May 29, 2018: Why Do Bigots like Roseanne Barr Gravitate toward Trump?

 

5/29/18: It’s a sad day for the president. His favorite TV show has been canceled after Roseanne Barr goes on a Twitter rampage every bit as unhinged as any of his own. 

Barr’s meltdown begins when she responds to a comment about Valerie Jarrett, who worked for President Obama. Barr describes Jarrett’s looks: “Muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby = vj.” That’s the first nail in Barr’s coffin, a racist twofer, combining a spritz of anti-Muslim hate with 1870s-style denigration of African Americans. 

 

We all make mistakes – but not anti-Semitic mistakes. 

Suddenly aware that her “joke” might have been poorly received, Barr apologizes. Still, apologizing can be hard if you have sawdust for brains. Barr decides the best way to fight fire is to pour gasoline on it and hold her Twitter fingers in the flames. The second nail in her career coffin is an anti-Semitic tweet. First, Barr labels Chelsea Clinton as “Chelsea Soros Clinton.” Then she claims she is married to a nephew of George Soros, a liberal Jewish financier. 

BLOGGER’S NOTE: See 11/3/19 and 8/20/20, for examples of QAnon anti-Semitism infecting the party of Trump.

 

Ms. Clinton gets wind and politely points out, via Twitter, that while the nephews of Mr. Soros may be fine individuals she cannot say. She is not married to any of them or all of them. 

Barr picks up a third nail and tries to hammer it home. Before she can stop herself Barr’s nimble fingers are tapping away again. “Sorry to have tweeted incorrect info about you! Please forgive me!” she faux apologizes. “By the way, George Soros is a nazi who turned in his fellow Jews 2 be murdered in German concentration camps & stole their wealth-were you aware of that? But, we all make mistakes, right Chelsea?” 

That is true. We all make mistakes. We just don’t all make anti-Semitic mistakes. I once ran into the back of a car driven by one of my former students. It was the only wreck I’ve caused in fifty years. It was a mistake. 

It was not an anti-Semitic mistake.

 

A large part of Barr’s problem boils down to the same kind of profound ignorance we see in the president. A bare minimum of fact-checking shows Soros was born in Hungary on August 12, 1930. This would make him eight years old when World War II began, fourteen when Germany surrendered. 

In other words, Ms. Barr was falling for and spreading the kind of misinformation that circulates regularly on the internet. In November 2016, for example, Snopes, the fact-checking site, debunked a rumor that Soros had once been an officer in the dreaded SS, the military arm of the Nazi regime. 

That would have been quite a trick for a boy of fourteen.

Nope: Not George Soros.

 

Oskar Groening worked at Auschwitz but was not found out for seventy years.

Suppose Barr wanted to look under a few rocks and find some actual Nazis to tweet-worry about? She need look no further than Richard B. Spencer, a really big fan of President Trump. (See also: 5/31/18.) 

Or she might consider the stirring words of Rocky Suhayda, leader of the American Nazi Party. That would be an obvious place to start. Back in 2016, he had this to say: 

Now, if Trump does win, OK, it’s going to be a real opportunity for people like white nationalists, acting intelligently to build upon that. You know how you have the black political caucus and whatnot in Congress, and, everything, to start building on something like that, OK.

 

It doesn’t have to be anti, like the movement’s been for decades, so much as it has to be pro-white. It’s kinda hard to go and call us bigots, if we don’t go around and act like a bigot. That’s what the movement should contemplate.

 

What Suhayda was saying was this: “We are bigots. We all know that. We’re members of the American Nazi Party! But if we’re smart about how we act we can make it hard for people who aren’t bigots to prove that we are. Are we? Sure. And Trump is our kind of guy.”

For some reason American Nazis gravitate toward Trump.

June 2, 2020: President Trump - A Twisted Talent for Stirring Anger and Fear

 

6/2/20: The deaths of 106,000 Americans from the coronavirus are bad enough. The toll on jobs, as our economy grinds to a halt, with more than 40 million Americans suddenly out of work, is bad enough.  

Now, on top of that we see scores of American cities riven by angry protests and even rioting.

 

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This president has no more moral authority than the cop who knelt on George Floyd’s neck until he was dead.

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And who do we look to in vain for a calming voice in a time of growing fury? Donald Trump? This president has no more moral authority than the cop who knelt on George Floyd’s neck until he was dead. 

Trump is what Trump is. He’s an adept hater. That makes him the wrong man, in the wrong job, at the wrong time. We all remember how he got a start in politics. His rise in the right-wing pantheon came on the strength of his birtherism. Racism with a new name. Trump claimed that Barack Obama wasn’t an American. He said he could prove it. 

He never did.

 

More recently, he gave a birther radio personality, Rush Limbaugh, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. 

He employs a birther press secretary. Birthers stick together, like Klansmen and Klanswomen without sheets. 

Trump is who he is, a profoundly warped human being. He can’t help to heal a nation because his superpower is creating division. During his run for the White House, Trump appealed to fans like the West Virginia woman who called Michelle Obama “an ape in heels.” He employed a campaign co-chair in New York who joked that Mrs. Obama should go back to Africa, “live in a cave,” and have sex with gorillas. Since entering politics Trump has managed to pluck the heartstrings of neo-Nazi luminaries like Richard Spencer, David Duke and Rocky Suhayda. It was Suhayda who pointed out that Trump’s 2016 victory represented “a real opportunity for people like white nationalists.”

Spencer and his audience cheered Trump's victory in 2016.

 

As a candidate, Trump said he might pay the legal fees for a white fan who sucker-punched a black protester, who was being led out of one of his rallies. Matthew Heimbach, an avowed white supremacist, assaulted an African American woman at another rally in March 2016. His lawyer later claimed that Heimbach could not be held to account, because his client had “acted pursuant to the directives and requests of Donald J. Trump and Donald J. Trump for President.” If his client was found liable, the attorney said, “any liability must be shifted to one or both of them.” 

The man who sits in the White House gives haters cover to spew whatever they want. Trump gave the Holocaust denier, Arthur Jones, hope enough to run for Congress. He hired Carl Higbie, who joked about having people bring guns to the border and perform target practice on illegals. Higbie had previously suggested that black women think “breeding is a form of government employment.” Later, while visiting Great Britain, the president retweeted posts from Katie Hopkins. Hopkins, a racist with a British accent, once famously compared dark-skinned immigrants coming into Europe to “cockroaches.” 

 

A twisted talent for stirring anger and fear, and fueling hatred. 

Twisted individuals often band together. It’s no surprise to find that one of Trump’s top aides is Stephen Miller. Miller is a soulless chap who subscribes to the “Great Replacement” myth. That is: Dark people are plotting to replace the white race in Europe and America. 

Miller was the warped genius behind the decision to lock up children in cages after they and their families tried to sneak across our border. Trump was in sympathy, all the way. 

Trump’s skill set includes a twisted talent for stirring anger and fear, and fueling hatred. In the fall of 2016, the man who wished to be president fired up his base by attacking NFL players who knelt in peaceful protest against police brutality. After he was elected, he claimed that protesting players, predominantly African American, were disrespecting our military, and our flag, and should lose their jobs. He said that if they didn’t like it, they should leave this country. When Jemele Hill, an African American sportscaster, labeled him a racist, Trump said she should be fired. He called kneeling players like Colin Kaepernick, sons-of-bitches. And police kept kneeling on the necks of others.

 

Trump has had almost a full term to learn to unite rather than divide. He has regressed. Last summer he suggested that four female members of Congress, all individuals of color who had criticized his policies, should go back to countries where they came from if they didn’t like it here. One of the four, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, was born in the Bronx. Ayanna Pressley was born in Cincinnati. Pressley’s ancestors arrived in America, via slave ship, long before the first Trump set foot on free soil in 1885. 

Now, with the nation torn by protest, we need a leader with empathy. The Great Divider is incapable. When he gazes in the mirror, he is looking at all the people he cares about most. 

Trump has never governed with all of us in mind. His default setting is to appeal to the base instincts of his base. It’s them against the rest of us, and if he can stir anger against “treasonous” Democrats, “flag-hating” liberals, “Enemies of the People” in the press, and his dark-skinned predecessor, he’s not only ready to do so, he’s in his element.

 

If you care to look, the word “hate” litters the president’s Twitter feed, like bodies in the wake of a pogrom. The Democrats “hate” our military, he says. His critics “hate” our country. His political opponents “hate” the Second Amendment. Trump hates anyone who criticizes or doubts him and works hard to get his base to hate them, too. 

Trump might claim to care about George Floyd. He doesn’t. He won’t care no matter how many African Americans are killed by police, because most would never vote for him. The police, in general, will. Trump might tweet a hundred times a day. He won’t tweet sympathy for Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old ER-tech, shot eight times by police. And shot by mistake. Or Botham Jean, shot and killed by mistake, while in his apartment. Or Greg Gunn, shot in the back by a police officer, while Gunn was walking home after a card game. Or Sean Reed, a 21-year-old veteran, shot while live-streaming the incident on Facebook, so that you could hear the cops laughing over his corpse. He’s going to need a “closed casket” funeral, one joked. You won’t hear the Great Divider speak with feeling about Ahmaud Arbery, the black jogger, gunned down by neighbors (watch the video), at any of his rallies. Because many who attend those rallies love their AR-15’s more than they love their darker neighbors.

 

If you were to ask President Trump, after three-and-a-half years in office, who these people are – Frederick Douglass, Trayvon Martin, or Eric Garner (who died because he was selling cigarettes illegally; more video) – he wouldn’t know. He wouldn’t know about Philando Castile (watch even more video if you’d like to see another senseless killing), Jordan Davis, William Green, Tamir Rice (killed at age 12, while wielding a toy pistol), Atatiana Jefferson (shot and killed by police in her own home) or Heather Heyer, a young white woman (run down and killed in 2017, by a white supremacist at the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va.). 

Trump has continued to stoke the anger as cities he is supposed to care about have exploded. When protesters gathered outside the White House on a night in May, Trump boasted that if they had breached the main fence, they would have been met with “vicious dogs” and the “most ominous weapons” he had ever seen. 

He intimated that his critics – in this case protesters – were fake. Their anger was a hoax. Trump was one of many right-wing nuts who gave credence to the idea that survivors of the Parkland High School massacre were “crisis actors,” not kids justly shocked by the carnage they had endured. Now the president said the crowd at the White House gate was “professionally organized,” not comprised of Americans expressing outrage and dismay. He commended the Secret Service in a series of tweets, saying agents “let the ‘protesters’ scream & rant as much as they wanted, but whenever someone....got too frisky or out of line, they would quickly come down on them, hard – didn’t know what hit them.”  

George Floyd never knew what hit him either. But for Trump, the simpler the message, the better it is when it comes to riling up his base.

 

* 

REPORTERS have a chance to ask Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada what he thinks of Trump’s threat to use the military to stamp out protests. For 21 long seconds he pauses, a pause freighted with meaning. 

“We all watch in horror and consternation what’s going on in the United States,” he finally says. 

 

“There couldn’t be a scarier person inhabiting the White House.” 

Even Canada’s leading conservative newspapers are concerned with what’s happening to the south. “There couldn’t be a scarier person inhabiting the White House at this very moment,” Gary Mason, a writer for The Globe and Mail says. 

“My view is one of profound sadness – sadness at watching communities we respect being so torn apart, and sadness at watching the loss of life in the pandemic,” Frank McKenna, former Canadian ambassador to the United States, adds. “The United States is so polarized, the question of wearing a mask or not is fraught with political overtones. It’s excruciating to watch.”