Tuesday, March 26, 2019 | 2 a.m.
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The Mueller Report has landed ... with a thud. According to summary findings released by Attorney General William Barr, special counsel Robert Mueller’s nearly two-year-long investigation found no conspiracy between Donald Trump and his associates and Russia. The report seems to support Trump’s mantra: No collusion. Trump will no doubt use these findings as a cudgel against future inquiries, regardless of merit.
The report did not, however, exonerate Trump of obstruction of justice. I submit that we witnessed that Trump obstructed justice in open view, from the White House and on social media.
And while Trump waged a two-year battle of slander and misinformation to defame the Mueller investigation, the majority of Democratic leadership did nothing to make the case that he had already reached the threshold of accountability, even without the report. Instead, they put too many eggs in the Mueller basket, and allowed Trump to move the goal posts. Indeed, now the goal posts are permanently affixed to skates.
The best case against Trump and the age of Trumpism has always been, and remains, the moral case. Criminality is only one facet of that, although it is the one that the courts and Congress can use to punish him.
As for the people, the voters, it is the moral abomination of having a racist, sexist, child-caging, family-separating, Muslim-hating transphobe as president that must remain front and center. That is the only way to move beyond Trump in 2020.
The Mueller report is a cautionary tale. There are no magic bullets, no devastating facts, no pivotal events that can undo what Trump has wrought. Trumpism is bigger than Trump. It is a rebranding of a consistent and increasingly resurgent strand of white American anxiety about primacy, privilege and displacement.
The very symbols of Trumpism — the MAGA hats, the wall, etc. — are more than merely physical objects. They have long since transcended their original meaning and purpose. They are now emblems. They are now the new iconography of white supremacy, white nationalist defiance and white cultural defense.
They are a form of white pride credentialing.
In much the same way that the Confederate flag became a white supremacist signaling device, wearing the MAGA hat and self-identifying as a “Trump supporter” now serves the same purpose.
The symbols are tangentially connected to Trump, but they also transcend him. They are a way of cloaking racial hostility in the presentable form of politics.
This isn’t restricted to America. Much of the West is now in the grips of rising nationalism, in general, and white nationalism, in particular.
Cultural forces are being marshaled against waves of immigrants from the South — primarily from Latin America in the United States and from Africa and the Middle East in Europe.
In this way, nationalism has taken on an international solidarity. It is a multinational white tribalism on display, and what is being exposed will not easily be squelched or beaten back.
In America, this recent rise of white nationalism follows a historical pattern: Whenever black people make progress, white people feel threatened and respond forcefully.
Emancipation and the Civil War gave rise to the Ku Klux Klan, which formed just months after the war ended. The Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education, striking down racial segregation in schools, gave rise to the white supremacist Citizens’ Councils. The election of the first black president gave rise to the Tea Party, which was formed soon after Barack Obama was sworn in.
Trump took the anti-Obama energy the Tea Party had stirred and fashioned it into something more dangerous: a theology whose singular principle was white power, the power of white people to defend a country they believe they built and own, and the power of white people to excel even when they’re awful.
Now, immigrants have become the “rising threat” that was once ascribed solely to black people. White people used the threat of “Negro domination” to call state constitutional conventions to write white supremacy into the constitutions of Southern states.
Today, the “threat” is a majority-minority country, and there is a move underway to get states to sign on to force a convention for the U.S. Constitution.
As was reported on Bill Moyer’s website in 2017:
“A constitutional convention, something thought impossible not long ago, is looking increasingly likely. Under Article V of the U.S. Constitution, if 34 state legislatures ‘issue a call’ for a constitutional convention, Congress must convene one. By some counts, the right wing only needs six more states. Once called, delegates can propose and vote on changes and new amendments to the U.S. Constitution, which, if approved, are currently required to be ratified by 38 states.”
As the report points out, “once a convention is underway, all bets are off.” Anything can happen.
What we are living through is not a battle but a war. It is far bigger and far more dangerous than Trump. And we will be engaged in the fight long after Trump has vanished, or has been vanquished.
Charles Blow is a columnist for The New York Times.
