Caffeinated Politics

There is no way to consume this news without severe indigestion. In recent days we have read and heard about Donald Trump’s decision to nominate Paul Ingrassia to serve as special counsel of the United States, a role charged in part with safeguarding federal whistleblowers from retaliation. We also know that as Trump elevates confirmed racists, he has fired successful and resume-heavy Black people.

Politico reported that Ingrassia told other Republicans in a group chat that the Martin Luther King Jr holiday, which celebrates the civil rights icon, should be ended. He stated that that he had a “Nazi streak”.

“MLK Jr was the 1960s George Floyd and his ‘holiday’ should be ended and tossed into the seventh circle of hell where it belongs,” Ingrassia wrote in the messages from early 2024, Politico reports. He also wrote that holidays commemorating Black people, such as Black history month or Juneteenth, should all be “eviscerated”, though he used an Italian slur for Black people.

The dog whistles of vile hate and deep-seated racism from the Republican Party have given way to the fog horns that now even more correctly and sharply define their image. They no longer even try to explain away the unacceptable. There is no longer a basement too deep for them to step into. As a I write this coulomb, only four of the 53 Republican Senators have found their way to a microphone or a press office and denounced Ingrassia. To me, that is breath-taking. For those in the nation who still have a working conscience we are outraged that this man is still on the public payroll, though his nomination was withdrawn on Tuesday. Let us be totally clear from the start of this post. He was not nominated to be Special Counsel because of his keen mind or legal prowess. It was his overt and dark racism and severely flawed character that elevated him within this second Trump term.

Meanwhile, consider the people who are fired or never hired during this same period of time.

Mr. Trump’s highest-profile firing of a senior Black leader was in February, when he ousted Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., the second Black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the nation’s senior military official. Joint Chiefs chairmen traditionally remain in place as administrations change, regardless of the president’s party, and in 2020 Mr. Trump had nominated General Brown, a fighter pilot, to be the Air Force’s chief of staff. But Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had previously said that General Brown should be fired because of a “woke” focus on D.E.I. programs in the military and questioned whether he was promoted because of his race.

General Brown was replaced with a little-known Air Force general, Dan Caine.

Of the president’s 98 Senate-confirmed appointees to the administration’s most senior leadership roles in its first 200 days, ending on Aug. 7, only two, or 2 percent — Scott Turner, the secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and Earl G. Matthews, the Defense Department’s general counsel — are Black. Senate-confirmed appointees by race and ethnicity at the 200-day mark in presidential administrations.

The statistics were compiled for the Brookings Institution by Kathryn Dunn Tenpas, a senior fellow at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center who specializes in presidential personnel. The statistics track appointments to the 15 cabinet departments in the presidential line of succession: Treasury, Defense, Justice, Homeland Security, State, Education, Interior, Agriculture, Commerce, Labor, Energy, Health and Human Services, Transportation, Housing and Urban Development and Veterans Affairs.

“Trump seemed to be very proud to have ‘Blacks for Trump’ at all of his rallies and behind the podium, but not behind him in the cabinet meetings,” said Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, the president of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a think tank that tracks Black representation in government leadership, among other markers. The dearth of Black people at the top, he said, would result in “radical substantive policy changes” for African Americans.

What we are witnessing is not just one man’s vile racism, but a culture of contempt that has metastasized within the Trump White House. We are not talking about Ingrassia’s actions as mere lapses in judgment. They are overt declarations of hate. Additionally, these offensive thoughts were shared among Republican operatives, and then this putrid man was elevated as a nominee by Trump to lead a federal watchdog agency.

That he was nominated at all speaks volumes. The Trump administration did not stumble into this scandal but rather wholeheartedly and willfully cultivated the conditions for it. Ingrassia’s rhetoric mirrors the administration’s broader pattern which is clear to see. It includes the demonization of immigrants, the glorification of authoritarianism, and the erosion of civic norms. When hate becomes a credential on a resume, the rot is not marginal in this White House, but it is rather central to its ethos.

Donald Trump and his conservative male backers are once again self-defining themselves for the nation.