Donald Trump and the Legacy of Malcolm X’s Chickens
When Lee Harvey Oswald shot and killed President John Kennedy on November 22, 1963, the nation immediately went into shock. Kennedy was not the first president to be assassinated in office, but this was very different than the murders of Abraham Lincoln (1861), James Garfield (1881), and William McKinley (1901).
First, there was no collective memory of such a thing. In a nation with an overall life expectancy under 70, a president had not been assassinated in 62 years.
The murder also arrived with unprecedented vividness and immediacy, via television. People all over the world watched JFK wave to a crowd as he sat next to his glamorous wife in the backseat of a convertible, and then BANG! Bullets tear through his head and neck as Jackie desperately struggles to catch him. Replayed, over and over.
And framing matters was the unusual nature of U.S. politics in 1963: mid-20th century consensus politics. Unlike today’s fierce partisan divisions, most mid-20th century Americans united around common national beliefs and agendas. After surviving the Great Depression and World War II with the help and under the direction of the federal government, most Americans were deeply patriotic. They lauded federal projects such as interstate highways and the G.I. Bill, while rallying around federal efforts to fight the Cold War. There were certainly divisive issues (particularly Civil Rights), but partisan bickering was muted by today’s standards. So when Kennedy was murdered, it was easy for all Americans to grieve. Indeed, it was absolutely expected. By contrast, Lincoln, Garfield (a former Union general), and McKinkley (Union battle veteran eventually promoted to captain) died during or in the aftermath of civil war.
Finally, there was John Kennedy’s personal popularity. Some will tell you that JFK barely won the 1960 election, that his popularity shot up after the assassination, and that he was more beloved in death than in life. All of that is all true. But devoid of context, it obscures Kennedy’s very real popularity during his lifetime. For more than of half of his nearly three years in office, JFK’s approval ratings were in the mid-high 70s. Two months before his death, they finally slipped below 60% for the first, but then immediately rebounded. At the time of his death, Kennedy’s approval rating was 58%.
No U.S. president since has had an approval rating that high that late in their term. None.
And so when JFK was suddenly murdered in front of its very eyes, a nation mourned.
What, then, were Kennedy’s harshest critics to do amid this moment of collective grief? If you would not praise the man, then the prudent course would be to shut up.
But Malcolm X was never much for shutting up. One of the 20th century’s most articulate and searing critics of American racism, he would not bite his tongue even on this occasion.
In December of 1963, after giving a speech about how MLK’s civil rights movement had been co-opted by the Kennedy administration, journalists asked him about the president’s recent assassination. First Malcolm chided the reporters for trying to bait him, saying they wanted nothing more than to hear him say “Hooray! Hooray, I’m glad he got it.” He would not do it. Except he kind of did.
Malcolm pointed out that the Kennedy administration had visited violence upon Africa and had “twiddled its thumbs” about everything from violence against civil rights protestors to the recent assassination of South Vietnamese leader Ngo Dinh Diem. After fostering this violent environment, the assassination of a U.S. president was merely a case of chickens coming home to roost.
This interpretation would be shocking enough for most Americans to contemplate. But Malcolm didn’t stop there. Without skipping a beat, he opined:
“Being an old farm boy myself, chickens coming home to roost never did make me sad; they’ve always made me glad.”
Elijah Muhammad, the Nation of Islam’s leader and the only man Malcolm X’s answered to, censored him immediately, forbidding him to make any public statements for 90 days. Three months later, Malcolm did not exactly walk back his statements. Rather, he insisted his words had been “distorted.” He now claimed that he’d merely blamed JFK’s assassination on a climate of hate, and implied that he was far too savvy to ever intimate he was glad the president had been killed.
Looking back, Malcolm X’s assertion is fuzzy at best; it’s difficult to credibly blame Kennedy’s assassination on the vagaries of Cold War era violence. However, I think Malcolm was correct more generally about chickens.
For over two centuries, the United States has been turning loose its fowl, and they may finally be coming home to roost. If so, their return will not be signaled by the death of a president, but by the intransigence of one who refused to leave office gracefully.
Donald Trump’s presidency, which more than anything else has been marked by an endless string of attacks on democratic norms, has spent the better part of a year threatening in various ways to not leave office. In the past he has talked openly about not stepping down should he lose. He has talked about delaying the election. When the election unfolded, he claimed he was winning when he was losing. After losing, his relentless accusations of electoral corruption and malfeasance ranged from baseless conspiracy theories to dozens of frivolous lawsuits. And since his looming eviction from the White House has seemed inevitable, he has not only double downed on the false accusations, but has committed himself and his administration to actively hampering the presidential transition instead of facilitating or even simply not cooperating.
https://apnews.com/d203eaa406dc5e7362dfa9e33522195e
[The only line I’m adding]: And now he has incited a violent mob invasion of the U.S. Capitol.
It’s difficult to assess just how much damage has been done to the American republic by Donald Trump’s raging lunatic presidency and the Republican Party’s shocking sycophancy to him in pursuit of power. Abstractions, even vital ones such as democratic norms, aren’t easily quantified and measured. And anyway, the process is ongoing; the assaults are still being waged daily. Undeniable, however, is that a substantial amount of damage has been done.
Republican-Democratic partisanship is likely now the worst it has been since the Civil War, and the repercussions are serious. Tens of millions of Trump loyalists do not believe a fair election was held in November. And perhaps a majority of American voters believe the opposition party is nothing short of evil.
In 1858, Illinois Republican U.S. Senate candidate Abraham Lincoln warned voters that a house divided against itself cannot stand. He lost that election, but two years later was elected president of the United States, and the nation came apart despite his fervent efforts to keep it together.
It is to early to tell, but it is possible that the end result of Trumpism will be the collapse or radical reconfiguration of the U.S. constitutional republic and its democratic norms. And if so, that will be the chickens coming home to roost.
How so?
The United States has a long history of protecting and prioritizing its economic and imperial interests over supporting democracy. Over the last 230+ years, there have been countless episodes of the United States opposing the freedom, sovereignty, and democratic institutions in other nations because they conflicted with U.S. economic and/or imperial agendas.
All of it is grounded in anti-democratic efforts against Indigenous nations, ranging from assaults on the Haudnosaunee (Iroquois) League of Nations (the world’s oldest extant democracy) during and after the American Revolution, to the ethnic cleansing of Native constitutional republics from the East, to wide-ranging genocidal campaigns against Native nations in California amid the Gold Rush and in other parts of the West. Genocide 
and ethnic cleansing, replete with concentration camps (reservations), advanced U.S. economic interests and imperial agendas at the expense of independent Indigenous nations, many of which practiced various forms of republican and democratic governance.
After destroying various participatory and representative Indigenous polities in North America, the United States looked abroad, repeatedly attacking and interfering in with nations throughout the Caribbean and Latin America. By the early 20th century, its violent imperial interventions had reached and violently suppressed an independence movement in the Philippines. To safeguard trade routes and gain access to resources and markets, the United States intervened directly to undermine and squelch democratic movements or even overthrow democratically elected governments across the globe.
After World War II, these practices accelerated under Cold War competitions with the Soviet Union. The are too many instances to count, but low lights include undermining the integrity of democratic elections; (Italy); overthrowing democratically elected leaders violent coups and replacing them with brutal dictators (Guatemala, Iran, and Chile); and of course the millions of killed during the Vietnam War to prevent the spread of left wing economies in Southeast Asia.
After the Cold War, the United States oversaw a “rehabilitation” of Russia that prioritized extreme neoliberal (free market) reforms. The subsequent economic and social degradation contributed to the nation’s descent into authoritarian Putinism. At the same time, the United States has built an inextricable economic alliance with China while largely turning a blind eye to its ruthless authoritarianism, rabid anti-democracy, and vicious human rights abuses.
Now the United States faces its own internal crisis, largely of its own making (though exacerbated by foreign online propaganda). The Soviet Union’s immolation and our uneasy alliance with China means there is no communist superpower/common enemy for Americans to rally against. The decline of Cold War culture has seen Americans trade conformism and unity for hyper individualism, and steadily increasing disregard for and even antagonism towards social norms.
The net result is a nation that has turned on itself. The house is divided. And as it begins to teeter, the chickens are returning home. Watch them roost in its rotting foundation. Feel the old wooden floors vibrate as they flap their feathered wings and settle in.
