Nature shows us many examples of “natural enemies” in the wild. Mongooses will take on poisonous snakes without a thought, sea lions will mob up and attack killer whales, and a pack of hyenas will take on a lion three times their size. When you know who your enemy is; when you know you’re just prey pretending to be a predator, you attack without hesitation.
Which explains why Trump-era Republicans are lashing out at any black woman they can find, whether it’s White House reporter April Ryan, Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters of California or, now, former national security adviser Susan Rice. Trump-era Republicans hate and fear black women, and they’re convinced that their downfall will be at the hands of a black woman’s pen, policy or protest.
On Monday the Republican echo chamber went nuts after a Bloomberg news story reported that Rice, President Barack Obama’s former national security adviser, had “repeatedly” asked to “unmask” the names of Trump campaign and transition officials who were caught on tape talking to Russian spies under investigation. Rice, as part of the investigation into Russian hacking and meddling in U.S. affairs, had every right to ask who was on the other end of a phone call between a foreign agent and an American who might one day be part of the White House. However, Republicans have concluded that this is somehow validation of their Fox & Friends-induced belief that Obama was spying on Donald Trump.
Since everyone has already told the administration that the wiretapping story was a lie (even Fox News suspended the guy who said it), let’s focus instead on Rice. Why, out of the dozens of former White House officials involved in the Russia investigation, are Republicans focusing on her absolutely legal requests? For the same reason that White House press secretary Sean Spicer got snippy with Ryan, and Bill O’Reilly came after Waters. Republicans smell their natural enemy.
This is not some essentialist “black queen as savior of our men” polemic masquerading as commentary. It’s a stone-cold fact that while many Americans are waking up to the havoc wreaked by less than 100 days of a Trump administration, African-American women, a full 94 percent of them, saw Trump for what he was last fall. That group includes African-American Republican women like Condoleezza Rice.
