The President Who Could Drink Water: White Supremacy and Donald Trump
For half an hour on Saturday night, in front of a smattering of supporters at a deflating, bewildering rally, President Donald Trump told rambling stories about his trouble walking down a ramp. The anecdote was equal parts puzzling and pathetic, an unneeded explanation involving leather-soled shoes, generals with rubber-soles, and a few dozen rallygoers shifting and ask one another what the President of the United States of America was talking about.
The coup de grace followed. While the ramp story was a “controversy” Trump himself had started by bizarrely tweeting about the affair in the middle of the night even as no one had said anything about it in the media, the bigger issue from the Day of the Ramp was Trump’s obvious difficulty drinking from a glass of water. Because the President is a public figure whose health is a matter of national security and public interest, the struggle he displayed was an actual issue. It was obvious that Trump was having some difficult. The reason why wasn’t clear.
To answer his critics, Trump wasted the people’s time talking about the hot sun and getting a tan and then picked up a glass of water and drank it to the riotous applause and cheering of his people, who chanted FOUR MORE YEARS! FOUR MORE YEARS!
You would have thought from the reaction from his sycophants that Trump had just turned the water to wine.
It was telling.
Trump’s ability to lift a glass of water, bring it to his lips, pour it into his mouth without spilling it all over himself, and then successfully swallowing the liquid was enough for his legion of supporters to demand four more calendar years of him being the most powerful man in the world.
And truthfully, it makes sense. Trump’s supporters enjoy a cultish devotion to him and have so dedicated themselves to believing his lies and propaganda that they have all but destroyed any notion of shared reality in the United States of America. To them, Trump’s drinking of water probably does resemble a miracle of sorts. After all, considering he has failed in every regard to achieve any of his campaign promises, has mishandled the pandemic so badly we’re watching deaths and cases rise daily, and has eradicated the economy, potentially, for a generation, it’s one of the first times he’s actually done something.
It is the gaze of white supremacy that elevates the ingestion of liquid to the point of sainthood. Trump is president because Barack Obama was president, and to have an African America in power was such a horrendous thing to these people that a counter-revolution headed by the most obviously incompetent white man in America was an absolute necessity. They needed to find the most buffoonish white man possible, the biggest public failure in the post-war U.S. and show that he could rise to the level of the first black president.
Of course, Trump is no stranger to the strange magic of white supremacy. Born incredibly rich, he squandered his father’s money every step of the way, blowing through his inheritance, failing at sure-fire businesses like his casinos and hotels, mismanaging every situation and every deal, declaring bankruptcies over and over and over again, at one point losing more money than any other American in a decade.
Trump is an abject, undeniable favor. In fact, his business endeavors have been so lowly and misguided that his fortune would have been several, several times larger had he just invested it in simple stocks.
But the point is that he is still rich and he is still the President of the United States of America. This talentless, disgusting individual who has failed and failed and failed, all while promising any rube with a nickel still in his pocket that he’s a giant success and could really use that nickel, has been kept aloft by a system that has protected him from consequence and his own failures. Like so many other white men who have been guided along by a system tuned to their favor, Trump has continued to succeed despite his failures.
That is the nature of white supremacy.
Thunderous applause.
Chants of FOUR MORE YEARS!
All-consuming and awe-inspiring power.
The ability to shape the very workings of the world.
Because he lifted a glass of water and took a swallow.
Jared Yates Sexton is the author of American Rule: How A Nation Conquered The World But Failed its People, available for pre-order from Dutton/Penguin-Random House. His work has appeared in the New York Times, The New Republic, The Daily Beast, Politico, and elsewhere. He currently serves as an associate professor of writing at Georgia Southern University and is the co-host of The Muckrake Podcast.
