Imagine if President Obama had paid hush money to a porn star to try to cover up an adulterous affair. Imagine if he did it again with a Playboy model. Then, imagine that he falsified business records to conceal the scandal.
Almost everybody in America, Democrat and Republican, Black and white, would be upset with Obama. But that’s not the case with Donald Trump, the man who famously claimed he could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and wouldn’t lose any voters.
As Trump’s criminal trial begins in Manhattan, Republicans are proving once again that their alleged values are really double standards.
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When Obama was president, Republicans complained that simply wearing a tan suit at a press conference in the summer of 2014 was “shocking,” inexcusable, and “unpresidential,” despite the fact that many other presidents had worn tan suits in the past.
Ahh, those were the days.
Republicans attacked Obama when he spoke about the death of unarmed Black teenager Trayvon Martin in 2012. Speaking as a Black parent of two girls, Obama said, “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.” But former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich called Obama’s remarks “disgraceful,” and former Republican Senator Rick Santorum accused the president of trying to “divide” Americans.
Republicans also blasted Obama in 2009 when he was asked a question at a press conference about Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates being arrested for breaking into his own home. Obama opined that the Cambridge Police had “acted stupidly” by arresting him even after he showed his identification to them. Republicans pounced on Obama and even introduced a congressional resolution demanding he apologize to the police.
They even attacked First Lady Michelle Obama for wearing a sleeveless dress, planting a vegetable garden, and for her poignant and truthful remarks at the 2016 Democratic Convention when she said, “I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves.”
But they never attacked Melania Trump for delivering the message “I really don’t care, do u?” written across the back of her jacket while visiting a detention center for migrant children. Or for her failure to explain how she got a special “Einstein visa” to come to the United States as an immigrant. Or for plagiarizing her 2016 convention speech from Michelle Obama.
If Obama had committed any one of the crimes of which Trump is accused, his political career would have ended immediately.
Once again, the rules only apply to certain people.
After 88 felony charges, eight aides convicted, four criminal indictments, two impeachments, a half billion dollar fraud judgment, an $83 million defamation verdict, another $25 million fraud settlement, a $5 million sexual assault verdict, a $1.6 million corporate tax fraud conviction, a fake university shut down, and his fake charity shut down after he was caught using the money to buy a life-size portrait of himself, Trump can rely on the self-anointed “law-and-order” party to pretend like he’s the legendary crime fighter Elliot Ness instead of the infamous mob boss Al Capone.
If Obama had committed any one of the crimes of which Trump is accused, his political career would have ended immediately, and he would likely have been arrested and imprisoned long ago.
Even when Trump admits his infidelity and moral failures, as he did in the famous “Access Hollywood” tape, it doesn’t bother his white evangelical followers who love to police Black people’s moral behavior but not their own.
It’s inconceivable that any Black person with Trump’s résumé would have been taken seriously as a candidate for president.
In fact, it’s inconceivable that any Black person with Trump’s résumé would have been taken seriously as a candidate for president the first time he ran with six bankruptcies, three wives, multiple adulterous affairs, and no experience in government.
It’s even less conceivable that such a Black person would be taken seriously after losing the popular vote twice, refusing to accept the election results, refusing to attend his successor’s inauguration, inciting a deadly insurrection to cling to power, and then suffering the humiliation of having a bipartisan majority of the U.S. Senate voting to convict him.
In a famous 1989 article, antiracist scholar Peggy McIntosh describes white privilege as “an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools and blank checks.” As state and federal courts continue to delay Trump’s trials and reduce his penalties, Donald Trump’s ability to avoid consequences for his illegal, unconstitutional, and immoral behavior epitomizes those invisible blank checks of white privilege.
For those who don’t know American politics and think the Trump campaign is just an amusing but unthreatening sideshow, it is not. This is dangerous. This has never happened before in the history of our country. This is not normal.
This is white privilege.
“Black Vote, Black Power,” a collaboration between Keith Boykin and Word In Black,
examines the issues, the candidates, and what’s at stake for Black America in the 2024 presidential election.
Keith Boykin is a New York Times–bestselling author, TV and film producer, and former CNN political commentator. A graduate of Dartmouth College and Harvard Law School, Keith served in the White House, cofounded the National Black Justice Coalition, cohosted the BET talk show My Two Cents, and taught at the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University in New York. He’s a Lambda Literary Award–winning author and editor of seven books. He lives in Los Angeles.