After that asshole Trump pardoned fellow Nazi Joe Arpaio, I was despondent. Nothing Trump has done affected me so deeply, so viscerally, so I did what everyone should never do, and I lashed out on Twitter.
The problem was immediately obvious to everyone except me: The way I wrote it, I was blaming people of color for Trump. And of course, that was bullshit. So I want to make very clear:
I fucked up. I was clumsy. I was a fool.
Trump was elected because of the racist white assholes who voted for him.
Trump continues to exists because of the racist white Republican Party that enables him.
There is a debate to be had about how to increase voter participation in marginalized communities. There’s a reason why Republicans work so hard to disenfranchise those potential voters, putting in institutional roadblocks to the franchise. We at Daily Kos (and I, personally) have long focused on those issues.
There’s also a debate to be had about how Democrats only seem to care about people of color around election time, and then never again. Latinos are still chaffing about the number of deportations during the Obama years. Missouri had a Democratic governor and DA during the Ferguson saga.
But none of that has direct bearing on one key point—the blame for our white supremacist government is on the white people who voted for Trump 2-1 in 2016, and on the institutions that have willfully been created to prevent marginalized communities from voting.
Period.