In Plain Sight: The Evidence of Things Seen
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
“You don’t have to ask me how someone is. You can see how they are by what they say and the comments they make.”
—Kara Young, biracial former girlfriend of Donald Trump
“Beat them up, not once but repeatedly, beat them up so it hurts so badly, until it’s unbearable.”
—Benjamin Netanyahu on how to deal with Palestinians.
“What has happened in Gaza over the past nine months is devastating. We cannot look away in the face of these tragedies. We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering. And I will not be silent.”
Americans live in a state of denial. We reject the evidence of our senses, even when it is screamed at us clearly and unambiguously and paraded starkly naked before us. We bow to the deceit and manipulation of the wealthy and powerful, turning off our critical thinking and recalibrating our moral compass, all the while avoiding the truth about what we have become and what this change says about us. Not only does this betrayal of conviction impact equity and democracy at home, it also affects those living abroad whose lives are devastated by its dehumanizing and destructive consequences and the paralysis of those who fail to challenge it.
Donald Trump notoriously boasted that he could shoot someone in public view and not lose any voters. While his criminal acts have so far not included homicide, ironically, there is some truth to this statement from the self-professed “brilliant weaver” of towering tales.
Every day, in every way, Trump tells us who he is — and gets away with it. Whatever skeletons he kept in his closet have largely been exposed. We know his playbook, which Trump returns to with the feverish regularity of an obsessive-compulsive. However, it appears he has caught the corporate media off guard. Recently, it has been sounding the alarm over Trump’s insistence that the 2024 election is being rigged against him. However, he began beating that drum as early as the 2016 election, when he declared he would accept the results only if he won. Sadly, he did. Now, eight years later, after rejecting the results of the 2020 election, he repeats the claim as he runs in another election. Though newsworthy, there is nothing new here.
Another chapter in Trump’s voluminous playbook is birtherism. Given Kamala Harris’ melanated ancestry, did anyone doubt that Trump would resuscitate this old canard once she declared her candidacy? When racism was on the fringe, people believed it could be contained, but the fringe has moved closer to the center. What was once the Tea Party has hulked into MAGA and taken over the Republican Party. Conservative political organizations like the Heritage Foundation and the National Federation of Republican Assemblies (NFRA) make no attempt to conceal their racism, which they would like to see elevated to national policy.
Setting its sights on Harris, the NFRA has taken Trump’s birtherism a step further, claiming, based on its “originalist” (read bullshit) interpretation of Article II, Section 1, Clause 5 of the Constitution, that even though she was born in America, Harris is ineligible for president because her parents were not naturalized citizens at the time of her birth. (This would also apply to Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy, no doubt to the orgasmic delight of Ann Coulter.) Not content with this vile sophistry, the NFRA goes so far as to quote the 1857 Supreme Court Dred Scott ruling, claiming that Harris cannot be a U.S. citizen because her ancestors were enslaved blacks. (Aside from the fact that the NFRA’s interpretation of the article is flagrantly incorrect and ignores the fact that the 13th and 14th Amendments overturned the ruling, one might wonder why the organization chose not to play this trump card when Harris became vice president four years earlier, as the position also requires natural-born citizenship.)
The racist xenophobia expressed here is as obvious as it is hurtful. Imagine growing up as a black and brown child in America only to realize that your country is just not that into you and where racial progress is measured in terms of the evolution of racial epithets—from calling black people “niggers” to “rebranding them “DEI hires.” Then again, in the eyes of NFRA, it is not their country and never will be.
This is, after all, MAGA’s raison d’être—to time-slip the nation back to an age when America was great and, as Chief Justice Roger Taney wrote in the Dred Scott decision, blacks had “no rights which the white man is bound to respect.” These are the same fragile white souls who ban teaching unbowdlerized American history in classrooms because they fear it will damage the self-esteem of white children. No wonder Trump and the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 want to abolish the Department of Education to perhaps replace it with the Department of Truth Social.
Despite these threats to governance and the psychological well-being of the people of color these attacks target, the media spends too much time debunking Trump’s distractions. Just when you think the media might catch up, Trump ejects some chaff to throw them off his trail. Given Trump’s history of bragging about his enormous ratings and the size of his rallies after Biden’s inauguration, was it really news that Trump would display a chronic case of Crowd Envy? We already knew Trump is a size queen, although he apparently does not measure up to his own exacting standards, which may account for his many insecurities.
Speaking of chaff, Trump would also have us believe he is a “stable genius” who knows more than anyone about everything and everyone. He knows more about military strategy, taxes, construction, campaign financing, infrastructure, ISIS, the environment, drones, technology, trucks, Facebook, the courts, steelworkers, the Kurds, trade, nuclear weapons, lawsuits, debt, politicians, and even the circumstances of Barack Obama’s birth. He is an expert not only on racial determination but also on assigning qualities appropriate to each race. As he testified in 1993 before a congressional hearing on Native American gambling, Trump knows what “Indians look like,” going so far as to call Connecticut’s Mashantucket Pequot, a tribal nation with multiracial ancestry, whom he was engaged in one of many casino gaming disputes he had with Native Americans, “the Michael Jordan Indians,” and to dismiss their indigenous roots.
Some thirty years later, Trump now assures us that he knows who is East Indian. Indeed, it wasn’t all that long ago that Trump, a connoisseur of the finer aspects of biracialism, could discern which attributes biracials inherited from each parent. In her 1997 book Confidence Man, Maggie Haberman details how Trump claimed that his biracial model girlfriend at the time, Kara Young, inherited her beauty from her black mother and her intelligence from her white father.Apparently, “low IQ,” biracial Harris —who Trump has admitted is “beautiful” like his plagiarizing spouse, though not “better-looking” than The Don himself—is also intellectually challenged, presumably due to her lack of superior white genes.
The reality is Trump’s ability to read race and ethnicity like tea leaves is as reliable as his exceptional memory: He once claimed to have received a copy of Mein Kampf from a “Jewish friend,” although it turns out the book was a collection of Hitler speeches, and the friend was not Jewish.
When matters turn contentious, under pressure, Trump’s omniscience is superseded by his self-avowed ignorance, and he suddenly transforms into an orange-skinned, blue-suited Sgt. Schultz. When asked, he knows nothing about David Duke, the Proud Boys, Nick Fuentes, Lev Parnas, Stormy Daniels, E. Jean Carroll, any of the 18 women who have accused him of sexual assault, Mein Kampf and its 21st-century sequel Project 2025, and who shot the disgraceful Arlington National Cemetery campaign video and posted it to TikTok.
Like his endless litany of lies and unchecked racism and sexism, Trump’s cognitive decline is in full view to even the most myopic of political observers. Even so, corporate media seems to be pulling its punches, perhaps because, like the assaulted Arlington employee, it fears possible future retaliation should he win in November.
Again, none of this is a state secret. Trump has not attempted to conceal his authoritarian plans for the nation, even announcing that he would “terminate parts of the Constitution,” wants to be “dictator” (albeit for “only one day”), and will “fix” things so that no one will “have to vote again.” These statements cannot be easily dismissed as mere braggadocio and jokes.
With every delusional, gaslit utterance, Trump proves himself mentally and emotionally unstable, someone who not only should not have access to the nuclear codes but, given his interminable, vindictive, fact-free rants, to the media, old and new. Unfortunately, even though the proverbial Framers of the Constitution anticipated the need to remove presidents from office if they were unable to carry out their duties, they failed to include a constitutional provision that would have kept demented candidates out of the White House. In an ideal world, where voters can distinguish fantasy from reality and choose leaders who share that ability, this would not be necessary. That, however, is not the world we live in.
True, as Politico’s Alexander Thompson has suggested, America may have already unknowingly elected mentally ill presidents. Indeed, not only are there sufficient grounds to believe, according to Bandy X. Lee and 36 other psychiatrists and mental health professionals, that Trump was cognitively impaired during his first (and hopefully only) term in office, but also that his condition has progressively deteriorated since leaving office. Yet despite these concerns, he is the Republican nominee, and polls show him virtually neck-and-neck with his Democratic rival. Long gone are the days when an enthused howl could end your political career. Trump, however, is free to grunt and groan and produce whatever bizarre, cacophonous noises he pleases and remain the darling (at least publicly) of the GOP and about a third of the country.
Despite the transparency of Trump’s behavioral quirks and seditious aspirations, he has yet to face any consequences. Impeachments have come and gone, as have attempts to remove him from the ballot in several states; trials pend indefinitely. Yet through all of this, the Felon of Fifth Avenue not only remains at large but is free to run for president in a race that remains obscenely close for a country that ostensibly embraces the rule of law and struggles to judge people by the content of their character and not the orange of their skin. Adding to these ironies is the possibility that, ignoring the dangers looming before them, like Germans in 1933, Americans may ultimately vote to end our democracy. Germany’s decision invited genocide. In America, a genocide precedes it, though its victims are located oceans away.The death of American democracy may be the price Americans pay for their myopia. But another group of people is already paying an existential price for our folly.
A critique of Israeli policy may seem out of place in an anti-Trump polemic. Still, the core problems remain fundamentally the same: American regard for both Trump and Israel tends to deny the evidence of things heard, seen, and performed, often ad nauseam. Despite the overwhelming evidence of corruption and atrocity, despite statement after statement from Israeli officials dehumanizing Palestinians, despite report after report of war crimes and human rights violations, including the rape and torture of Palestinian detainees and the detention and mistreatment of thousands in the West Bank and Gaza, despite the evidence of things not only seen but endlessly reiterated, the American-supported genocide in Gaza continues unabated in plain sight.
Those Americans who buck this trend are doxxed, expelled from universities, and fired. Those who call out Trump’s Bigly Lies and stand against him face a similar fate should he win in November and exact his promised retribution.
Almost a year has passed since Hamas’ terrorist attack on Israel that has left some 1,200 Israelis dead, resulted in the deaths of 35 hostages, and incurred the genocidal wrath of Israel that has led to the slaughter of over 40,000 Palestinians, the destruction of Gaza, the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Gazans, famine, and the outbreak of polio. Even without daily graphic reminders of the carnage, the intent of Israeli leaders is clear. From Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on down, they have repeatedly and unequivocally expressed their hatred for Palestinians and their plans for Gaza and the West Bank, all while making no secret of their opposition to the establishment of a Palestinian state and exposing American support for a two-state solution as a hollow ruse, a piece of performative art worthy of a Parisian mime. They know that America, which has proven itself unable even to persuade Israel to commit to a ceasefire, will do little to pressure its “most important ally in the Middle East” to accept a plan that might create such a state.
U.S. leaders, including Harris, have declared their unconditional commitment to the existence of the Israeli ethnostate; their support for a Palestinian state has been more equivocal, limited to an idea, not the creation of an actual entity. For all the much-ballyhooed hope, joy, and diversity conspicuously displayed at the DNC convention in Chicago, the faces of Palestinian American families affected by the genocide in Gaza were nowhere to be seen, their voices deliberately silenced. Their absence from the stage is odd given the fact that, as Ta-Nehisi Coates points out, Chicago is home to more Palestinian Americans than any city in the country. Yet despite sending 29 uncommitted delegates to the convention and touting the party’s diversity, organizers refused to give them a speaking platform on stage, effectively gagging them, apparently, for fear that to do so would cast a pall on the feel-good optics of party joy and unity. No one wants a Debbie Downer to spoil all the fun, particularly if, unmuzzled, Debbie’s pro-Palestinian, pro-ceasefire, anti-genocide voice prompts pro-Israel donors to withhold their contributions. (God forbid that the Harris go the way of Liz Magill, Claudine Gay, and Minouche Shafik.) American diversity is its strength so long as Palestinian Americans are excluded and American complicity in genocide remains comfortably out of sight.
Harris has called the scale of suffering in Gaza “heartbreaking,” while failing to acknowledge the role America’s moral abrogation has played in shattering those hearts and much, much more. “So many innocent lives lost, desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety,” she laments, failing publicly to recognize that those hungry innocents are fleeing bombs made in the U.S.A. and an IDF funded by American taxpayers, including Palestinian Americans, a fact that should ensure their right to voice their concerns about the suffering in a public forum that putatively celebrates representative democracy. In 2023, speaking at a White House ceremony for the advancement of economic and educational opportunities for Hispanic Americans, Harris stated, “None of us just live in a silo. Everything is in context.” Sadly, the DNC chose to deliberately obscure some contexts and silence those who would provide them.
But then, what did one expect? The former president uses “Palestinian” as a racist slur against his political enemies. White House officials mourn the deaths of innocent Israelis but portray the deaths of innocent Palestinians, when they are recognized at all, as the inevitable price of war, and 100 days into the conflict, express America’s determination to have Israeli hostages returned to their families but say nothing specifically about the 24,000 Palestinian lives taken at that point in the conflict. Where are the congressional hearings to parse these statements, preserve the safety of Palestinian Americans, and ensure the rights of peaceful pro-Palestinian protesters?
It speaks volumes when it takes the eradication of nearly 2% of the population in Gaza for President Biden to finally admit that “Those protesters out in the street, they have a point. A lot of innocent people are being killed on both sides.” Why is it that it took some ten months for him to come to this realization? Although some have welcomed this statement, woefully belated as it is, it fails to acknowledge the obscene disproportionality of the killing and suffering.
In America, as in Israel, Palestinian lives don’t matter. The pain of Palestinian Americans who have lost family, relatives, and loved ones in the conflict, the plight of hundreds of thousands of Gazan refugees, and the rape, torture, and death of Palestinian detainees held in Israeli detention centers escapes the notice of mainstream media and mainstreamed politicians, revealing once again that Palestinian lives are inconsequential.
Israeli leaders rain dehumanizing racist rhetoric and lethal ordnance upon Palestinians. Still, they are not held responsible for their actions because doing so would lead to accusations of antisemitism, just as criticizing Trump and his cult for their racism and sexism is cynically framed as anti-white misandry.
In America, even if Trump loses in November, the dogs have been let loose; the damage already has been done, setting the stage for another January 6 and, perhaps, far worse. In Gaza, even if a ceasefire is eventually declared, its pulverized shell, the benighted product of moral indifference and political self-servitude, will remain, a shell-shocked elegy to the dead whose exact numbers have yet to be determined and may never be. In both cases, one did not have to be Cassandra to see what was coming, if only because it was already in plain sight.
Note
[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.
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