Woody Guthrie wrote these words for an unrecorded song about Donald Trump’s father, Fred:
I suppose
Old Man Trump knows
Just how much
Racial Hate
he stirred up
In the bloodpot of human hearts
When he drawed
That color line
Here at his
Eighteen hundred family project
As Trump is set to romp tonight in the Iowa Caucus, it’s worth remembering he was raised by a racist developer who made his fortune with federal cash — while ignoring the anti-discrimination law that came with it. When the feds sued father and son, Fred thumbed his nose at them and hired Roy Cohn, a lawyer “famous among lawyers for winning cases by delays, evasions, and lies.” Cohn got a favorable settlement for the Trumps and became Donald’s mentor, teaching him to do whatever it takes to win.
The Guthrie song cuts to the heart of Trump family racism. The backstory is in this 2020 Washington Post story:
The Trump development was called Beach Haven, a public-housing project for veterans built with federal loans. As a Merchant Marine, Guthrie qualified to live there.
A year into his stay, though, Guthrie began to understand that the curiously all-white neighborhood was by design. In the archive, Kaufman found notebooks Guthrie filled with what he wished the place had been, a community where “a face of every bright color laffing and joshing in these old darkly weeperish empty shadowed windows.”
Guthrie moved out two years later, not long before Trump was investigated by a U.S. Senate committee in1954 for profiteering off the public contracts for that development.
Guthrie re-styled his Dust Bowl ballad “Ain’t Got No Home” into an indictment against the Trump property, lyrics Kaufman also found in those Tulsa archives . .
BeachHaven ain’t my home!
I just cain’t pay this rent!
My money’s down the drain!
And my soul is badly bent!
Beach Haven looks like heaven
Where no black ones come to roam!
Fred & Roy taught Donald to always push the envelope and now he’s going for broke on the racism front, saying that immigrants are poisoning the blood of the country. When it was pointed out this is Nazi-talk, he claimed “I never read Mein Kampf”. And then doubled down:
They're destroying the blood of our country," Trump said about the waves of migrants who have crossed the border. "They're ruining our country. And it's true they're destroying the blood of our country. That's what they're doing. They're destroying our country . . .
They don't like it when I said that -- and I never read 'Mein Kampf.' They said, 'Oh, Hitler said that' - in a much different way. No, they're coming from all over the world. People all over the world . . .
Once upon a time in America that language would be a political death sentence. But no more. Donald Trump has turned back the clock to the time & place I was born, 1950s apartheid Mississippi. Philip Bump, the brilliant data & numbers guy at the Washington Post, brings us the depressing facts:
There’s always been a symbiosis between Donald Trump and right-wing rhetoric. His 2016 campaign for the Republican presidential nomination was successful — surprisingly successful — because of his willingness to embrace arguments and assertions that were considered beyond the pale for his more traditional opponents. By picking out and then defending (to whatever extent was necessary for his audience) claims about immigrants and terrorism, among other things, he tapped into a strain of argumentation that was often kept out of sight. He helped bring the rhetoric into the mainstream.
On Sunday, CBS News presented the results of a new poll conducted by the polling firm YouGov — results that offered a stark example of this pattern, of how even extreme right-wing arguments are now barely outside the norm.
Respondents were asked by YouGov whether they agreed with Trump that immigrants entering the United States illegally had the effect of “poisoning the blood” of the country. This is not just right-wing rhetoric, mind you, but a reflection of some of the most extreme racial politics in modern history. It is an explicit depiction of immigrants as dangerous, but specifically in the context of posing a threat to national identity. It is the language of fascism.
Nearly half of Americans agreed with it.
We can be depressed. Or we can work and organize to change the dynamic and win the conversation over the kind of democracy we’re going to have. We have two options on offer:
a) a multi-racial functioning democracy
b) a white nationalist pseudo-democracy/fascist autocracy
Winning the 2024 elections avoids option b, but doesn’t automatically get option a. People have to be made to understand that, politics is a marathon, not a sprint. It takes winning multiple elections and more importantly, winning the national conversation for multi-racial democracy. That takes work. That takes organization. It’s a helluva more than just electing Joe Biden for the 2nd time.
Making it truly functional is yet another hill to climb. As I said, it’s a marathon.
I should know, I come from Mississippi. A place that’s far from perfect, a place that’s regressed in the last decade of one-party GOP rule, but a place that is still a far sight better than when I was born. And once we capitalize on new federal court decisions that allow folks to get voting rights back, there’s a real shot at having true democracy in Mississippi. 15% of black voters in Mississippi were disenfranchised due to racist law. Even though ex-felons can now vote in Mississippi, it will take organization to get people registered and to get them to the polls. We did it in the 1960s and 1970s. There’s history and a blue-print for how to do it, and there’s already a lot of engagement under the radar. Like here. Or here. Or here.
There’s also a whole lot of hate standing in the way.
Old Man Trump knows
Just how much
Racial Hate
he stirred up
In the bloodpot of human hearts
Hate is tough to meet, and the easy out is lazy cynism. Don’t take it. We’re better than that as a people, even many who’ve fallen under the spell of Fox-News-Trumpism are better than that. You have to believe in better angels and all that. They’re real.
But while hope is indispensible, without a strategy coupled to hard work & organization, it’s just wishful thinking. We have history on our side. We’ve done this before, in the Civil War and during Reconstruction. In 50s /60s civil rights. And in many other social/political/labor fights in between.
Flash back to the summer of 1963, Barry Goldwater and southern racism was on the rise. Many expected Kennedy and the Democratic Party to lose the election in 64. Democrats were split into two factions — one a liberal pro-civil-rights grouping and the other made up of southern-segregationist-pro-Goldwater Dixiecrats.
We know how that story ended. We need to lean on history as we fight Trumpism, which is just warmed over John Bircher-Goldwater Dixiecratism. It never died out, it just crawled out of sight, hiding under rocks.
Racists are mean, weak losers who think so little of themselves they cling to something as superficial as the color of their skin or the place of their birth. Trump is the weakest, meanist little loser of all. Racism isn’t his strength. It’s his achilles heel. Go for it.
Ryan Harvey has adapted Woody Guthrie’s Ole Man Trump lyrics into a song. Or you can listen to him sing it on youtube.