In his attack on Black elected officials, Trump is harkening back to the worst of post-Reconstruction America.
Over a chaotic span of days this past weekend, Texas was the main stage for an increasingly indistinguishable group of political actors, those who form what remains of the Republican “establishment,” and the many strands of the far right, a joint production that has come to dominate the conservative movement. The right-wing jubilee kicked off with a “border security” summit last Thursday, attended by 12 state attorneys general, including Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (who is still facing fraud charges).
And then, come Saturday night, entered Donald Trump himself. The former president’s scripted remarks played as even more extreme than others, not only for how near his rally was to the weekend’s self-appointed border “defense” activities.
This weekend was suffused with the familiar atmosphere of paranoia that had marked the Trump White House years:
But there was something else: an open call to exact retribution on Black elected officials, an appeal to white terror. The prosecutors, Trump said, “in reality, they’re not after me. They’re after you, and I just happen to be the person that’s in the way.” He repeated himself and continued: “If these radical, vicious, racist prosecutors do anything wrong or illegal, I hope we are going to have in this country the biggest protest we have ever had, in Washington, D.C., in New York, in Atlanta, and elsewhere”—effectively singling out three Black prosecutors investigating him
When I hear Trump attempt to rally a posse to Atlanta against a Black woman holding elected office, tell his followers that she holds illegitimate power over him, order them to protest against her “vicious” acts, in some ways, it resembles merely a continuation of a long terror campaign. The subtext is not subtle: Trump believes that power is fundamentally illegitimate and corrupt based solely on the fact of Black people holding it—never forget that he rose in Republican ranks thanks to his trumpeting of birtherism—a threat of presumed illegitimacy he then uses to mobilize white mass violence. There’s no sense in informing anyone that Trump’s invocation of law and order is a joke, when he openly defies the law and summons his flock to protect him from the consequences—in the very same speech in which he promised to pardon the people who attacked Capitol Hill Police officers assaulted on January 6. That doesn’t matter much when, to Trump, the law is white.
https://newrepublic.com/article/165270/donald-trump-black-politicians-texas-reconstruction