State of the Union 2020: Trump simply gave Individuals a lesson in white historical past

As Trump closed out his State of the Union handle on Tuesday, he made positive to nod to his largest, and most religious, voter base — white folks.

“That is the nation the place kids study names like Wyatt Earp, Davy Crockett, and Annie Oakley,” he famous. “That is the place the place the pilgrims landed at Plymouth and the place Texas patriots made their final stand on the Alamo.”

He fully forgot to say that earlier than Earp, Crockett, Oakley, and the Pilgrims ever arrived on what we now know as America, there have been Indigenous folks, those that had been residing on and caring for the land for hundreds of years.

“The American Nation was carved out of the huge frontier by the hardest, strongest, fiercest, and most decided women and men ever to stroll the face of the Earth,” Trump continued. “Our ancestors braved the unknown, tamed the wilderness, settled the Wild West.”

Yasin Ozturk/Anadolu Company through Getty Photos

In his retelling of historical past, the president not solely erased the hundreds of thousands of Native peoples previous to Columbus’s arrival in 1492, however evoked that their lands, livelihoods, and existence have been one thing to be tamed and conquered. “Our ancestors,” as Trump referred to, have been these settlers — white folks from England and Europe. Newer immigrants have been denigrated as “depraved human traffickers” and “illegals” in different components of Trump’s speech. The almost 40 percent of Americans who will not be white apparently didn’t bear mentioning in Trump’s historical past.

In his revisionist telling of the “founding” of America, Trump additionally fully erased slavery. In response to Trump, after taming the Wild West, and “lifting hundreds of thousands from poverty, illness, and starvation” (Indigenous folks not amongst them), these ancestors additionally “laid down the railroads, dug out canals, raised up the skyscrapers — and, girls and gents, our ancestors constructed probably the most distinctive Republic ever to exist in all of human historical past.”

Many historians would argue that it was not the white colonists who constructed the foundations of this nation, however these that they had enslaved. The White Home, the Capitol, Wall Avenue, and lots of of our Ivy League universities have been constructed with enslaved labor. America turned a global economy due to enslaved labor. It’s an unsightly historical past, however an simple one: the our bodies of the enslaved — abused and routinely murdered — helped colonists construct the nation we all know right now.

Trump is infamous for these kinds of dog whistles — and extra overt shows of racism. Whereas campaigning in 2016, he retweeted white supremacists, referred to as Mexicans “rapists,” and informed black voters they lived in “poverty, your colleges are not any good, you don’t have any jobs.” As president, he has condemned folks from “shithole nations,” and after the Charlottesville rally in 2017, stated “each side” have been responsible for the violence that ensued. Tuesday evening, he awarded Rush Limbaugh — a person who has constantly made racist feedback towards black folks — with the nation’s highest civilian honor.

Whereas the historical past portion of Trump’s speech may need been extra subtly racist than messaging he has invoked previously, it was nonetheless supposed to point out whose historical past issues.

Mandel Ngan/AFP through Getty Photos

“We settled the brand new world, we constructed the fashionable world, and we modified historical past perpetually by embracing the everlasting reality that everybody is made equal by the hand of Almighty God,” Trump stated as he ended his speech.

The “we,” in fact, are the folks he hopes will carry him to reelection: The 62 % of white males and 52 % of white girls who voted for him the final time round.