By Gordon Hull
As our tin-pot “President” continues his inexorable slide into narcissistic authoritarianism, it is worth noting recent events that establish beyond any residual doubt that radical white terrorism is now official policy. When historians look at the Trump presidency, assuming we all survive long enough for there to be historians, I suspect last week is going to be a significant one. It began with Trumps’s remarks after Charlottesville, in which he managed to say that counterprotestors shared in the blame for neo-Nazi violence and that there were many “fine people” hiding in the mob of white supremacists. These made his own views clear (as though they weren’t already). But they did not establish state policy. Events Friday did: the pardoning of former Maricopa Country Sheriff Joe Arpaio, the border patrol’s decision to keep inland border patrol checkpoints open during the evacuation from Hurricane Harvey, and Trump’s apparent decision to end the DACA program. Together these say: radical white terrorism is above the law, and the undocumented are homines sacri. Foucault remarked at one point that in a biopolitical state “it’s impossible to reconcile law and order because when you try to do so it is only in the form of an integration of law into the state’s [administrative] order” (Power, 117). In Trump’s America, you get neither law nor order: Trump despises both the rule of law, as evidenced Friday, and the administrative state, as evidenced by his repeated appointment of incompetent, unqualified partisan hacks to head regulatory agencies the very existence of which they oppose. The theoretical framework through which all of this behavior is intelligible finds its expression in the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.
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