Behind the Byline With Adam Serwer

Serwer: The moment it occurred to me—not the phrase but the phenomenon itself—was when I was watching the president’s rally after the Kavanaugh hearings, and how he just really took such pleasure in attacking Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who had accused Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault when they were teenagers. And his audience, in turn, was so delighted by that, regardless of what the collateral damage or consequences might be. It just occurred to me that everybody was having a really good time, and that this wasn’t the first time that the Trump crowd had taken such joy in Trump humiliating someone weaker and more vulnerable.

Taking pleasure in cruelty is not unique to Trump supporters. What’s unique about this phenomenon with the current president is that it’s such an important part of his own political culture. It’s not that people who are not Trump supporters are incapable of engaging in similar behavior. It’s just that he elevated it to a kind of virtue, and uses it to forge a communal feeling with his base.

Aberra: Over the last few months, the pandemic and racial reckoning in America have been covered as the biggest stories in our country this year. You’ve written about the intersection of the two in several articles. What do you think about the rhetoric of calling both issues pandemics?

Serwer: Calling them dual pandemics is a bit of a misnomer, in the sense that one of these was already here when the coronavirus hit. The coronavirus just made it visible. Black Americans were already in a crisis. They’ve been in a crisis since the 2008 recession when a substantial amount of Black wealth was wiped out. It never recovered and still hasn’t really recovered despite the so-called Trump boom, which is really a continuation of growth from the Obama administration. What we’ve seen happen on top of that is tremendous economic collapse, which has disproportionately harmed Black people, Native Americans, Latinos—basically people of color all over the country.

These things are sort of overlapping national crises, but it’s inaccurate to call them both pandemics. One crisis has been here for a long time and is the result of not addressing previous national crises that other people who were not Black, Hispanic, or Native American had essentially learned to live with in their daily lives. What really happened is that the coronavirus brought these things into view, but that’s not the same.

Aberra: Do you have a favorite story or one that you’re particularly proud of?

Serwer: My piece on how the emergence of data on racial disparities of the coronavirus victims has affected perceptions of whether or not the pandemic itself was as much of a national emergency as people said it was. I feel pretty proud of that piece and how it panned out in terms of my examination of what people said and what that said about their motives. And I also think it panned out in terms of how to describe the reasons why the coronavirus has had such a tremendous racially disparate effect across the country.

Aberra: In one of your recent articles, you wrote, “For the past few months, Trump and the conservative propaganda apparatus have struggled to make the old race-and-gender-baiting rhetoric stick to [Joe] Biden.” Now that Biden has selected Kamala Harris as his vice-presidential candidate, how do you expect that rhetoric to change?