Category: Trump effect

August 18, 2017

Toppling statues is a necessary, yet woefully insufficient response to the horror in Charlottesville. It is certainly satisfying to see activists and elected officials decisively moving to rid the public landscape of these monuments to white supremacy. It is edifying for some of us to learn that these monuments were erected at the dawn of Jim Crow, or during the Civil Rights Movement, as visible markers of the resistance of many Americans to Black equality. Continue reading “Toppling Monuments”

August 16, 2017

 

Thank God for the blessing of clarity. Although there has never been any doubt where Trump stood and whom he supported, yesterday’s defiant, impromptu press conference shredded any pretext that Trump stands for anything less than unvarnished white supremacy. No longer can anyone claim that Trump’s supporters are beset with economic anxiety or lured by his faux populism. Yesterday, Trump stood behind a podium with the seal of the President of The United States of America and truculently defended the “very fine people,” who marched in Charlottesville. Trump averred that not all of them were white supremacists and expressed sympathy with the marchers’ purported concern that their “history and culture” be preserved. Trump equated Robert E. Lee with George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. The nuance that two were slaveholding nation founders and one was a traitor fighting expressly to preserve slavery was seemingly lost on Trump.

In the wake of the press conference, a parade of pundits seemed aghast at the naked racism and anti-Semitism on display. They should spare us. Frankly, at this juncture, pearl clutching shock that the President of the United States is an unabashed racist who gives comfort to Nazis and Klansmen is a luxury we can’t afford. Trump is no mere doddering bigot muttering at the television from the comfort of his Naugahyde La-Z-Boy. He is the President of the United States with the full, fearsome power of the executive branch of the federal government at his disposal.

For those who have been in a coma for the last four days, let’s review what those “very fine people” on the “Unite the Right” side did this past weekend. On Friday night, hundreds of torch carrying white supremacists marched on the lawn of the University of Virginia chanting blatantly anti-Semitic, Nazi slogans like, “Jews will not replace us,” and “Blood and soil.” They then violently attacked a much smaller group of counter-protesters, punching them and spraying them with mace. The white supremacists surrounded a church where a mix of clergy, Black Lives Matter and local activists had gathered, making it unsafe for them to leave the building.

On Saturday, the white supremacists marched to Emancipation Park, outfitted with riot shields, brass knuckles, clubs and guns. While some of the anti-fascist counter protesters also had shields and clubs, there is no question that the vastly larger crowd of “Unite the Right” protesters was armed to the teeth and itching for battle. In addition to attacking counter demonstrators, white supremacists threw bottles of urine on journalists covering the rally. After the rally had been declared an “unlawful assembly,” one of the Nazis plowed his car into a crowd of peaceful counter-protestors, killing Heather Heyer and injuring nineteen others.

These are the “very fine people” that Trump defended. Don’t be confused. These people were not in Charlottesville to express their “views.” They were not simply trying to preserve “history and culture.” No one at a Black Lives Matter march wears brass knuckles. No one at the Women’s March brought clubs and guns. The Nazis and white supremacists that rioted in Charlottesville this weekend were proudly heralding the return of state sponsored racial terror and Trump is their standard bearer.

We have been here before. We have seen thousands of Black people lynched and terrorized for the crime of asserting our inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We have seen six million Jewish people murdered by a genocidal regime that Americans fought a war to vanquish. So spare us tut-tutting “concern”, tweeted denunciations or sound bite expressions of revulsion. If you are not doing EVERYTHING you can to root out these forces of evil, root and branch, starting at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, you are wasting my time and risking my life, so spare me.

August 13, 2017

 

    Don’t pretend to be shocked. We all knew that we’d get here. We all knew that this vein of hatred ran rich through American soil, never far from the surface. The ideology of white supremacy is in our DNA and every serious effort to dismantle it has been met with a vicious backlash. Our bloodiest war was fought because half of our countrymen were willing to die for the right to keep Black people as property. Too many Americans never accepted that loss. Continue reading “Civil War”

This week we have crossed the Rubicon. Trump’s continued presence in The Oval Office no longer simply risks the continued existence of the United States as a democracy, but  risks the lives of 50 million South Koreans ( plus the 28,500 American troops stationed there), 25 million North Koreans and  the 162, 742 American citizens of Guam, at a bare minimum.  Every day, Trump emerges from his lair in Bedminster and barks some bellicose gibberish that ratchets up the chaos.  When his beleaguered Secretary of State tries to reassure Americans that we can sleep at night unworried by the threat of imminent nuclear war, faux adjutant and real Nazi, Sebastian Gorka, contemptuously suggests that it is foolish to think that Tillerson can speak on military matters.  It begs the question, how is it reasonable to listen instead to the opinion of a white supremacist with a chest full of fake medals? Continue reading “Dr. Strangelove”

August 8, 2017

 

On a daily basis, we see mounting evidence that, not only is Trump intellectually and temperamentally unfit to be president, not only is he zealously pursuing policies to reverse the societal progress this country has made towards equality in the last seventy years, but that his continued tenure as president risks our permanent transformation from a deeply flawed representative democracy to a tin pot autocracy ruled by a vulgar, vengeful, pathologically insecure bigot.

The Washington Post’s story yesterday about how the Trump Hotel in D.C. has become a hub for conservative and international influence peddling reads like a scene from a dinner theater version of “Casablanca.”  The Post described a lobby bar peopled by the boldface names in Trumpworld, like Lewandowski, Spicer and Giuliani, with a calendar full of events sponsored by organizations and groups seeking to curry favor with Trump.  In a nod to compliance with the emoluments clause, the hotel says it maintains a separate ledger of payments from foreign nationals, but no one has verified the existence of such a ledger or has knowledge of the amount that foreign interests have paid to the hotel since Trump’s inauguration in January.  The most shocking example of influence peddling that The Post reported was that the Saudi government paid the six figure hotel bill of a veterans’ group that came to Washington to lobby against a bill that would have allowed the families of the victims of 9/11 to sue the Saudi government!

Trump meanwhile, is busily tweeting sycophancy, insults and classified information from his Bedminster hideaway.  Over the weekend he retweeted praise from a purported Black woman supporter named “Nicole Mincey,” who turned out to be either a Russian bot or a scammer selling MAGA merchandise.  Yesterday, Trump unleashed a bewildering tweetstorm against stolid Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal, excoriating him for an ancient incident in which he exaggerated his service record.  Clearly, the decidedly unflashy Blumenthal has gotten under Trump’s skin with his insistence on pursuing the Russian investigation wherever it leads and his willingness to eschew equivocation and raise the prospect of impeachment.

While the press focuses on Trump’s idiotic tweets and his naked avarice, momentous and dangerous events are ignored.  The press has barely mentioned Trump’s failure to condemn the terroristic bombing of the Dar Al Farooq Mosque in Bloomington, Minnesota.  Trump has spent no time developing a strategy to deal with North Korea’s threats to retaliate against the U.N. sanction vote (other than to tweet classified information in statements which conflict with those of his U.N. Ambassador, Nikki Haley).  Today, his Justice Department, led by serial perjurer and committed racist, Jeff Sessions, reversed course in a major voting rights case and backed Ohio’s massive “use it or lose it” purge of infrequent voters.

The fact is that, although the particulars of Trump’s unique danger to our body politic may differ from day to day, the fundamental aspects have not changed – corruption and greed on an epic scale, policy animated by pernicious hatred of anyone who is not a straight, white Christian man, led by an impetuous, petulant bully.  The danger we are in cannot be overstated.  We cannot afford to equivocate, sit on the sidelines or get caught up in intra-party squabbles between the center left and far left.  It will take each of us using everything we’ve got to defeat the menace that Trump, Pence and their enablers constitute to our liberty, safety and security.  It may be August, but playtime is over.

August 5, 2017

 

As we watch the noose tightening around Trump’s administration from a steady drumbeat of leaks revealing just how profoundly ignorant and weak he is, combined with the strategic disclosure that Special Counsel Mueller has empaneled a second grand jury in Washington, D.C., profoundly troubling developments have emerged. On the right, Trump and his supporters have stepped up their attacks on their perceived enemies – people of color, Democrats and the Free Press. Continue reading “What time is it?”

Yesterday’s report that the Justice Department was set to launch an investigation of “discrimination” against white students in colleges and universities, together with the introduction of the RAISE Act, which would replace current immigration law, which favors uniting families, with a “merit” based points system purportedly favoring skilled workers, makes it clear that this administration is doubling down on policy driven by white supremacy.  We should not fool ourselves, though, that these two proposals represent anything new.  In fact, both represent a return to the status quo circa 1950, before a series of cases culminating in Brown v. Board of Education began to force open the doors of educational opportunity for African Americans and before the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 eliminated quotas based on national origin. Continue reading “A level playing field?”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

July 29, 2017 

     Friday was a day of reckoning. Any sentient being who watched the events of the last 24 hours unfold can no longer delude themselves. The current occupant of The White House is a vengeful, petulant toddler with armies and the nuclear launch codes at his disposal. Trump, enraged that Congressional Republicans were unable to ram through an ill-considered, hastily written tax cut for the wealthy masquerading as health care reform, lashed out and fired White House Chief of Staff, Reince Preibus. Further evidencing his ignorance of, and disregard for, how a competent White House is supposed to function, Trump plucked John Kelly from the Department of Homeland Security as his new Chief of Staff. Trump is heedless of the fact that the Chief of Staff’s job is to work with Congress to effectuate the President’s policy agenda. We can only surmise that Trump believes that Kelly, a former General, can “order” Congressional Republicans to be compliant with his whims.

     Oleaginous sycophant Anthony Scaramucci presaged Reince’s fate in his foul-mouthed rant to Ryan Lizza. The fact that Trump picked this Gordon Gekko wannabe with absolutely no qualifications for, or understanding of, the job of White House Communications Director is further proof that Trump wants to act like the British in the War of 1812 and burn The White House down.

     To add insult to the injury of Trump’s transgender ban by tweet, yesterday Trump addressed Long Island police officers and gleefully encouraged them to brutally assault those suspected of crimes. Given the fact that a Black person has been killed by the police every 28 hours in the first seven months of this year (Source: www.mappingpoliceviolence.org), it is not as if the cops need further encouragement to act as judge, jury and executioner where Black and Brown people are concerned.

      At this juncture, it is beyond cavil that Trump is a viciously bigoted sadist, hell-bent on using the power of his office to inflict pain and misery on marginalized groups. It is also no secret that this is the source of his appeal for many of our fellow citizens. If we are being honest, we know that Trump is simply the apotheosis of forty years of the Republican politics of racial resentment. Although the language has been coded, a clear-eyed look at Republican domestic policies reveals that they are all rooted in this. We can go down the list. De-funding public education is federalized resistance to mandated school integration. Cutting the safety net is about starving Black and Brown people whose disproportionate reliance on these programs is the legacy of 150 years of state sanctioned discrimination and economic apartheid.

         The day of reckoning is upon us. For Congressional Republicans, the question is whether they will finally assert their Congressional authority to serve as a check on Trump’s abuse of power or whether they will join his nihilistic quest to remake America as a white country through deportation, incarceration and extra-judicial murder? For the rest of us who are not people of color, women, or LGBT, the question is whether we are willing to face the history that has brought our republic to the brink? For those of you, the question is simple, “Do you hate us more than you love yourself?” 

July 27, 2017

 

We all recall starting each school day reciting the “Pledge of Allegiance.”  The oath which we mindlessly repeated was originally written in 1892 by Reverend Francis Bellamy.  It was adopted on a widespread basis to address American anxiety about whether the waves of European immigrants were sufficiently loyal to the United States and whether post-Civil War native born Americans were sufficiently loyal to one United States of America. (Source:  “The Strange History Behind the Pledge of Allegiance,” Kelli Marshall, Talking Points Memo, 9/15/15).  The words “under God” were added in 1954, an outgrowth of the paranoid Red Scare of the 1950’s.

 

It is worth reflecting on the nature of that oath, as we consider the events of the last several days.  First, as all sitting presidents have done for the last seventy years, Trump spoke at the Boy Scouts of America Jamboree.  Rather than follow the tradition of presidents going back to FDR and speak to the assembled young men about community service and civic responsibility, Trump made a rambling, inappropriate, ugly speech.  He led the scouts to boo President Obama and held up William Levitt, the developer who mass produced residentially segregated affordable housing in Levittowns throughout the Northeast (look it up) as a role model for the Scouts to emulate.  With the moral blindness typical of Trump, he implied that Levitt was admirable because of his wealth, regardless of the source.  Truly, there is nothing that this man will not debase. Continue reading “Pledge of Allegiance”