A Call to the International Community: The Racist Roots of the Trump Administration's Coup d'etat and Its Danger to the World
America is plunging into a Cimmerian darkness.
It may be no exaggeration to say that we face an existential crisis and are pressing hard against a knife’s edge that is beginning to slice through the arteries of our republic, perhaps similar to Germany in the early 1930s.
We have elevated greedy and cruel leaders to power in the U.S. who are aggressively targeting the most vulnerable citizens; recklessly demolishing safeguards against the abuse of power; ripping apart environmental commitments; attacking and manipulating our freedom of press and speech; pushing for the right to ethnically cleanse Gaza for profit; maligning President Zelensky and exploiting war-torn Ukraine for greed; and stoking alt-right extremists in Europe and the U.S.
As you read this, the wealthiest, such as Nazi-saluting Elon Musk, are stealing access to our private data and fleecing our government for their own aggrandizement while depriving the barest of basics to the poor in our own country and around the world.
As Bernie Sanders reminds us, wealthy elites like Trump and Musk want what ruling-class elites have always wanted: more power, more control, and more wealth. They could care less about the people and nothing about the poor.
It is all grotesque and obscene.
What we are experiencing in America is nothing less than a coup d'etat, where the Donald Trump rich are usurping our democracy and trampling our constitution for selfish aims. They are trying to remake the world in their own dreadful image, breaking and shattering everything they touch, as we have seen authoritarian regimes do throughout history.
We have unleashed on you as well as ourselves weaponized greed and intolerance and it is spreading like a virus. Unless we take a stand together, we could be facing a similar crisis to what the world suffered as the Nazis expanded across Europe following the dismantling of democracy in Germany, where destructive power spreads and consumes humanity for power’s sake.
To understand what is happening in America today, you need to understand something about American racism and intolerance. And for me to explain that, let me get a little personal.
I am a historian with a focus on African American history. I have also studied genocide history, as well as nonviolent revolutions, which have brought me into close contact with lethal regimes and governments. And I have a family member who was in the American Nazi Party, a shadow that hovered over me during my childhood and adolescent years, but that ultimately led me down a path of peace and nonviolence.
I remember my family member describing his time in the ANP as something akin to being deeply poisoned. As someone who has studied racism in America, it not only affects extremists; even more troubling, its venom has infected entire regions and collectives of everyday people in the U.S. from our earliest history to today.
The thing you need to know about America, which many of you likely already know, is that we have always been a fundamentally racist country. Our national wealth and power were built in part on the backs of enslaved African Americans and our land grab across the North American continent was accomplished by the ethnic cleansing of Native Americans.
To justify what we had done and were doing, we created many ways to reinforce the narrative of white superiority—laws, policies, customs, stories, violence—conditioning the public imagination to accept racism as a norm and whiteness as the standard.
It so poisoned much of our collective imagination that despite the strides we have made with civil rights and equality, and even with the election of a black president, Barack Obama, racism remained an undercurrent always simmering below the surface, sometimes seemingly dormant but always vulnerable to exploitation.
And those willing to exploit that undercurrent of racism found fertile ground after the election of Barack Obama to the presidency in 2008.
Distressed by the reality of a black president, and anxious that white supremacy was losing dominance, Donald Trump used his public persona to exploit that ugly underbelly of racism with his racially charged birther campaign. Here he feverishly tried to invalidate our first black president by claiming he was not an American. With a consistent barrage of insults, he degraded President Obama and other people of color, stirring white working-class resentment and distrust.
But Trump had help. He worked in tandem with popular right-wing radio talk show hosts like Rush Limbaugh and Fox News commentators such as Bill O’Reilly and Tucker Carlson. During the Obama years, these commentators, fearing the loss of their white Christian dominance in our increasingly multiracial and multifaith democracy (they could not tolerate sharing power equally with non-whites and other faiths), used their powerful media outlets to dig ever more aggressively into the racial, ethnic, and Transgender prejudice and fears and built a strong movement of intolerance and hate.
Consequently, that ugly undercurrent of racism and intolerance in the U.S., that poison ready to be activated and exploited at any time, rose like a tidal wave in 2016 with the election of Donald Trump as president and has now become a more destructive tsunami in the wake of his second election. It is violently crashing through the U.S. today, harming the most vulnerable and threatening to spill its poison into the world as this administration fuels the flames of right-wing extremism in Europe. ?
I know I speak for millions of Americans in pleading with the international community—Europe, Canada, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East—citizens and leaders—to support us in our time of crisis. We ask that you stand boldly against the cruel Trump movement and its coup d’etat with hardline diplomacy. And we ask that you engage in economic boycotts of American companies that are eradicating their programs and protections to redress systemic racism.
Leaders, please do not give an inch when meeting with Trump officials, and let them know that you oppose their infringement on human rights and democracy. This is no time for diplomatic niceties or compliance, such as when British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain underestimated Adolf Hitler.
Please grandstand publicly against them. We Americans who are struggling against anti-democratic forces in our own country need that show of symbolic strength and resistance from the international community.
Trump only won the 2024 election by 1.5 percent. Half of us Americans—and more when you consider third-party votes—did not vote to have our democracy taken away. We are using every legal, electoral, and judicial tool to fight back here in the U.S., and I hope we soon become a mass movement of civil disobedience and nonviolent action that will sweep away this nightmare.
Together, with your support internationally and our efforts domestically, we can defeat this latest form of ugly fascism that is threatening the world and create in its place a more caring and cooperative human community. We Americans who believe in justice, equality, and human rights will never give up. Please stand strong with us.?