Foreshadowing: The One-Time Trump Win

Luis Quiros
7 min readFeb 1, 2021

On January 24, 2017, I hosted the first talk radio episode of Q’s Justice Unplugged on WVOX 1460 AM. As a Bernie Sanders’ follower, advocate, and voter living in Westchester, where Hillary Clinton was the automatic winner, I uplifted the moment and what a Trump victory could elevate in society. If Hillary Clinton claimed the victory, we would confront a passive era of inaction justified by the celebration based primarily on Hillary Clinton being the first women president. Decades of inaction, of bad policies at the hands of the Clintons and others in the Democratic Party, the neoliberal agenda, would once again plague us — with more lives being neglected and the violence of White supremacy being addressed as incidents rather than systemic. Hillary Clinton knew how to walk between raindrops without getting wet; Trump, would get pneumonia with every action. A new activist base would be awakened — the White community.

For hundreds of years the testimony and the lives claimed by racism, a persistence of violence and oppression didn’t shock and disrupt our social structure as much as the spotlight of a White male personifying the White supremacy that lived on since the founding of this country. No longer could we go to academia or systems to give us the language to justify the actions carried out by Trump and his supporters. The creed that sameness should be the desired ethnic state was toppled over and assimilation outside the immigration context was exposed: to be neutral or centrist is immoral.

Embedded into every fabric of our society, even with some of our own fighting against us, colonized minds, known as the Non-Others, have used our language, knowledge, safety nests, and mother nature against our quest for dignity. This Eurocentric perspective provoked Toni Morrison to note that race has functioned as a metaphor necessary for the “construction of Americanness — the creation of the national identity of America being [W]hite — .”[1] If what is even reasonably moral is true, it dies with the lack of evidence when it comes to Europe’s entrance into the Americas. The ramification suggests that the ills of the past are irrelevant to today’s world because people in the past simply did not know as much as we do now; past problems were caused by human stupidity and prejudice. As a theory of history, it is weak; indeed, some would argue that it offers no theory of historical changes at all other than that society gets better.

For particularity, since 1492, our moral positioning has been unauthentic — fake where it matters most. To hide behind slavery, immigrants were catapulted as the builders of this country, though it was the cotton extracted by slaves that build this nation. The inalienable-ness of rights in the Declaration of Independence at the end of the eighteenth century meant nothing more or less than that from then on, people — and not God’s command or the customs of history — should be law’s ground zero. So Jefferson’s desire for an intellectual attachment founded the University of Virginia in 1819, using a river for transporting materials and supplies, Black workers, and a curriculum of scientific racism. In his Notes on the State of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson was able to conclude that “since blacks secrete less by the kidney, and more by the glands of the skin, they have a very strong and disagreeable odor.” He declared that he had never found “a Black man who had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration, never saw one who had shown any understanding or appreciation of the elementary levels of painting or sculpture.”

Fast forward, the Supreme Court’s historical unwillingness to use the favored group as an equal protection baseline, and unwillingness to require the state to justify allowing the poor to fall below that baseline[2] assures Non-Others are processed through and entertained by a fake democracy. It is unquestionable that one of the most cynical and often used tools of the demagogic and opportunistic politician is the glorification of the people as central to the growth of the nation.

No wonder we Others conclude that the start to our punishing consequences couldn’t have been what we did, didn’t do, should, or could have done. We Others were young in our lives when we understood that this nation, strategically, divided itself by race, class, gender for an unsatisfiable appetite of more of things and leisure time. Hence, a shortage of resources and an abundance of free and inadequately paid labor. No longer were we going to allow people to tell us Others to participate in a process that would reshape them to be as civilized and moral as they are.

Inspirational, Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) charged the ills of the United States’ early history and educational ideologies. Tolstoy wrote about his fondest childhood memories, Childhood and got it published immediately. Not surprising, during his studies of law and oriental languages, he was described as unable and unwilling to learn. He referred to himself as an anarchist, always in conflict with the church, government, political leaders, and even his own family. An aristocrat by birth, he eventually renounced his wealth and turned to a peasant life, reminding me of Rosseau. All alone, Tolstoy, was a great moral philosopher and deep religious thinker.

Technological, medical, and scientific progress since the start of this nation would never have been possible without planning a community of Others via the exploitation of our Otherisms. (Skin color, gender, accent, culture, even attire). On January 3, 1919, Roosevelt announced that one becomes an American by assimilating themselves because there is only room for the American flag and one language. How aware are we that what has happened during the first two months of 2021, has been our history since before the forming of the 13 colonies? How many in this nation or globalized world believe that Biden defined his own presidency? [3]

Sadly, for too few, our research was on point when after the first school shooting, April 1999 in Colorado, I was quoted in newspapers about how many similar lockdowns would follow in White middle and upper class schools, as opposed to the inner city where metal detectors are often placed.[4]

Accurate social narrating, prior to an actual incident, for too few is a practice. For example, prior to the start of COVID-19, the too few, cautioned this nation about its most neglected epidemic,… mental illness and historical plagues and lockdowns.[5] For us Others, lockdowns were normalized by zip codes, zoning, broken window theories, unaffordable due process, and in total, gentlemen’s agreements. To incite or instigate a sense of urgency toward eradicating forms of White supremacy, which in itself is most definitely, affirmative action, Trump had to win.[6]

Trump’s existence and presidency fostered radical and queering artistry across disciplines. His win made the invisibleness of deceits, visible. Exposing the intentionality of 1492 is his legacy, dominated neither by person nor ideology, he exposed the invisible hand of the market on all political parties and White people. A few days prior to the confirmation of Kavanaugh for the already conservative Supreme Court, October 2, 2018, Trump was loud in securing that Others’ history remain invisible: “It’s a very difficult and scary time for young men in America, when you can be guilty of something that you may not be guilty of.” The same day Kavanaugh was confirmed, Trump pursued the restart of the stop-and-frisk policy that abused, traumatized, and incarcerated so many people of color, of all ages.

Trump as a businessperson and president revitalized violence, exposing the deep-rooted social instabilities in our society and the people who no longer feared standing with those principles. And this can be traced prior to the signing of the Declaration of Independence and 1492. Trump’s program to continue keeping invisible the anti-colonial intellectuals of the Third World Others was missed by academia and political scientists. And those that might have figured it out, were too scared to risk their tenure and media popularity.

It has taken centuries for the Non-Others to learn that you can produce equality while glorifying Otherism’s and propagandizing sameness. Despite defending in word the people’s sovereignty and the notion of the common good as their goal, in practice, their decisions are subservient to the interests of big transnational companies. [7]

Easy to surmise that Trump would have only one term and that no matter the next president, they would become known for taking a platform placed by Trump. Biden is now known for being the second president to deal with racial equality — something Barack Obama missed out on — the first one being Johnson (1964). Predictable was the racial violence on Eric Garner and many Others, the violence at the Capitol and other cities.

The opportunity to end our longest race war, The War on Poverty, has been pushed to the front of the line by Trump’s legacy.

We are all Others. When we know it, the world order is restored into action in pursuit of justice.

[For more reflection and discourse, please visit: www.justiceforothers.com]

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[1] Ronald Takaki, ed. Debating Diversity, Clashing Perspectives on Race and Ethnicity in America. New York: Oxford Univ. Press. 2002, 37.

[2] Neuborne, State Constitutions and the Evolution of Positive Rights. 20 Rutgers, L.J. 881, 893–95. (1988–1989) (Collecting state constitution “poverty” provisions).

[3] Biden Seeks to Define His Presidency by an Early Emphasis on Equity. Jim Tankersley and Michael D. Shear. New York Times. Jan. 23, 20121.

[4] Luis Quiros, An Other’s Mind. 2011, P.76.

[5] www.anothersmind.com Refer to Rebuttals, Testimony, Opinions. 4/14/2017 WVOX Politics & Your Health Bob Marrone & Dr. Victor Sternberg. Start at minute 12:30. USA about winning versus doing the righteousness. Never enough. Quiros call-in at 17:23, USA with epidemic of mental illness, young people. Veteran suicides. Short-sidedness keeps us from being alert and conscious — neglecting the predictability a future flu virus killing hundreds and thousands of people. An Other’s Mind, pgs. 4, 46, 164, 219, 234. Justice Unplugged, pgs. 2–4, 8, 13–14, 16, 39, 82, 115–116, 162, 207 — Social Separation, human experiments (Slaves, Guatemala).

[6] www.anothersmind.com Refer to Q’s Justice Unplugged; Weekly Guest Spot 4/18/18 Pt. 1 and Pt. 2.

[7] Teresa Forcades i Vila, Els crims de les grans companyies farmacèutiques (Ed. Cristianisme i Justícia: Barcelona 2006), Quaderns Cristianisme i Justícia, 141; translated into Spanish (2006) and English (2006). Fake Democracies and the Political Consequences of the Christian Notion of Person, 56.

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Luis Quiros
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Luis Quiros has striven as an activist, community organizer and educator against the marginalization of the Others. Author: An Other’s Mind & Justice Unplugged.