American Trilogy: OJ Simpson, Louis Farrakhan, Donald Trump

On Oct. 3, 1995, after a trial that had lasted as long as a presidential election campaign, a jury found O.J. Simpson not guilty of murdering Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman. Blacks cheered. Whites were horrified and angered that Blacks cheered. Blacks cheered even louder at whites being horrified. All they saw was white derangement syndrome. 

The reaction to the verdict–not the verdict itself–showed a nation more profoundly divided along racial and ideological lines than whites wanted to admit, though Blacks lives were measured in the price paid for those divisions.  

There was no reckoning. Blacks didn’t think they owed whites an explanation for what they took as a rare victory from a justice system stacked against them. As the old Black saying went, “When white folks say ‘justice,’ they mean ‘just us.’” Fueled by the same media that had exploited the 13-month trial for ratings, the nation focused on sensationalism, conspiracy theories, mutual hatred and power grabs further poisoned by the total-war rhetoric of Newt Gingrich, the authoritarian scout of presidents to come who was just then beginning his reign of bile, Contract on America in hand. 




Whites didn’t want to understand why Blacks celebrated, including Blacks who knew O.J. was guilty. “For many whites,” the scholar Henry Louis Gates wrote at the time, “a sincere belief in Simpson’s innocence look[ed] less like the culture of protest than like the culture of psychosis.” 

The culture of psychosis is back. Or rather, it never left. It defines us. It’s not about color, or just about color. It’s about tribes, driven more by ideological psychosis than race or religion or party affiliation. The tribes of 1995 have switched places. Donald Trump hasn’t killed anybody, at least not directly. But he is the convicted felon 34 times over, the twice-impeached president who was found liable for sexual assault and would have been found liable for leading the insurrection and terrorism of January 6, had the case proceeded. The glove fit. 

Unlike O.J., he was never acquitted. But he was re-elected. His supporters haven’t stopped cheering and dancing on rooftops, real and metaphorical. His opponents have looked on horrified, unwilling to accept that 77 million people could vote that way, less willing to understand them, willing only to vilify them, as if that’s going to improve matters. 




Disbelief would be disingenuous. The culture of psychosis we saw on full display in 1995 told us then that evidence, facts, truth, justice and history are irrelevant. Tribalism alone matters, paired in Trump’s case with a power defined by divine right and a machinery of fabrications to power the myth, like the one about god intervening to save the man so he could save America.

America excels in eras of mass hysteria: The Red Scare of Woodrow Wilson’s senescent years, the McCarthyism of the 1950s, the Islamophobia and constitutional shredding of post-9/11 Bushism. In retrospect these all seem like survivable missteps, because democratic institutions weakened but endured. There was an independent judiciary, an oppositional legislature and a slightly less sensational and definitely less fractured media. Wilson’s repressive regime lost the White House, the House and the Senate for Democrats for more than a decade. Joe McCarthy’s own colleagues in the Senate ended his war on Americans. A majority-Republican Supreme Court diluted or invalidated Bush’s worst excesses. 

Those guard rails have lost their integrity. Courts, lawmakers, corporations have become too submissive or too eager to show fealty. Their lord knows. He’s about to take advantage. 

In a country half made up of enemies, four years won’t be enough for Trump to purify America. The 22nd Amendment limiting presidents to two terms won’t have to be repealed, now that Trump is repealing chunks of the Constitution by executive order so he can impose his blend of martial law and reign of terror, at least for that half of America that makes up its internal enemies. His invalidation of birthright citizenship is no different than if he had invalidated the First Amendment’s press protection (as he may yet), and the 14th Amendment’s protection of birthright is more explicit–more precise–than the First’s.  His truth is marching on. 




American history is nothing if not a scriptural bounty of precedents that, like Nostradamus on mushrooms, prophesy the present. Barely two weeks after the Simpson verdict in 1995, the Nation of Islam Minister Louis Farrakhan led his so-called Million Man March on Washington. They’d descended on Washington in droves–400,000? 800,000? A million? The number would be as controversial as Trump’s inaugural crowd in 2017, a controversy Trump evaded this time around by claiming a chill. 

You may remember Farrakhan, that sordid seethe of hate, that Goebbels of anti-Semitism whose Nation had as much to do with Islam as Khomeini’s version of Shiitism did (which is to say: next to nothing), that bow-tied gangster whose Fruit of Islam black shirts were the antecedents of Proud Boys, Three Percenters and the rest of maga’s maggoty militias. 

Farrakhan’s malice droned and rambled and jibber-jabbered in triumph (he went on so absurdly long that, like at Trump rallies, thousands filed out long before the end), taunting and insulting the establishment that had snubbed him for so long. Banking on anger and resentment and victimhood–the Trump playbook before Trump–he had made this happen. Tapping into that old psychosis, he made it seem like the biggest populist revolt of Black men since 1963. He let loose, his bigotry vindicated, his self-promotion unbound, his children at his side a small army of nepotists, his brand exulting over the city. 

The difference is that Farrakhan could only muster that million, while Trump, a white Farrakhan in hot-pink tie, mustered the 312 necessary to regain power. Farrakhan was a buffoon. So is Trump. But one of those buffoons is now in his 90s and forgotten, and the other is the most powerful psychotic in the world. As in 1995, as in 2016, we chose to learn nothing, choosing instead between being horrified and jubilant. Neither will answer the moment if we still want a Republic and if, as Ben Franklin once advised, we aim to keep it.

Pierre Tristam is the editor of FlaglerLive. A version of this piece aired on WNZF.

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