I wouldn’t call it a game, because there’s nothing fun about it. So let’s call it a thought experiment. I’ll ask you to imagine the response if the 44th president had done something that paralleled, however roughly, what the 45th president—the one who lost the popular vote and only got elected because the Electoral College denied the will of the voters—did this week.
To remind you, Donald Trump retweeted three videos initially posted by Jayda Fransen, the deputy leader of a fascist, ultranationalist, Islamophobic political party called Britain First. Fransen is currently awaiting trial on two separate charges, one of which was for religiously motivated harassment. These raw videos showed graphic incidents of violence purportedly being committed by Muslims. David Duke reacted to the retweet as follows: “Thank God for Trump! That's why we love him!” A pretty good rule is that if David Duke loves something you did, you’re probably not on the side of the angels.
The three videos were entitled, respectively: “Muslim migrant beats up Dutch boy on crutches!” “Muslim Destroys a Statue of Virgin Mary!” and “Islamist mob pushes teenage boy off roof and beats him to death!” In reality, the “migrant” in the first video was, according to Dutch officials, “born and raised in the Netherlands,” and spoke Dutch in the video. Furthermore, there is no evidence in the video that the aggressor is Muslim, and officials have not released any information to that regard. It’s purely fake news. Finally, the perpetrator was arrested and convicted for his crime.
As for the other two videos, the New York Times analysis concluded that they “offer no clear explanation of what is happening in front of the camera,” and “lack context about what is happening.” The Trump White House admitted that “whether it’s a real video” is essentially irrelevant. The end justifies the means.
These videos have one purpose: to inflame anger and hatred toward Muslims. Trump retweeting them has that same purpose, along with a larger political one: to feed red meat to his base while distracting them from the fact that he’s taking money from the middle class to give tax cuts to millionaires.
Now let’s perform our thought experiment. First, let’s make clear that no other person who has held the office of the presidency in recent decades would have done as despicable a deed as Trump did here. Speaking just about the post-9/11 world, George W. Bush—whose foreign policy failings alone place him at the bottom of the list of presidents—took care to speak positively about Muslims as a group and tamp down rather than whip up hate against them. Barack Obama would be among the last people in the world who’d even consider doing what Trump did. Rather than tar all Muslims with the crimes of a few, here’s what Obama said at a Baltimore mosque in 2016:
Here at this mosque, and across our country and around the world, Muslim leaders are roundly and repeatedly and consistently condemning terrorism. And around the globe, Muslims who’ve dared to speak out have often been targeted and even killed. So those voices are there; we just have to amplify them more.[snip] If you’re ever wondering whether you fit in here, let me say it as clearly as I can, as president of the United States: You fit in here — right here. You’re right where you belong. You’re part of America, too.You’re not Muslim or American. You’re Muslim and American.
Even though it would never happen, now let’s game out an opposite-world scenario where Obama did something truly vile and Trump-like.
Let’s pretend Obama retweeted or in some other way publicly endorsed a propaganda video put out by a group as extreme as the fascist Britain First. How about a group called the “New Black Panther Party.” The NBPP—which has no connection to the Black Panther Party of the 1960s and has been denounced by former original Black Panthers for inciting hatred toward whites—has been labeled a hate group by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and the Anti-Defamation League. The Southern Poverty Law Center described the NBPP as “a virulently racist and anti-Semitic organization whose leaders have encouraged violence against whites, Jews and law enforcement officers.”
This would never happen, of course, but imagine if, in an alternate universe, Bizarro Obama did retweet a video that depicted something really outrageous, like false images of cops lining young black men up against a wall and murdering them execution-style. Bear in mind that in the actual universe we live in, the Trump FBI recently issued a report titled "Black Identity Extremists Likely Motivated to Target Law Enforcement Officers”—even though the FBI director couldn’t name an actual, existing group that fit that description, and admitted that the definition itself reflects a "phantom menace that remains unresolved."
I was going to start by asking you to think about how the right-wing would respond to Obama in this imagined scenario, but instead let’s talk first about how liberals would respond. Liberals would abandon him completely, wholly, and immediately, because our commitment to equality, justice, and truth is what makes us liberals to begin with. We wouldn’t even give the right-wing a chance to react before we did that. As for the right, well, you know what they’d do publicly. Hell, they denounced Obama regularly as a divisive race-baiter anyway, despite the fact that no public figure in our time advocated more forcefully and eloquently for the strengthening of bonds across lines of race in our country.
Privately, conservatives would rub their hands together with glee because the more hate there is—the more divided and alienated whites and blacks are from one another—the easier it is for them to do what they really want to do on the economic front. That’s as true for Trump as it is for Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan—whatever public misgivings they might express about Trump’s rhetoric.
Back to the real world, the one where the president of the United States acts like the love-child of George C. Wallace and Alex Jones. By retweeting these false, hateful videos, Trump has materially harmed American interests. The State Department actually warned the White House that they feared a repeat of September 2012, when violence erupted at protests at U.S. embassies throughout the Muslim world after another anti-Muslim video appeared on the internet—and that video was condemned rather than endorsed by the U.S. government. One of those protests led to the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi. Trump is just lucky nothing like that has happened again to this point.
On another front, while Trump was tweeting, Egypt and Russia sealed a pact that would give Putin’s air force permission to use Egyptian air space and Egyptian bases to land, refuel, whatever. Here’s the upshot, one that makes clear what a sucker Trump is being played for:
If finalized, the agreement would give Russia its deepest presence in Egypt since 1973, when Cairo expelled the military of the Soviet Union and instead became Washington’s closest Arab ally.The United States has provided Egypt more than $70 billion in aid in the four decades since, at a rate of more than $1.3 billion a year in recent years. The cost is often justified in part by the argument that it secures the use of Egypt’s airspace and bases for the American military.
Finally, we can compare the real Obama and the real Trump on another matter that took place this week. After an undocumented immigrant was acquitted of the murder of Kathryn Steinle—a case Trump repeatedly used during the campaign and since to gin up hatred of Latinos and immigrants—he called it a “disgraceful verdict” and a “complete travesty of justice.”
Contrast that to Obama’s reaction to the cases where unarmed black men were killed, and their killers walked free. For example, after George Zimmerman was found not guilty of killing Trayvon Martin, President Obama stated: “The judge conducted the trial in a professional manner. The prosecution and the defense made their arguments. The juries were properly instructed that in a case such as this reasonable doubt was relevant, and they rendered a verdict. And once the jury has spoken, that's how our system works.” That’s how a president is supposed to react after a verdict is announced in a sensitive, high-profile case.
Barack Obama believes that America succeeds when we come together around a shared vision of justice, fairness, democracy, and equality. Donald Trump believes that he succeeds—and that’s all he really cares about—when Americans are at each other’s throats. Americans have to decide what we believe.