he told an Atlanta TV station that "early voting in Georgia is having a record turnout, due to the enthusiasm and 'popular excitement for the elections ”and that“ we expect long queues: voters must be aware of all the possibilities available to them, which include three weeks for early voting and then voting on election day ”.
In a way, it's understandable that people are thrilled that they can finally vote to kick Trump out of the White House. I know because I am too. However, considering Barrett's recent appointment to the Supreme Court and the ongoing voter suppression efforts in many states, a narrative is forming around this election that is far too convenient and very dangerous.
There is a lot of talk about how voting can "save us". Through President Trump's fault, Covid-19 is scourging the United States, with an estimated 215,000 deaths from the virus to date, while the president continues to encourage people who think face masks - a simple and effective tool for limit transmission - is something dangerous or a limitation of personal freedom. The economy is sinking; the environment is being destroyed for profit; the administration is obsessed with torturing and deporting immigrants while ignoring the real risks of domestic terrorism because they are the same people who could vote for Trump. If this is where we are, another four years of this would be a cataclysm, in a literal sense.
So I am in favor of whatever it is that motivates people to vote. But there is not enough incense, or ballot papers, to cleanse "the soul of the nation". The stench left by the Trump presidency will remain even after he is gone. While the president has done damage to virtually all American citizens through the way he handled the pandemic, there is a category of citizens for whom this damage is much more obvious - those who are discriminated against for the color of their skin, for their gender and their sexual identity.
This goes far beyond Barrett's appointment, with his dangerous views, to the Supreme Court. Indeed, it is impossible to calculate the exact extent of the way the Trump administration has devastated America’s marginal communities. Not only have Trump and his party made incredible efforts at voter suppression, stuffed the federal courts with a large number of unskilled and ultra-conservative life-appointed judges, but there is no more talk about the pogroms organized by his administration. against immigrants, with and without documents, which include his travel bans, arrests and family separations that have caused drama and death.
And then, in addition to all this, there is obviously Covid-19. It is our national plague, but like many disasters that have hit the United States, it has hit hardest on Blacks, Hispanics, Latinos and natives. The disease has killed 1 in 1000 black people. It has the potential to kill 1 in 500 by the end of 2020.
The scars caused by the pandemic will remain with us for generations, and all thanks to Trump's incompetence. Perhaps if he had paid as much attention to the pandemic as he does to the question of maintaining white American political rule, a lot fewer people would have died. But obviously it's all a matter of priorities. From his point of view, he was in danger of having only these four years to fill the federal courts with his faithful ones. Plus this year there was also a census, so this was his best opportunity to maim the electorate.
A conservative 6-3 majority in the Supreme Court would be Trump's biggest contribution to white American dominance, but his manipulation of the census is also important. The Supreme Court was already hanging to the right, and last Tuesday ruled in his favor in the Ross v. National Urban League, allowing him to stop the census early during a pandemic. The president intended to terminate it on September 30, but a federal court had arranged for it to go on until Halloween. Several people involved in the operations have spoken out against Trump's decision, insisting that it is absolutely not possible to finish the counts by the date he proposed.
Trump and his Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross, on the other hand, say that without the deadline they would not be able to present the census results to the president by December 31 as the Constitution states. But it is impossible that they do not know what experts have been saying for months: interrupting the census will not only produce false data but will also have a discriminatory effect against people who are more difficult to count - the poor, the blacks, and so on. What Trump and his administration are actually doing is manipulating the shape that individual constituencies will have over the next 10 years, and thereby hitting the possibility for many communities to be represented.
So in many ways - our votes, our constituencies, the census, the courts - who knows how many of us will count for anything in the near future? If a person is undocumented, will she be intimidated into not filling out the census form? And if you fill it in, will you be counted?
The answer to these questions, if Joe Biden is elected president and the Democrats take control of Congress, cannot be evaded and hidden behind rhetoric and grand moral gestures. It takes an expansion of the Supreme Court and other courts in order to limit the damage already done, investigations and trials against those who have been responsible for all the unfair behavior - from a political and legal point of view - that has been committed by this administration.
While it continues to deny the existence of structural racism, in reality the Trump administration has struggled to change the structure of the racist country more than anyone else in recent years. And all to hold on to power, because Republicans - who are unable to speak truthfully to voters because they would not know how to sell them the plutocracy they support - know that they would not be able to retain their power in an increasingly different America. and further and further away from their dead ideas.
Trump and his party keep erasing and forgetting the kind of people who line up to vote early like in Georgia, these voters trying to do with their ballots what they have been called to do so many times in past. So many times they have been asked to save the United States, and there they are again. It hurts me to look at those lines, knowing that even if they succeed and get Biden elected, that result will be only the first step in a long rehabilitation process - and not the light at the end of the tunnel. I dream of a day when they can rest, but it still seems far away. They are not our saviors, but citizens who are asking their country for something that is nowhere near comparable to what their country has asked of them so far.
