It's Not A Trick Question

Maybe Maryland Governor Wes Moore, a 2028 presidential hopeful who happens to look like a president in an action movie starring Jason Momoa and the Rock, has coldblooded Democratic Party quants and advisors in his ear every day updating him on the racism quotient of the median American voter.

And maybe that kind of information being pumped into your brain every waking moment of every day makes you choke like Nick Anderson at the free throw line in game one of the NBA Finals when you're asked a straightforward and critically important question about the country's wildly racist president. Maybe that kind of advising scrambles your mind so you can't say the easy and obviously true thing when asked if the very outwardly racist president of the United States is in fact a racist.

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That's my most generous interpretation of Moore's response to a question last weekend during a televised town hall interview with CBS News' Norah O'Donnell. It was a simple question, a veritable softball tossed right down the bloody heart of the plate for an up-and-coming Democratic Party politician who will likely cruise to a second term as Maryland governor this November. O'Donnell asked if the president, after posting an online video of Barack and Michelle Obama as apes, was racist.

Moore told O'Donnell it was not for him to answer, but a question for the president.

Moore went on to say the hideously racist depiction of the nation's first Black president and his wife as apes has a real effect on people of color and should not be overlooked as Trump being Trump, posting stupid shit online in the middle of the night like a doddering, sundowning, online-poisoned fool who happens to have access to the nuclear codes. Pointing to the Trump regime's attempts to ban books related to slavery and Jim Crow, "minimizing" Black history, and the government's systemic attack on Black employment, Moore said the president's actions "probably give the answer before he has a chance to answer himself."

I'll tell you, like I told the good folks on Bluesky, the internet's only legitimate microblogging platform, that I happily voted for Wes Moore in the 2022 gubernatorial Democratic primaries and, naturally, the general election. He's had a fine if unremarkable first term as my state's governor and I will once again vote for him in November when he runs against whichever loser right-wing freak the Maryland GOP puts on the ticket.

In December 2024, about a month after Trump somehow won every swing state and made his way back to the White House after trying and failing to overthrow the American government four years earlier, I attended a Democratic Party fundraiser in Montgomery County, Maryland highlighted by a spirited Moore address to a group of blue-state liberals who were somewhere between dejected and in a fugue state.

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All had not been lost, Moore assured us in that small restaurant on a frozen December evening, striking an imposing figure, clearly never having missed a day at the gym, even leg day. His tone was serious and resolute, his smile electric. Elected Democrats, he said, would have to fight hard to protect vulnerable communities the Trump regime planned on terrorizing and the government functions and capacity they planned on decimating in the name of plutocratic supremacy. We would keep going because that's all we could do, he said. We did not have the luxury of giving up. Moore's five-minute address was a desperately needed pep talk with a radicalized group of white supremacists about to grab the levers of power.

It's why I found Moore's initial town hall answer – refusing to outright say our racist president is racist – so deflating. I was not under the impression that Moore was some kind of populist firebrand – he clearly hews closer to the traditional corporate Democratic brand – but to not forcefully acknowledge Trump's racism was a stunner, one that could thrown in his face during what will assuredly be an apocalyptic 2028 Democratic presidential primary campaign.

That Moore detailed a few of the ways in which the president has harmed Black communities was a nice save after an abysmal opening salvo. He deserves credit for that. That politicians must speak to the public in three second clips, not expansive, thoughtful answers, is a tough break for a promising pol unwilling to come out and say clearly that Trump is racist. Moore had a chance to say what needed to be said and he did not.

'He is directly pulling from the language of white supremacy'

A handful of high-profile elected Democrats, most of them women unafraid to tell the truth, have offered masterclasses in calling Trump and his lackeys racist. U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is foremost among these truth tellers. AOC over the past eight years has shown over and over how easy it can be to call the racist in the White House a racist.

Ocasio-Cortez in 2019 shredded the president for "directly pulling from the language of white supremacy" during a candlelight vigil after one of the nation's many mass shootings, many of which are inspired by white supremacist rhetoric.

"So I don't want to hear the question, 'Is this president racist?' anymore," AOC said. "He is."

Maybe more than any other Democrat, AOC seems to understand the uncomfortable truths that must be told in an era of competitive authoritarianism in the United States. It is a disorienting and confusing time to be alive, with everyone living in their own curated algorithmically-driven realities. So we need public figures to speak plainly about the truth, about reality as it actually is. AOC gets that.

Moore, in his town hall with O'Donnell, could have gone in myriad directions, as you know in your marrow ten fucking years into this thing. He could have pointed to the president's recent pleas for immigrants from Scandinavian countries to come to the US in place of those from African and South American nations, or his administration only admitting white South Africans into the country at Elon Musk's behest. He could have pointed to Trump's strange and disturbing public dalliances with saying the n-word. He could have highlighted one of the dozens of different ways the Trump regime has worked to re-segregate public life in the United States, remove commemorations to enslaved people and Civil Rights icons, and place known white supremacists into powerful federal positions.

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Moore's answer seemed to be guided by the quants begging him to be careful about what he, one of only four Black governors in the history of the United States, says about race, and about the racists running the federal government. Do not scare the white folks, these politics knowers – their nose in the polling spreadsheets – might tell Moore as he preps for his presidential run. Moore told O'Donnell to go ahead and ask Donald Trump if Donald Trump is racist. Moore said this only a few days after Trump called himself the least racist president in recent history; I suppose that includes America's first Black occupant of the White House. Huge, as they say, if true.

It's hardly an exaggeration to say there were a dozen fantastic ways to respond to this question of whether the president – who has been accused of racist practices since Jimmy Carter was president – has a problem with people of color. He's demonstrated over and over again as a failed businessman and a failed celebrity and a failed president that he views the advancement of Black and brown people not as an vital part of American history, but as a problem in need of fixing. Why would a president make Stephen Miller, among the most nakedly racist men alive today, an influential White House advisor who has at times functioned as the president himself?

A president does not give that kind of power to a man who wails about the genocide of white Americans if that president does not hold an unshakably racist worldview. A president does not demand an immediate end to all diversity programs in government and academia and the business sector unless that president is racist. A president does not smear Black immigrants as garbage unless that president is racist.

Failing to plainly say the racist president is indeed racist has the added effect of legitimizing the idea that being labeled a racist is as harmful and discriminatory as racism itself. It's a common right-wing belief system that has bled into mainstream American politics and culture over the course of this so-far-terrible 21st century: That calling someone a racist – or even suggesting something they said was rooted in racism – is equally offensive as committing a racist act, attacking or demeaning someone for an immutable trait.

Good and bad things: They are the same. It's a neat little bad-faith trick the American right has mastered, feigning concern for racist attitudes by claiming they too are victims of (anti-white) racism.

To fail to call out clearcut racism from the nation's highest office feeds into this insidious idea. It helps to put those accused of racism on equal footing with those experiencing racism. Moore's answer to O'Donnell's question was designed not to upset our mob boss president, his dwindling supporters, and white folks in general. It's a bad look, Moore's handlers might think, for a Black presidential candidate to go around labeling white people as racist, even if they are. In this way Moore is taking the Obama path to power, one that fully acknowledges the challenges of being a presidential candidate of color in a country haunted by the institution of slavery on which it was founded. Maybe that's why it's easier for me, a white guy with a blog, to say our president is a ferocious racist than it is for Moore to sit before a national TV audience and say the same thing. There's a reason Obama spoke about race less than any other modern president. It was the calculation of a hyper-intelligent, savvy man who knows his country all too well.

But things have changed since Obama carefully and successfully ran for president in 2008. One change is the mood of the American electorate. Fourteen months into this godforsaken second Trump term, the electorate might be best defined as writhing with revolutionary fervor. Normies – folks who desperately do not want to do the politics thing – are fucking furious over the blatant constitutional violations and brutal terrorizing of American communities, including, of course, in Minnesota, where regular folks have transformed themselves into coordinated anti-government forces dedicated to keeping themselves and their neighbors safe from the president's personal army as it ignores court orders and commits crimes against the American people every day.

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We have retired knitters and PTA leaders and dudes in Callaway golf hats seeing their fellow citizens murdered in the streets by roving paramilitary units and looking strongly into how the tree of liberty is watered and when that watering might take place. We have people telling local media outlets they are ready to die in defense of their communities if that's what it takes to beat back this fascist assault at the hands of a regime that absolutely hates America. We have millions and millions of otherwise-apolitical people pouring into the streets to reiterate a most American concept: No kings, not now, not ever. We will have no kings, they howl. Zero point zero kings is the ideal number of kings, per the analytics of representative democracy.

Whatever the national mood was by the exhausting end of two George W. Bush terms, it was not this. Not even close.

People today are engaged, ready to take back a country they lost to a group of billionaires who decided sometime in 2024 that the insurrectionist president should reclaim his throne. People are mad as fucking hell and they're not afraid to say so. They are finally awake to the horrors of democratic backsliding. In such a political environment, animated by a palpable desperation for regime opponents to say what needs to be said and do what needs to be done, I think folks would be OK with a highly visible governor saying Trump is a goddamn racist.

Follow Denny Carter on BlueSky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.