Jeremy Christian, an avowed white supremacist with a violent past, is the alleged killer of Rick Best and Taliesin Myrddin Namkai-Meche, but Donald Trump is not blameless for their deaths. The murder of these two heroic men and the near death of a third, Micah David-Cole Fletcher, happened last Friday in Portland, Oregon, when, according to numerous reports, Christian boarded an afternoon commuter train and began hurling anti-Muslim insults at two teenage girls, one of whom was wearing a hijab.



A witness, Rachel Macy, told the Oregonian what happened next. She reported that the three men were attempting to form a barrier between Christian and the girls to protect the teenagers from Christian’s threats when Christian suddenly brandished a knife and slashed all three men in their necks. Blood was immediately everywhere. “It was just a swift, hard hit,” Macy said. “It was a nightmare.”

A nightmare, indeed. In fact, deadly violence due to what you wear on your head is the very specific nightmare of every Muslim woman who wears a hijab in the US today. Highly visible in a toxic Islamophobic environment, Muslim women in hijab endure all kinds of unconscionable abuse daily.

The FBI does not track hate crimes by gender, but research in the Netherlands and France offers some measure of the scale of the problem. There, studies show that Muslim women account for 90% and 81% of reported anti-Muslim incidents involving violence respectively. (In most cases, the Muslim woman was wearing a headscarf.) To the anti-Muslim bigots, a hijab is not a sign of piety. It’s a target.

By the way, if you feel inclined to tell Muslim women to remove their hijabs as a way of avoiding violence, please don’t. Better yet, instruct the bigots not to attack them instead.

But if Christian’s act is a nightmare, Trump’s presidency is the daymare, a horror show made all the worse as it’s experienced while being wide awake. Under increasing pressure to issue a condemnation of the act, Trump finally tweeted a message concerning this heinous crime. “The violent attacks in Portland on Friday are unacceptable,” the tweet read. “The victims were standing up to hate and intolerance. Our prayers are w/ them.”

This may sound presidential, until you look into it a bit. First, we can note that the tweet came not from Trump’s personal account, where we have (unfortunately) become accustomed to hearing the (unfortunate) thoughts of Mr Trump, but from @POTUS, which is chiefly run by his staff.

Incidentally, it’s easy to tell the difference between @POTUS and @realDonaldTrump by the former’s lack of spelling errors, cheap insults and exclamation points!

Understanding that this message of condemnation was tweeted from @POTUS and not @realDonaldTrump is crucial because Trump’s far-right followers will see an @POTUS tweet more as an exhibition of the exigencies of presidential performance than as an expression of Trump’s principles. They won’t be wrong.

Second, the tweet makes no mention of the anti-Muslim cause of this near triple murder in the country Trump now presides over. This absence is far from surprising. Trump has almost never acknowledged even the existence of American Muslims.

His now famous comment of “Islam hates us” indicates that Muslims definitionally cannot be true Americans, ie “us”. His official statement congratulating Muslims on the beginning of Ramadan spends more words on terrorism than on Islam. And he never courted American Muslims during the election season. In Trump’s political lexicon, Muslims are to be extremely vetted, banned, registered and bombed –never tolerated, let alone respected.

But Muslims are hardly the only group to suffer under a newly virulent extreme right wing. Richard Collins III, who was African American, was also stabbed to death recently on the University of Maryland campus, allegedly by a member of the white supremacist “Alt-Reich: Nation”.

Last March in New York City, another white supremacist, James Jackson, allegedly killed Timothy Caughman, a 66-year-old African American, also with a knife. (What is it with crazy white men and their blades?) And Desiree Magnum, the non-Muslim girl on the train in Portland, is also African American. Whether black or Muslim or any kind of other, categories collapse in the minds of racists once difference from them is perceived.

But the point we must grasp is deeper and more consequential than merely affirming how Trump’s lexicon validates a logic of violence towards Muslims and African Americans. The real conclusion to draw is that Trump is not, never will be, and never even aims to be a president for all the people of the United States. On the contrary, Trump is and only will be a president for himself.

With his self-aggrandizing behavior, this is not a difficult notion to grasp, but it’s the far right that doesn’t meaningfully understand this point. The far right foolishly believes Trump is their president, as if Trump has the presence of mind to believe in any ideology, let alone contemporary forms of fascism. Yet by not rupturing ties with the white nationalists and hate-mongers that he has courted, Trump emboldens their destructive capabilities to a point we soon may not be able to fathom and he may not be able to contain.

James Buchal, the Republican chair for the greater Portland area, told the Guardian that a rally scheduled for 4 June should not rely on the police for protection. Instead, he says, rightwing demonstrators ought to hire far-right militia groups such the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters to guard them while marching. Both the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters are extremist anti-government groups who urge violent “self-defense” against our system of government.

In Portland, marches by rightwing groups are currently being planned for 4 June and also 10 June, the same day that the anti-Muslim organization Act for America is planning a nationwide “March Against Sharia” in major urban centers across the country. Unsurprisingly, Act for America has also called upon these same groups to provide “security” at their rallies.

Trump’s romance with the far right has brought us to a point where our own politicians are demanding that rightwing extremist groups should usurp the power and authority of the state. We simply can’t let that happen.

The violence inflicted by the state on minorities is already bad enough. Imagine the conflicts and divisions in the country if rightwing extremists get their wishes to assume the security functions of government. Trump gave this looming combat legitimacy. And no tweet from Trump, from any account, will be able to stop it.