BUZZ
ANALYSIS: Trump has ‘consistently scapegoated Black and Brown people to gain political capital’
A Princeton University professor claimed recently that President Trump’s “takeover” of Washington DC is a sign we’re “sliding towards fascism.”
Appearing on “Democracy Now!,” Professor Khalil Muhammad (pictured) said Trump “has consistently scapegoated Black and Brown people to either gain celebrity or political capital” and is “enacting an authoritarian agenda” in his second term as chief exec.
How original.
Muhammad, Princeton’s inaugural Professor of African American Studies and Public Affairs (and director of the Institutional Antiracism and Accountability Project), said Trump is using “militarization of law enforcement” to “either coerce or control scapegoated populations.”
He cited the National Guard in Los Angeles as another example.
“And I just want to remind everyone that the Trump administration elected in 2016 came in riding on a lie about American carnage in American cities,” Muhammad continued to hosts Juan González and Amy Goodman.
“This was also a period of dramatically declined crime rates and violent crime rates, in particular, across U.S. cities.”
Indeed, the segment claims the nation’s capital reached “a 30-year low in violent crime” this past January, a common refrain in the mainstream media the last week or so. (Of course, there is (a lot) more to the story.)
Muhammad said “what is consistent is Donald Trump’s use of racist rhetoric, racist ideas, and the use of policing to enact a domestic policy agenda.” In addition to the National Guard in LA, Muhammad said Trump wants to do the same in New York and Chicago — yet he pardoned numerous January 6 “insurrectionists.”
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The professor continued:
Donald Trump doesn’t care about any rule of law. What he cares about is flexing the power of the executive branch of government against named and so-called enemies. And as long as he can get away with it, without congressional oversight, and a claim of a popular mandate, which, of course, is not entirely true from the election, but nevertheless he is using the pretext of public opinion who elected him to get away with this. And it is a slide towards a fascism. All of this is textbook around the world. And we ought to be deeply concerned about the future of all of us with respect to the capacity of this particular president to use and threaten a coercive state violence against his so-called enemies.
When asked about Trump removing homeless encampments in DC, Muhammad invoked the situation in Gaza and the “criminalization of people who are victims of an unequal society […] that is, to treat them as if their poverty is a crime […] both in the U.S. and in Gaza and in other parts of the world.”
In response to Goodman’s query about veterans among DC’s homeless, Muhammad said Trump “ran by mocking veterans” and “consistently disrespects” the military.
Muhammad recently moved to Princeton from Harvard’s Kennedy School and specializes in “the broad intersections of systemic racism, structural inequality, and democracy in U.S. History,” according to his faculty page.
During the president’s first term, Muhammad claimed Trump was a “really big part of the problem” regarding whites calling the police on black people for “insignificant reasons.”
The professor also said Trump ran as “a law-and-order candidate in a country with a long history where the notion of using the police as the foot soldiers of controlling African-Americans.”
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IMAGE CAPTION & CREDIT: Professor Khalil Muhammad; Princeton University.
