What Happened to Trump Was Jacked Up, But Don’t Let That Distract From How Dangerous He Is to Black Folks

Everybody’s still shook after seeing video of former President Donald Trump becoming the victim of what the FBI is calling an assassination attempt. While lots of details are still unclear, politicians on both sides of the aisle have been calling for cooler heads in the midst of years of volatile rhetoric.That’s admirable, especially given the current political climate, but we shouldn’t forget that nothing’s really changed about the agenda of the right wing. Republicans still wish to roll back voting rights, they’re still determined to bleach away diversity initiatives anywhere they can and they still want to eliminate women’s reproductive rights.

Stephen Cheung, a Trump campaign spokesperson, told news website Axios in April that a new Trump administration intends to nix a number of President Joe Biden’s progressive policies.“As President Trump has said, all staff, offices, and initiatives connected to Biden’s un-American policy will be immediately terminated,” said Cheung. There is no indication that has changed since that interview.According to Axios, an organization called America First Legal, founded by former Trump aide Stephen Miller (who is on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s list of extremists), in February sued CBS and Paramount Global for discrimination against a white man who was a writer for the network’s show “Seal Team” in 2017.

The same month, the group sued the NFL over the “Rooney Rule,” which requires the league’s teams to interview at least two minority candidates for principal leadership positions. In 2021, the group backed a successful lawsuit against the Small Business Administration’s Restaurant Revitalization Fund in which three white restaurateurs claimed the program’s prioritizing of women and minority businesses was discriminatory.“This ruling is the first, but crucial, step towards ending government-sponsored racial discrimination,” said Miller at the time. Trump has pledged to “create a team to review and reverse actions under Biden’s “equity” agenda,” calling the concept of equity “Marxist.” Cheung parroted the sentiment to Axios: “President Trump is committed to weeding out discriminatory programs and racist ideology across the federal government.”This comes as recent focus of The Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025” continues to increase as the presidential campaign moves forward. Meanwhile, heralding of a bloodied Trump’s fist pump photo by conservative sycophants, who wasted no time in pointing the finger either at President Biden, or at the left wing in general, is also increasing.

This, despite investigators determining so far that the shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, acted alone and was a registered Republican (reports that he donated in 2021 to a Biden-supporting PAC seem dubious because he would have been 17 at the time).

The point is these folks are determined to achieve what they see as a Ayn Rand-esque utopia where the human rights achievements of the last century are erased and replaced by a religious fundamentalist theocracy run by Trump loyalists.

Right now, the only narrative is sympathy for Trump who was wounded in this fiasco, and it is warranted. To be clear, Trump certainly had an attempt made on his life which is bad enough. What’s worse is a man lost his life just for coming to the July 13 rally with his family – something he didn’t deserve – while another individual remains in critical condition.

However, that does not mean that anyone who opposes Trump’s agenda should change their minds. Project 2025 is VERY dangerous, and perhaps an existential threat. Trump’s own “Agenda 47” aligns with it and has the same implications. You can be sympathetic to Trump while being extremely unsympathetic to his politics.

Already it seems that something suspicious is happening that works in Trump’s favor. On Monday, federal judge Aileen Cannon, a Republican Trump appointee, dismissed the classified documents case against him, finding that the appointment of special counsel Jack Smith was unconstitutional. This gets rid of a serious legal hurdle for Trump, who had been accused of holding onto sensitive documents after leaving office, and then obstructing the government’s ability to get them back.

Moves like this will serve to empower Trump’s base and give them the confidence they seek as election season continues to heat up. The opposition now needs new, effective tools to push back. But the last attention Democrats have gotten in the political realm has not been positive — now there’s little attention at all.

With the Republican National Convention starting yesterday (July 15), the likelihood is that the far right will sing carols of Trump being a savior who has come to earth from Valhalla to vanquish their enemies, and they will use the attempt on his life as fuel. That means unless Trump himself finds a way to calm his base down, look for the rhetoric to become more heated. On Sunday night, President Biden appealed to the nation to “cool it down.” He basically said that we can agree to disagree without being disagreeable. It remains to be seen if that’s something we can all do.

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Madison J. Gray is a New York-based journalist. He blogs at starkravingmadison.com.