It's not surprising that Trump tweeted that 'white power' video — but it's telling that he deleted it

By now, the following narrative should read as ordinary: President Trump retweets a video or meme; said video or meme is found to have underlying racist undertones; the president then retracts said media, claiming not to have realized anything regarding the offense. So few of us were surprised when, on Sunday morning, Trump shared a video of a supporter in Florida's Villages community driving a golf cart decorated with Trump campaign posters and shouting, "White power." Trump retweeted the video, and thanked the "great people" in it.

Three hours later, the video was gone from his timeline. Put on the task of supermarket aisle clean-up, Deputy Press Secretary Judd Deere announced later on Sunday that the president had not heard the comment.

That revelation, of course, feels impossible. I’d wager that Trump heard it, and wanted to use it to stoke racial tensions that outweigh many other issues among his supporters. The president is foolish, of course, but no true fool, and his cultish and curated social media is no accident. What he puts forth, even in its most dystopian and stream-of-consciousness form, gives real insight into how he wishes to present himself. If he wants his followers to see a video of a man yelling "white power," well, then, so be it.

If 2020 feels like it's shifting, though, that's because it is. Trump’s tacit and not-so-tacit nods toward white supremacy aren't working anymore, because the groundswell is too large to contain. This isn't the year where white grievance brings white people to the polls. It's the year where white grievance brings everyone else to the polls.

Put simply, the writing is on the wall. From the million-person Tulsa rally that didn’t materialize to Trump’s own concessions among confidants (one particularly damning Politico article published on Saturday claimed that even his own campaigners and insiders have told him he’s on course to be a one-term president), it’s clear that the strategy that propelled him into power in 2016 is no longer working.

Even the president’s attempt at coopting Juneteenth — the June 19^th recognition of the emancipation of enslaved Texans — was a failure. The president had originally planned a rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma in order to shore up support among his most vocal white supporters on that particular date. But the rally was moved, and a day that few white Americans recognized soon became a lightning rod in American politics. As Jelani Cobb noted in The New Yorker this week, “The Trump team, in designing the Juneteenth stunt, dramatically elevated awareness of the day. Companies across the country have made Juneteenth a paid vacation day; governors, including Ralph Northam, of Virginia, announced plans to declare it an official state holiday.” The backlash did not win white voters over. Instead, it solidified a wall of anger against Trump, and reminded most of us, yet again, of his insidious — and often obvious — racism.

The president’s tactic has long been to play both sides — to claim on the one hand that he does not know that his behavior is racist, while on the other extending an olive branch of obvious racism to his most vile supporters. He didn’t know who David Duke was, you see, even though everyone else on planet earth did. He didn’t know about Juneteenth, or about the white power guy. He didn’t know any of it. With every other president, the buck stopped at the Resolute Desk. With Trump, the buck stops nowhere. It hangs in the air until he waves it away: Did I do that?

Trump did delete the white power tweet, and that’s worth considering. It’s worth considering because it marks a change in the arc of the presidency. Trump does not ever see himself as accountable for his actions, and today is no different in that regard. But he must know that the dog whistle is no longer an effective tool for summoning the masses.

If it were, his rally in Tulsa would have been a thrumming crowd of red hats, instead of a flaccid arena of empty blue seats. I like the poetic imagery of that, of the sagging void, of racism yielding, just a little, to the thread of common decency. The president heard those words — “white power” — loud and clear, and he decided to tweet them out anyway. But he is learning, in this bursting-at-the-seams America, that his narrative is not useful to the moral, righteous people who hear his whistles. And, after seeing that the reaction was not what he expected, he retreated; he deleted. Perhaps it is true that even he knows his strategy has gone terribly, possibly unsalvageably, awry.