Byron Donald's Chum Bucket

It’s maddening when somebody like Byron Donalds, the African-American Congressman from Florida, makes comments like he did at a Republican fundraiser the other night, saying “During Jim Crow, more Black people were not just conservative — because Black people have always been conservative-minded — but more Black people voted conservatively.”

The outrage was quick and predictable, as Donalds almost certainly anticipated it would be. Set aside, for a moment, the obvious fact that Black people did not “vote conservatively” in the Jim Crow South because most Black people couldn’t vote at all. Set aside the fact that discrimination during Jim Crow was codified into law. I’m asking you to set aside the utter ahistorical bullshit of his statement for one moment to consider that even Donalds does not mean what he says.

Byron Donalds. Photo by Heather Khalifa for the New York Times.

As I’ve been writing for the last several days, MAGA is built neither on fact or fiction. It’s built on sentiment, the sentiment that America was once the land of milk and honey, a wild land free of strife where rugged men made fortunes by the sweat of their brows, a land where men did man stuff and women did woman stuff and nobody got confused about who did what. The MAGA imagination refashions American history into an EPCOT attraction, scrubbed free of the grit and grime spattered across our story.

When Donalds talks about “Jim Crow,” he’s not actually rhapsodizing about lynchings, institutionalized segregation, and Black disenfranchisement. Instead, he’s describing a sentiment meant to assuage white anxiety and ease white guilt. Its truthfulness is irrelevant because he’s not trying to communicate truth. He’s offering moral license to white MAGA America for their resentment and rage: “Even a Black guy says things were better back then!”

This is the MAGA shadow play, a strange kabuki in which words are denuded of their meanings. The “facts don’t care about your feelings” crowd is, curiously, much more attuned to feelings than facts. The feeling of America outweighs the actuality of America, with all of its nuance and contradiction. The feeling of a nation gone mad outweighs the actuality of a rich and strong nation wrestling with a host of difficult, but not intractable, problems. So when somebody comes along and promises to set the world right again, to make it “great” again, no wonder a certain percent of the population falls for the con. It’s a world made simple, for simpletons.

Donalds knows all this. He obviously knows that Jim Crow was a horror show for Black Americans. He knows his own career would not be possible during Jim Crow. He knows that his words will be met with outrage and scorn. And that’s precisely the point. MAGA world demands outrageous claims, the more outrageous the better, so long as they comport with the MAGA worldview.

The audience for these claims may believe them or they may not. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that somebody is saying the things they wish to be true, whether or not they actually are true. That’s how you get Sean Spicer claiming Trump’s inauguration was “the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration—period—both in person and around the globe.” It’s how you get Kellyanne Conway unspooling lie after lie during her own tenure as presidential advisor. It’s how you get the entire cabal of Steve Bannons and Rudy Giulianis and Paul Manaforts and Stephen Millers and the rest of the greasy sack lunch Trump relies on.

It's not that they’re lying (although, of course they’re lying), it’s that they’re telling the truth as they wish it to be. When Conway coined the term “alternative facts,” she wasn’t being glib. “Truth,” in their view, is about framing instead of evidence. Again, the “facts over feelings” crowd seems utterly uninterested in facts.

Donalds is auditioning to be Trump’s VP pick. The chief prerequisites are the ability to lie without compunction, to fiercely defend your lies, to double and triple down on those lies when given the opportunity, and to attack those who would question the lies. Deny, deny, deny. Never apologize. Never admit error.

Byron Donalds is obviously a smart and accomplished man whose own marriage to a white woman would have been illegal during Jim Crow. Again, he knows all of this but chose to throw his ludicrous chum bucket into the waters in order to attract the attention of his Great White. No doubt he got it.