They won the war. America's full-flown racist regime.

That the Civil War's winner of U.S. political battles is the traitorous Confederacy has been long observed; the seminal work, John Egerton's 1974 The Americanization of Dixie: The Southernization of America. I've been unable to keep up with the gush of similarly themed works, sloth I excuse on the grounds of the texts' familiar essence: The Old South then the "New South" — pretty much the Old South — then its demographic and industrial mix becoming a region nearly indistinguishable from the greater United States.

The exception was its politics. Not at all slow on the uptake, though. Rather, the Old New South's "ideology" dug in, then morphed into "I'll go where the [white] votes are" Goldwater, Nixon's "Southern Strategy" and Reagan's opening, "state-rights" presidential campaign speech in civil-rights-activists-murdered Philadelphia, Mississippi — all culminating in the GOP's supreme transmogrification into Donald J. Trump, he of "very fine people."

Notes Washington Post survivalist Catherine Rampell (whom I hope retained the staff's Bezos-Apocalypse Emergency Evacuation Plan): "This month, Trump imposed a near-total ban on entry to the United States of citizens from 12 countries." Of no coincidence is that eight of the 12 are African countries, and of considerable irony is that many of their very former residents would have greatly appreciated such a ban — by which I mean the nearly 400,000 Africans kidnapped by slave traders, destination: North America.

(Trump regimists, being deeply read in history, would I suspect argue that the 400k stat is widely misunderstood as ghastly — No, no, it reflects not the original-sin disgrace of America, but its virtue. After all, 10.7 million Africans sailed on ship Middle Passage, hence America's comp-ticketed 388,000, employed by spunky, dedicated-to-o.01%-prosperity entrepreneurs, were a mere fraction of history's total count.)

Showing the unstrained quality of merciful despotism in his first diktat, Trump gently issued only "a partial ban on nationals" from nine other countries — a list including even well-known global troublemaker Togo. But, showing the nasty, brutish and short life of despotic mercy, "last weekend," continues Rampell, "a leaked State Department memo said the [regime] might add 36 more countries to the list."

Now I'm not about to droppeth a rainy torrent of 57 national designations on you, the sum of Trump's Queens-birthed, Old South white supremacy (whose initial geographic mention further shows racism's metastasis far beyond Confederate state boundaries; indeed, a preexisting condition, but that's another story). Curiosity may seek the links Rampell provides. As for State's still untapped additions, there is no hairy knuckle-dragging "might" that has ever remained uncaged in Trump's bigoted skull. Thus 12 + 9 + 36 = safe bet, the last will join the 21.

There are, however, some curiosities I shall note. Absent from Trump's Boo! itemization is North Korea. Also Russia, Vladimir Putin's totalitarian "shithole" for real, and for that matter, genocidal Israel. Moreover, having taken under advisement this trio of 21st-century government oppression and much worse, I'm puzzled that Trump's terra horribilis hunt is only scheduled to bag the comparable dystopia of Zimbabwe.

On the other hand, it's in Africa. That eliminates bewilderment. And shock is replaced by profound, devastating dismay when daily we're hit by hammering reminders that world authoritarianism's friend, ally and ruling materialization of Donald Trump has effectively declared white supremacy the American Civil War's victor.