PRESIDENT TRUMP IS A RACIST. THE REST OF US HAVE A CHOICE  PRESIDENT TRUMP Photo credit: Official portrait. DONALD TRUMP IS A RACIST, which makes him the most dangerous president in our history. It also is one of the most promising aspects of the Trump catastrophe, because it’s up to us, individually and as a nation, whether we will act out his bigotry. Indeed, as a I look at the many terrible things Trump is doing to our country, racism is one of those instances where each one of us has personal control. We can’t, as individuals, restart the USAID programs that were saving thousands of lives throughout the world before Trump killed them. We can’t stop our armed forces from murdering people in South American speed boats. We can’t stop Trump pulling the rug out from under Ukraine’s inspired resistance to Russia’s invasion. We can’t halt the roundup of immigrants on our streets and their detention at inhumane centers. We can’t end Robert Kennedy’s war on vaccines and science-based medicine. Can’t walk into a Harvard boardroom and make the people who run the world’s greatest university stand up to Trump’s bullying. We can’t restore the East Wing, take Trump’s name off the Kennedy Center. We can’t prevent the collapse of the world’s climate. Yes, we can want justice in all of those areas and in scores of others that define Trump’s sociopath’s campaign to destroy America. We can vote, persuade, protest, crusade, donate and try as hard as we can collectively to preserve American democracy. But racism and its antidote is personal, individual and doable. AFTER ALL OF THESE YEARS, it’s hard, at least for me, to believe that Donald Trump is actually a bigot. For so long, Trump was a clown, a citizen of the New York City tabloids. Just a cheat, a business failure, a liar, a TV personality, who seemed to have no important beliefs, and therefore need not be taken seriously. His racism, however, periodically surfaces, bursting his comic mask, and it’s as if he might as well be dressed in Klan robes and hood, on his way to a cross burning or a lynching. Still, it’s always starling. After all, he is the president, and presidents are supposed to be better than the rest of us. It may be an American myth, but many of presidents have had character, or at least acted if they had character. But Trump is different. Take what he did at the end of his Dec. 2 cabinet meeting, where he again revealed his deeply racist self. He embarked on a bigoted rant, almost incoherent, this one about Somalians, using Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota as his starting point.
Omar, of course, is a congresswoman from Minnesota, who became a U.S. citizen 25 years ago after coming from Somalia as a refugee.
Trump's cabinet fusillade featured his loathsome vice president, JD Vance, banging his fist on the table in approval, according to the New York Times. The Times, which is notoriously forgiving in it’s voluminous coverage of the president, in this instance called Trump’s tirade for what it was. “Even for Mr. Trump — who has a long history of insulting Black people, particularly those from African countries — his outburst was shocking in its unapologetic bigotry,” the Times wrote. Garbage. Their country stinks. Their country is no good for a reason. There are other instances in which Trump’s racism has surfaced. Here are three:
The message is as old as it is insidious. White good; black bad. White better; black worse. White smart; black stupid. TERRIBLE THINGS happen when bigotry is ascendant. In America, slavery is the country’s original sin. The Founding Fathers were slaveholders. The early American economy depended on slavery, and it touched every area, North and South. Slavery was at the heart of the Civil War, followed not by emancipation, but by legalized segregation in the South, an apartheid system to which the prejudiced North was indifferent, and lasted until the disruptions of World War II and the civil rights crusades of the 1960s. Every time the country seems to move forward on racial equality, a backlash follows. The election of Barack Obama, a man of color, seemed to have lifted the country to a new level of tolerance, but it was followed by the retreat to prejudice with the election of Donald Trump. I believe the reason that bigotry is so resilient is that every one of us is born into prejudice. It is impossible to escape the suspicion, whether unconscious or overt, that people who are different from you and me are dangerous and threatening. That ever-inherent bigotry is always available to leaders to attain and hold power, the most horrific example being the extermination of 6 million Jews by Hitler and his German contemporaries. Trump’s war on immigration, demonizing “illegal” entrants to the U.S., is the latest opportunity to turn people against one another. In just a year’s time, we are witnessing a huge, rogue police force chasing down immigrants in the streets, in their homes and at their businesses, with administration plans for a national system of “warehouse” detention centers, holding 80,000 souls to be expelled from our country. Is a re-segregation of America underway? It’s possible, but not inevitable. In 2026, will we stand passive or even join with a racist president as he denigrates Blacks and all people who seem different from us by a lot or a little, and as he, mocks the promise of the Declaration of Independence? We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. As individuals, we may not be able to escape the prejudices of our history and culture and even our genes. But we don’t have to follow Donald Trump into his decent into the cesspool. We can refuse to talk like racists, promote racism, tell racist jokes, laugh at racist jokes. We can stop pretending that we don’t see it, hear it, feel it. We don’t have to accept it, promote it, advance it. We are in control. * * * Here are some of the sources used in this piece:
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BRIAN C. JONES
I'VE BEEN a reporter and writer for 61 years, long enough to have learned that journalists don't know very much, although I've met some smart ones.
Mainly, what reporters know comes from asking other people questions and fretting about their answers. This blog is a successor to one inspired by our dog, Phoebe, who was smart, sweet and the antithesis of Donald Trump. She died Feb. 3, 2022, and I don't see getting over that very soon. Occasionally, I think about trying to reach her via cell phone. |
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