The Feedback Loop of Donald Trump's Personal Attacks
In a presidency defined more by its unrestrained racial acrimony than its respect for the office, Donald Trump’s latest offense will likely register as little more than a footnote. During a ceremony on Monday honoring Navajo Code Talkers from World War II, Trump set his sights on Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who has claimed to be part Native American. “We have a representative in Congress who they say was here a long time ago,” he jeered. “They call her Pocahontas.”
In an interview on MSNBC, the Massachusetts senator was quick to classify Trump’s remark as a “racial slur,” saying he “does this over and over thinking somehow he’s going to shut me up with it.” With expected exasperation, the press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders pushed back in a briefing, suggesting Sen. Warren was “lying about her heritage to advance her career.” The slight, though, was no minor aberration. Just last week Trump referred to LaVar Ball as “a poor man’s version of Don King, but without the hair.” (Ball’s son plays basketball for UCLA and, along with teammates, was detained in China for shoplifting; Trump helped to broker their release and did not feel the elder Ball was grateful enough for his efforts.) In the last two months alone, he’s taken jabs at Florida Rep. Frederica Wilson, personally called for the firing of ESPN anchor Jemele Hill, and bullied San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz amidst the devastation stewed by Hurricane Maria. “The danger of sympathizing with the stranger,” Toni Morrison reminds us, “is the possibility of becoming the stranger.” In tone and texture, Trump refuses to illuminate the paths between us.
Trump is a proficient agitator in the inventiveness of casual bigotry, and his distaste for people who don’t look like him, and those who don’t share equivalent ideologies, is weaponized in hulking doses. (After all, his political career began with a racist “birther” witch hunt against Barack Obama, obsessively disputing the president’s citizenry.) For him, these attacks function triply: as reprimand, distraction, and entertainment. For others, who stand outside his view, the hate never ceases—it twists and snakes and loops across our feeds, unfailingly and urgently, a daily broadcast of contempt.
One of the more astonishing realities of modernism is how the bigotries we carry with us now permeate the world in new ways. The existence of such malice is not surprising—racism has just about always been a fact of American life—as much as the frequency with which its venom leaks into popular discourse via social media and a 24-hour news cycle. The sympathies Trump afforded white supremacists in the haze of Charlottesville coiled across TV screens and Instagram feeds and group texts for weeks. One remark is usurped by another, then another, and another. The loop never ends; the feed never shuts off; it merely intensifies, catalyzed by a slogan-drunk MAGA movement and the permissiveness of a desperate Congress.
Arbiters of difference—be it race, class, or gender—only truly exist as tools of dominance. In labeling Rep. Wilson as “wacky” or mocking Sen. Warren’s indigenous ancestry, or by proclaiming that confederate statutes are part of America, thus valorizing the history of racial persecution they represent, Trump delineates the parameters of who does and doesn’t belong. The subtext of his convulsive rhetoric is one of subjectivity and power, a narrative of dislocation, one that determines how non-whites should be regarded in the public imagination. His comments can sometimes seem casual and ill considered, at other times methodically planned out or intentionally hurtful. But they are constant, and they are always remorseless—the feed broadcasts in a nonstop loop.
We watch and listen. Press conferences become nerve centers; Twitter responses, town halls. We reply, comment, and record en masse because modern living requires our perpetual participation—in the real world as well as the one we’ve created online. This exchange becomes a kind of binge in which we are both complicit and trapped. We do this, again and again, hoping the feed might jell and slow, but it never quite happens. It persists—stubbornly, unforgivingly.
In recent months, relatives who lived through the political malevolence of Nixon and Reagan have told me that "we’ve been here before." They’ve repeated it, almost like a mantra, but I’m beginning to think that it’s neither the talisman nor the truism they yearn for it to be. We're living in a time that is singular and vast, a "here" that often feels impassable.
The paradox of the loop, however, is that it also gives rise to disparate narratives, ones that rattle with comparable force. On Monday, Trump’s disrespect unfolded alongside the news of Prince Harry’s engagement to actress Meghan Markle, a black woman. Markle’s imminent entry into the Royal Family was met with cheers and testimonies that, yes, her black aunties would in fact be in full, majestic regalia at the wedding. All of it—the news, the discussion, all centered on the image of a black princess in the English monarchy—rang out like a negation to the world Trump would likely see built. Perhaps in increasing the amplitude and frequency of this particular feedback, our loop can destabilize Trump’s own, standing as its outmoded fearmongering crumbles into the Potomac.
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