Uncoded language

Last Friday the big story in the news was that the unrepentantly racist president of the United States did an overtly racist thing and members of his party were shocked, SHOCKED, to find there was gambling going on in this establishment.

To be clear, what Felon47 posted on his janky social media app was not, in and of itself, news in the strictest sense. The headlines about it should have been nothing more than "late-septuagenarian lifelong racist commits racism in public again." But the message was resoundingly offensive and deserved all the outrage it got from people not in his cult of cruelty and grievances. (I especially liked Hakeem Jeffries' reaction of "Fuck Donald Trump and his vile, racist, and malignant behavior.") The reaction from Republicans, though—the outrage voiced by GOP legislators and others within the MAGA cult—that's something else again.

These same Republicans have no issues (publicly, at least) with Felon47’s racist policies; his blaming a plane crash on "DEI"; his indiscriminate assault on Latinos;  his attempts to erase mentions of Jackie Robinson, Medgar Evers, and others from federal facilities and records; his references to majority-black nations as "shithole countries"; his slandering of Somali and Haitian immigrants en masse; nor any of the other remarks and behavior lifted right out of Mein Kampf and Stephen Miller's fantasy dystopia. But this they did. Curious.

Senator Roger Wicker (R–MS) called Felon47’s racist post "totally unacceptable" and called on Felon47 to "take it down and apologize." Congressman Mike Lawler (R–NY) said the post was a "grave failure of judgment." Senator Tim Scott (R–SC, the only African-American Republican in the Senate) called it "the most racist thing I've seen out of this White House." The post was condemned by quite a few elected Republicans, though some implied they were accepting Felon47’s ridiculous claim that it was not him but "a staffer" that posted it.

The thing about all of these GOP condemnations, though, is context.

Since they did not and do not exhibit such outrage at the rest of this regime's racism, since they did not and do not exhibit outrage and the rest of this regime's anti-American agenda, since they did not and do not publicly object to the regime's murder of both Americans in Minnesota and immigrants in detention—not to mention well over 100 Venezuelans on the open sea—it's reasonable to conclude it isn't the racism they're objecting to.

It's the overtness of the racism.

What was "totally unacceptable" to Wicker, what was a "failure of judgment" to Lawler, may well have been the lack of coding. Scott's outrage at "the most racist thing" may well be because the normal Republican rhetorical games weren't used to disguise the racism. Sen. Susan Collins (R–ME) may have been "appalled," but was she appalled at the post's content or was she appalled that the president went and ignored all the stuff she as a Republican senator has been schooled in for so many years to put a gauzy mask on bigoted remarks?

I quote the guru of Republican messaging, Lee Atwater, the disciple of arguably the most racist senator in history, Strom Thurmond, and who championed polarization and demonization as the preferred paths to political victories:

You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968, you can't say "nigger"—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights, and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.... I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this" is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger."

Atwater died in 1991, but his playbook remains standard operating procedure for the Republican party and I submit that the GOP outrage over last week's social media post was about Felon47 not using the playbook—not about Felon47 being a racist. They're fine with that. The apology Wicker wants isn't for the public at large, it's for himself and his fellow Republican cultists, who still have to use code.