America's Ol' Comfy Shoes
White supremacy is the "comfy shoe" of the US; a country unwilling to tolerate the temporary discomfort of breaking in a new way of life
Could you imagine President Trump saying this:
"June reminds us of both the unimaginable injustice of slavery and the incomparable joy that must have attended emancipation. It is both a remembrance of a blight on our history and a celebration of our Nation's unsurpassed ability to triumph over darkness."
No need to imagine it. He did say that. He said that on Juneteenth in 2020. Actually, in every year of Trump’s first term, he recognized Juneteenth, telling the story of the moment when the Black people in Galveston, Texas learned they were no longer slaves, they were free.
Juneteenth 2025 was met with crickets from the White House. No statement, no story. Only mention of the holiday was a late-night social media post from Trump where he complained about the US having “too many holidays.”
Just another reminder of how far MAGA has come from dog whistles of white supremacy to saying it proudly into a microphone.
It also reminds us of one of Trump’s most inalienable qualities; his ability to shapeshift into whatever the moment calls for. A way-less-hot Mystique, or Mys-take, he can take the form of whomever or whatever the Stephen Millers of this country need him to be.
During the 2020 campaign, Trump added making Juneteenth a national holiday to his platform in an effort to appeal to Black voters. President Biden ultimately made Juneteenth a holiday after Congress passed it in 2021. What a cool Trump-Biden collab.
So what changed?
Actually, nothing. Nothing has really changed, the covert white supremacy has just become more overt, pushing the envelope a little further each time. The immigration issue during the campaign was a real spectacle of good old-fashioned white supremacist propaganda, but it worked. So MAGA stuck with what worked.
When Trump was elected the first time in 2016, there was a substantial uptick in public displays of Nazi and other white supremacist symbolism. Following the results of November 2024, the same thing happened with one of my neighbors adorning a Christmas tree in their front yard with this:
After a couple of days of intense backlash, they took down the Swastika and put up “no trespassing signs.” But the message was clear; white supremacists felt emboldened once again by a Trump victory. While it’s true that not all Republicans are white supremacists, white supremacists identify with the Republican party at this point in US history.
The pursuit of white supremacy has always been embedded in MAGA if you know what to look for. But to MAGA’s benefit, most Americans have no idea what to look for. White supremacy wasn’t something that was taught to most of us outside of WWII and Hitler’s quest. It was presented as something that happened, an isolated act, instead of what it actually is. For the United States, white supremacy is this nation’s base. Slavery was the economic and social foundation upon which the United States was built and we have never truly broken that foundation. Slavery just takes another name now. Slavery is inmate labor, migrant labor, any labor derived from a group with limited political power. Capitalism has and always will require the exploitation of labor.
That is why, without fervent opposition, the US will always slip back into those “comfy shoes” of white supremacy.
At several points throughout this nation’s short history, an effort was made to break in a new pair of shoes. Reconstruction, for example, was one of those efforts. Following the end of the Civil war, Black Americans seized their newfound freedom. They made extraordinary gains in economic status and education. The men secured the right to vote, with the first Black U.S. Senator and U.S. Representative taking their seats in Congress in 1870.
Just 7 years later, Reconstruction came to an end with the election of Rutherford B. Hayes. A compromise to withdraw federal troops from southern states was struck to elevate Hayes to the presidency and once troops were withdrawn, southern states went right back to their old slavin’ ways.
Slipped right back into those comfy ol’ shoes.
MAGA isn’t doing anything that hasn’t been done before in the US. The movement exploits the undercurrents of white supremacy for political gain. Disguised as “law and order” or “fairness” it’s as American a past time as baseball.