My Comment: This
article below expresses exactly what I have been saying. It is
beautifully written and is right on point. Why is Trump's base even in
view of the fact that Trump's economic policies do not show that he
gives a rat's petuti for their economic interests but really only cares
about the interests of the top 2% as his permanent tax cuts for the rich
show as do the trade tariffs which have wreaked havoc on farmers and
others in the middle and working classes. So why do they support him no
matter what he does, no matter how unethical he is, no matter how many
crimes he commits and no matter how much he destroys our system of
checks and balances the Founders so brilliantly bestowed upon us over
200 years ago. The answer of course lies in racism, sexism and
homophobia. As long as Trump delivers on those things which he does his
nearly all white base will continue their allegiance no matter if he
betrays their social and economic class. This author below sees it the
same way and writes about it more completely:
Written by Amanda Marcotte / Salon
January 17, 2020
Donald Trump is scared. The Senate trial following his
impeachment for a blackmail and campaign cheating scheme starts next
week, and it’s driving him to distraction. He was supposed to host a
lame event at the White House on Thursday to bolster fake concerns that
white evangelicals are being oppressed, but blew off pandering to his
strongest supporters for an hour, likely because he couldn’t pry himself
away from news coverage of the impeachment trial’s kickoff. After
ending the event swiftly, Trump then tweeted angrily, “I JUST GOT
IMPEACHED FOR MAKING A PERFECT PHONE CALL!”
(As with most things the president says, this was untrue — he was impeached weeks ago, in December.)
Trump’s cold sweats are significant, because everyone who has been
following this case knows that the Senate will acquit him. Not because
he’s innocent — no one who has actually consulted the evidence is
foolish enough to believe that — but because Senate Majority Leader
Mitch McConnell and the Republicans who control the Senate decided long
ago that they would cover up for their shamelessly corrupt president no
matter what he does. With such an assured outcome, Trump’s fears seem
overblown and silly, even for someone crippled by sociopathic narcissism
and its accompanying paranoia.
But it’s also true that high-profile travesties of justice, such as the one Senate Republicans are currently preparing to commit, can often provoke major political backlash. Getting a jury to acquit the obviously guilty can, as history shows, cause a public that’s already outraged about the crime to get even more furious. That, I suspect, is what Trump is sweating.
What the Senate is about to do is akin to the practice of jury
nullification. That’s where a jury decides that either they don’t think
the crime should be a crime at all, or that they believe people like the
defendant should above the law, and so refuse to convict no matter how
guilty the defendant is. This something that in theory, and sometimes in
practice, can be used for good as when a jury refuses to throw someone
in prison for a low-level drug offense, or refuses to enforce a law
restricting free speech. But historically in the U.S., jury
nullification has tended to be used to uphold injustice and reinforce
racist or sexist systems of power.
(As with most things the president says, this was untrue — he was impeached weeks ago, in December.)
But it’s also true that high-profile travesties of justice, such as the one Senate Republicans are currently preparing to commit, can often provoke major political backlash. Getting a jury to acquit the obviously guilty can, as history shows, cause a public that’s already outraged about the crime to get even more furious. That, I suspect, is what Trump is sweating.
The most disturbing and frequent historical examples of jury nullification come from the Jim Crow South, where it was normal for all-white juries to acquit Klansmen and others who committed racist murders — not because they genuinely believed they were innocent, but because they believed it should be legal for white people to murder black people in cold blood.
The most famous of these cases was that of Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, two white men who murdered a black teenager named Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955. That the men had committed the crime was not in doubt — they described the murder in great detail to a reporter for Look magazine. But the all-white, all-male jury refused to convict, and didn’t really bother to hide the fact that they did so because they didn’t think white men should be punished for killing black people.
Unfortunately, this problem of white jurors refusing to convict in cases where the victims are black has not gone away. For instance, in the 2012 Florida killing of black teenager Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman, a nearly all-white jury voted to acquit Zimmerman, even though Martin was apparently just walking home after buying some snacks and Zimmerman had been warned by a 911 operator not to pursue him — and even though Zimmerman’s only basis for suspecting Martin of anything was his race. The one woman of color on the jury has since publicly lamented the process and describes what sounds a lot like bullying from the white women in the room.
Sometimes the backlash to injustice can be earth-shaking, as happened in 1992, when Los Angeles was torn up by riots in the wake of the acquittal by a majority-white jury of four cops who were caught on video severely beating Rodney King, a black motorist they had pulled over for speeding.
These are all racially loaded cases, of course, which sets them apart from Trump’s impeachment over his efforts to cheat in the 2020 election and his cavalier willingness to use government resources to force foreign leaders to help him do so. Trump’s inevitable acquittal in the Senate won’t be quite the gut-punch so many people feel when white men get sprung for committing racist crimes.
Still, the social circumstances of Trump’s upcoming acquittal go straight back to those same forces of white supremacy that have led to so many other travesties of justice in the past. After all, the main reason Senate Republicans are averse to taking what seems to be an easy way out — convicting the obviously guilty Trump and letting his Republican Vice President, Mike Pence, take over — is because they fear crossing the notoriously loyal Trump base, who represent their only possible chance of holding onto the Senate or retaking the House this November.
And the reason that base is so loyal, as with many things in this country, relates to racism. Trump’s base is motivated by what sociologists delicately call “racial resentment,” which is a nice way of saying that these white people see changing demographics in the U.S. and growing challenges to white domination, and they’re angry about it. Furthermore, they see President Trump, a blatant and shameless racist, as their best weapon to fight to preserve a system of white supremacy.
But watching obviously guilty people get away with it can also have a galvanizing political effect, and not just when the crime itself is racially provocative. As the #MeToo movement and the Women’s March demonstrated, Americans have also been roused to outrage when men commit sexual assaults and get away with it. And the ongoing fascination with gangsters who finally get caught after evading justice for years — Al Capone, Whitey Bulger, John Gotti — suggests a real hunger to see bad guys pay for what they do.
That’s what Donald Trump fears: That his acquittal will not be read as an exoneration, but as yet another famous miscarriage of justice that leads to outrage across the nation. Let’s hope his worst fears come true.
