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