“Trump has not only always been a racist, but anyone around him who denies it, is lying,” said a man who should know, Mr. O. O’Donnell, a former Director of Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City. “White people are Americans to Trump; everyone else is from somewhere else,” Mr. O’Donnell said. In the last few weeks, President Donald J. Trump has adopted it as a grand political strategy. As he continues with his campaign for re-election, and his weekly rallies, he continues to make the point that he is the whites’ best hope, that whoever did not like the way he does things should leave the United States.
He told that to the ‘squad,’ the four first term progressive congresswomen who say he is doing a poor job, who think he should indeed be impeached. It did not matter to him that three of them, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan were native-born Americans, and that the fourth member, Ilhan Omar, arrived as a refugee from Somalia when she was 12. Yet Trump asked the women to “go back” to where they came from.
Next, he picked on the House Government Oversight Committee Chairman, Representative Elijah Cummings, who represents Maryland’s 7th District which covers part of the city of Baltimore. His committee wanted but could not obtain certain documents from the Trump Administration, it subpoenaed for some e-mails, texts, from some of Trump’s inner circle and his key associates. Trump then descended on Mr. Cummings, describing him as a “brutal bully.” He didn’t stop there, he deprecated the Congress man’s district as “the worst run and most dangerous anywhere in the United States.
No human being would want to live there.” Mr. Cumming’s district, Trump continued, “is a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess. If he spent more time in Baltimore, maybe he could help clean up this very dangerous and filthy place.” Baltimore is a majority black city, and thus the issue is less about its hygiene as the colour of its residents.
Any place black people live, Trump sees nothing but dirt and filth and degradation, a view confirmed by his lawyer for ten years, Micheal Cohen, who told a Congressional Committee more about Trump’s racism and his comments on the City of Chicago. This also explains why Trump’s real estate firms never ever let apartments to black people in New York, and the city had to bring racial discrimination suits to enforce the tenancy of some applicants. It wasn’t many months ago Trump referred to Haiti and African countries as ‘shithole’ countries. We must recall that months ago when he attacked Representative John Lewis, the Civil Rights icon, he ridiculed Atlanta as a “crime infested” place “in horrible shape and falling apart.”
By the end of last week, at least five democratic presidential candidates had publicly described Trump as a racist and a white supremacist: Kirsten Gillibrand, Beto O’Rourke, Elizabeth Warring, Bernie Sanders and Andrew Yang. Jay Inslee preferred to call him a “white nationalist.” Joe Biden said Trump inspires white supremacists. Even the petrified Republicans are beginning to add their voice especially when it transpired that the mass killer at El Passo who had murdered 22 innocent citizens took his manifesto from President Trump.
By trying to stop the immigrant “invasion” to use Trump’s word, he was executing Trump’s mandate. He was not the first. On August 5, Cesar Sayoc Jr., the MAGA (Make America Great Again, Trump’s slogan) Bomber, the man who dispatched many package bombs to Democrats and journalists viewed as hostile to Trump, was sentenced to 20 years in prison. In a court filing in his defence, his defence lawyers described how he was radicalized and truly believed wild conspiracy theories he read in the Internet many of which vilified Democrats and spread rumours that Trump supporters were in danger. “He heard it from the President of the United States, a man with whom he felt he had a deep personal connection.”
It was thus inescapable to see how a man turned a terrorist because he took President Trump seriously and literally. As Michael Bloomberg, former Mayor of New York was quoted as saying last week, people look to their leadership for guidance and to say that it doesn’t have effect is wrong. So what the president says is very important, and if he supports or says nice things about racism, it encourages racism. If he goes and says nice things about white supremacists, he encourages that kind of violence, Bloomberg said. While Trump is at liberty to express his views, he should be mindful of his divisive rhetoric and respect the humanity of all Americans. The US government must put in place gun control measures to curb the killings in the country.