As president-elect Donald Trump rolls out his new cabinet-to-be, working and oppressed people should grow more and more wary. So far, there are only a handful of sure picks from the Trump administration. Among those is former General Michael Flynn who is slated for National Security Advisor, despite the fact that he “has shown a stunning contempt for the Geneva conventions and other laws prohibiting torture” (Human Rights Watch). Another is Michael Pompeo for Director of the CIA. Pompeo has been noted for his unflinching defense of infinite detention, torture and mass surveillance.
Perhaps the most worrisome of all, however, is Attorney General-to-be Jeff Sessions. Since his appointment, Sessions has been in the news for his avowed support for the Ku Klux Klan, saying that he “thought they were okay until [he] learned they smoked marijuana.” As an attorney in Alabama, he called a Black colleague “boy” and reportedly made use of the N-word. Also, while practicing law in the Yellowhammer State, Sessions described the NAACP, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the National Conference of Churches—three of the most important organizations in the Civil Rights Movement—as “anti-American organizations teaching anti-American values.”
These facts all came to light as Sessions was skewered before Congress in 1986 when he stood as a potential appointee to a federal judgeship. All these revelations were enough to lead the Republican-led Senate in the height of the Reagan era to reject Sessions’ appointment. Despite the intense right-wing domination of government and political discourse in the 1980s, Ted Kennedy reasoned that Sessions’ appointment was denied due to his “gross insensitivity on the questions of race” (translation to everyday parlance: because of his barefaced racism). He was only the third potential appointee to be rejected in the 50 years prior.
Sessions’ racism extends beyond Black America to peoples around the world. Unsurprisingly, Sessions is an opponent of undocumented immigrants, but takes his xenophobic, anti-immigrant stance a step further by opposing conventional immigration. This is a shockingly antiquated position even among bigots, who are bound by social norms shaped by a pronounced fightback of oppressed people. What Sessions’ hardline and total opposition to immigration reveals is a political attitude looking for an unapologetic return to the most virulently hateful and bigoted politics of centuries past, unusual even among far-right figures like Ted Cruz and Donald Trump himself.
Yet, we are living in a new political era where the far-right’s ideas—long kept dormant by social progress brought by decades of struggle against oppression—are coming out of hibernation. Emboldened by “getting their man in the White House,” the “alt-right” and other fascist groupings are coming into the open.
It is consequently unsurprising that the same Trump that ran a campaign on overt racism also appointed Sessions. It confirms what many already suspected about the upcoming administration: that Trump would in fact not be tempered his electoral success, but rather be emboldened by it. This is why Steve Bannon is Trump’s chief political advisor and why once-fringe figures like Pompeo, Flynn and Sessions are receiving high-ranking cabinet positions.
It is also why the protest and resistance movement is critically important. The fascist and alt-right was once kept dormant by struggle against all bigotry and oppression. This is the only reason why accusations of racism, sexism and anti-LGBTQ bigotry are taken seriously and bear any weight. The
recent protests, walkouts, strikes and other acts of resistance have also shaken the ruling establishment: it was only after people entered into resistance that the Democratic Party began calling on people to “give Trump a chance.” Clearly, the ruling class is deeply concerned about Trump’s deeply destabilizing impact, and Sessions and others’ appointments cannot but attract even more criticism and general disillusionment.
