“…in Order to Form a More Perfect Union….”

The current administration of the executive branch of the United States government is white nationalist. This means that, to President Trump and his cabinet and all the agencies under its command, all lives do not matter. Not Black lives, nor any other non-white, non-Christian, non-male, non-hetero lives. Nor anti-racist, nor anti-fascist lives.

We know this now from President Trump’s recent public diatribes, which bullied up to the rhetoric of racial purity not so long ago offered by former White House staffer and 2016 Trump campaign manager Steve Bannon to the French fascist Marine LePen’s National Front on March 10, 2018, exhorting his white supremacist pan-national allies to “Let them call you racist. Let them call you xenophobes. Let them call you nativist. Wear it as a badge of honor. Because every day, we get stronger, and they get weaker…. I did not come here as a teacher, I came here as an observer, and to learn. What I’ve learned is that you are part of a worldwide movement, that is bigger than France, bigger than Italy, bigger than Hungary — bigger than all of it. And history is on our side.”

Trump’s speech at Mount Rushmore was hateful but mostly pablum. Much of the coverage of the event was seen through the lens of the ongoing covid-19 pandemic and the national uproar over a seemingly endless series of fatal confrontations by marginalized communities with police brutality amid the wider scope of systemic racism. Indeed, the Mount Rushmore event was confronted by Lakota demonstrators who had…