President Donald Trump this week made a post which, according to one prominent New York Times columnist, was part of a “truly shocking” trend of racist rhetoric, and was sufficient grounds for new impeachment charges.
In his latest “Takes” video shared to YouTube, liberal Times columnist Jamelle Bouie highlighted Trump’s Truth Social post from earlier this week, describing it bluntly as an attempt to “incite a race riot” by calling on white Minnesota residents to “fight back” against the state’s Somalian immigrant population. Bouie noted that while Trump making racist statements was perhaps not surprising, this latest instance deserved attention as “a testament to how transgressive and fundamentally reprehensible this president and this administration is,” and for the way it continued a trend of Trump attacking Somalian Americans, whom he “routinely denigrates in vicious racist terms.”
“I genuinely have a hard time finding the exact words for describing how transgressive this behavior is, how fundamentally deviant it is in American politics,” Bouie said. “It’s actually hard at the level of federal politics to find politicians who are as openly racist as the president.”
Bouie noted some Jim Crow-era politicians might have risen to the level of racism espoused by Trump, but noted that even the infamously racist George Wallace toned things down and avoided attacking specific groups after trying to transition to national politics. Even Woodrow Wilson, “who probably holds or held the crown for the most racist president of the 20th century,” went about his rhetoric with more “class” than Trump.
All of this, Bouie argued, should be grounds to impeach Trump once again, when and if Democrats retake control of Congress in the midterm elections.
“It is really something; it is extraordinary, and the fact that he wants to incite violence against Somali Americans in the same way that he wants to incite violence against Haitian Americans is a fundamental dereliction of duty,” Bouie explained. “I’ve talked about this before, but the standard for impeachment in the Constitution, high crimes and misdemeanors, isn’t about literal crimes. It isn’t about the criminal code. Of course, breaking the law, violating the criminal code, is certainly grounds for impeachment, or should be. Even Trump VS the Supreme Court decision that created criminal immunity for the president doesn’t preclude impeachment for breaking the law in this way, but the impeachment process isn’t principally about crimes. It’s about transgressions against the political order. You might call [them] crimes against the republic, which may not be literal crimes but need to be punished in some way.”
He added: “Presidential rhetoric is not an idle thing. It has real weight; it matters; the words presidents use are never idle. They may think that they’re idle, they might just be yapping, but in point of fact, when you’re the most powerful person in the world, every utterance really matters. Every utterance shapes the public culture of the United States. It shapes the world, and so the president engaging in open racist demagoguery and trying to incite race riots, that’s an impeachable offense. That’s something for which a president should be removed, and even if removal isn’t possible… I think it still matters to say to the country, to say to the world, that we do not believe, that this is acceptable.”