Ta-Nehisi Coates’ powerful new essay, “The First White President,” offers up an indictment of white America — and white punditry — that is more sweeping than it first appears. Coates’ argument is not just that Donald Trump’s ascent was fueled by the racism of much of his white electorate.
It’s also that Trump’s candidacy, election, and presidency, coming in the first election following two terms of the nation’s first black president, represent nothing less than an effort to eradicate the very fact that America elected a black president in the first place.
Coates argues that we must forthrightly confront the wretched reality that Trump won because he framed his candidacy, overtly, as a “negation” of the first black presidency — as a promise to cancel it as a kind of historical accident. Trump launched his rise with the “birther” charge that Barack Obama’s presidency was illegitimate and vowed to erase the Obama legacy, i.e., to obliterate all historical evidence of the first black president’s successes. Thus, Coates argues, Trump’s ascension constitutes at its core a reassertion of white supremacy as the rightful American order.
There is another claim embedded in that one that I want to try to say something about. Coates extensively challenges a noxious strain of punditry about Trump’s victory, and about how we should respond to it. And he deals it devastating blow.