It's really so offensive when Biden says ridiculous gaslighty things like "No president has ever talked like that!" on matters of race when we have presidents on tape calling Black people the N-word and a long history of POTUS discourses preaching the ideology of white supremacy.

"Five White U.S. Presidents Who Used the N-Word" (an incomplete record) https://chicago.suntimes.com/2016/8/30/18420888/5-white-u-s-presidents-who-used-the-n-word

We've had presidents who enslaved humans and in at least one case, who raped a Black woman he owned. We've had presidents, including Washington himself, who actively promoted the genocide of indigenous people. Erasing this history to situate Trump's racism as exceptional is gross

What is exceptional about Trump is how ordinary he is in the pantheon of white supremacist presidents. His barbarous racism is just a throw back to the fascist origins of the nation which is why MAGA resonates and registers as "patriotic" for neo-Nazis and everyday racists alike.

In this regard, Trump does stand out in relation to very, very recent history. Most white supremacist presidents in the post civil rights era pretended to distance themselves from overt racists by resorting to "dog whistles". Trump doesn't whistle. He says the quiet part out loud

Compared to past white supremacist racists, Trump is actually somewhere in the middle of the pack. He represents the white supremacist mainstream: dabbling in eugenics and xenophobia, asserting white dominance and opposing antiracist activists. These are well established norms.

Even white supremacist presidential candidates in the late 19th century and early 20th century made empty promises to Black people and some even had Black "friends". Here, too, Trump is not exceptional. He's just an ordinary, barbarous racist like millions of people before him.

What makes Trump exceptional isn't his racism or his white supremacist beliefs, it's his routine violation of respectability politics and overt flouting of genteel norms common among the establishment. But none of this is more horrific than, say, owning and raping slaves.

What is worse? An uncivilized president or an uncivilized nation?

I guess that's what so sad about this state of affairs. Black people have been trying to tell y'all for generations that this is not a civilized society--that true civilization cannot coexist with legalized oppression, lynching and the persistence of white supremacy . . .

So we never really begin the work of building a civilized democracy because so many people still mistakenly believe that "we" already arrived and that the real problem is the backward clown in the White House rather than the backward institutions and culture that produced him.