Response to The Man’s Word

(See: Just Above Sunset: The Man's Word)

“The cognitive linguist George Lakoff said the word 'invasion' was a potent one for Mr. Trump to use because of what it allowed him to communicate. 'If you’re invaded, you’re invaded by an enemy,' he said. 'An invasion says that you can be taken over inside your own country and harmed…'”

The weird thing is, we think of “invaders” as people who want to break into the country to do it some harm, whereas, in this case, the invaders are apparently families, coming here to improve their lives and contribute to the country’s well-being, while the people who are doing harm to the country are already living here. (And you know who you are!)

Daryl Johnson is right about Trump, as was Charles Blow in yesterday’s column. You can demand that Trump stop talking about “invaders” and such, but trying to convince him to be more careful of what he says kind of misses the point.

For one thing, I actually don’t want Trump to wake up some morning and become a good guy, since everybody will still know he got to be president of the United States by being both a lamebrain and a self-centered jerk, so-to-speak, and that will set a bad example for future generations, who need to know that you shouldn’t expect that doing bad stuff is the best way to get good stuff done.

And, in fact, it’s not necessarily Trump's rhetoric that keeps the alt-right active, it’s his very existence!

Since the very day after his election, American white power has found an environment much more welcoming to them, the most blatant example being news stories of white school students suddenly aware of the overnight change in America, openly harassing kids of color, shouting they should go back to where you came from.

White Supremacists now know they have a substantially friendlier audience for trying stuff they wouldn’t have been as likely to have tried under Obama.

But did Donald Trump make force them to be that way? I think that Charles Blow’s viewpoint covers this — that these two malevolent forces have been traveling on parallel roads, each just happening to look over and derive encouragement from seeing the other. To paraphrase the poet, neither of them needed a weatherman to tell them which way the wind was blowing.

Racists and the other deplorables are, for their own survival, a duplicitous group and so they easily overlook an equally disingenuous  president Trump occasionally disparaging them as he reads robotically from a teleprompter (so much so as to suggest that he’s mocking), since they know he’s being forced by circumstances to lie. If that weren’t the case, Trump wouldn’t do it, since it would risk losing his base. This is how evil survives in a world that’s mostly hostile to them.

Is Trump actually a racist? And am I suggesting that he’s a closet racist?

Sure. Why not. All we need to make that call is to remember one example of many.

Back in May of 1989, when he lived in New York City, Donald Trump took out a full-page ad in all four of the cities major newspapers, calling for the return of the death penalty after five minority teenagers, none of whom he knew from Adam, were accused of raping and badly beating a female jogger in Central Park:

"Mayor Koch has stated that hate and rancor should be removed from our hearts. I do not think so. I want to hate these muggers and murderers. They should be forced to suffer ... Yes, Mayor Koch, I want to hate these murderers and I always will. ... How can our great society tolerate the continued brutalization of its citizens by crazed misfits? Criminals must be told that their CIVIL LIBERTIES END WHEN AN ATTACK ON OUR SAFETY BEGINS!"

Maybe partly because of Trump’s ad, the five African Americans and Latinos were found guilty and served several years in jail, but twenty years later, were all exonerated by DNA evidence after another man confessed. They then sued the city, and settled for millions.

Was Trump ready to apologize? Nope. In fact, he doubled down, calling the settlement "a disgrace." "Speak to the detectives on the case and try listening to the facts”, he wrote. "These young men do not exactly have the pasts of angels.”

Has he ever apologized in the years since? No. If you add up all the cases like that one showing his attitude about minorities, you’re justified in concluding that Trump is indeed a racist, and whatever he says, with or without TelePrompter, doesn’t really matter. What matters is what he believes and what he is while in office, which is a racist, and if he’s trying to convince America he’s otherwise, he’s not doing a very good job.

And as for the trade war, I find it hard not to side with China.

Yes, they’ve been getting away with their shit for years, but I hate to reward our leadership for thinking that being an asshole is a way for our country to deal with it.

It just goes to show you, and it never occurs to you until it happens, that when you live under a tyrant, it's hard to know who your friends are.