My goodness it appears to me Mr Hasan is as dangerous Mr. Trump!
Richard
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On Aug 19, 2017, at 5:03 PM, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
© First Look Media. All rights reservedTerms of use
Mehdi
_Hasan
White nationalist demonstrators walk into the entrance of Lee Park surrounded
by counter demonstrators in Charlottesville, Va., Saturday, Aug. 12, 2017.
Gov. Terry McAuliffe declared a state of emergency and police dressed in riot
gear ordered people to disperse after chaotic violent clashes between white
nationalists and counter protestors. (AP Photo/Steve Helber)
Photo: Steve Helber/AP
Donald Trump Has Been a Racist All His Life — And He Isn’t Going to Change
After Charlottesville
Mehdi Hasan
August 15 2017, 12:37 p.m.
Leia em português ⟶
“Racism is evil,” declared Donald Trump on Monday, “and those who cause
violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis,
white supremacists, and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we
hold dear as Americans.”
OK, “declared” may be too strong a word for what we heard from the president.
“Stated” is perhaps a better descriptor. “Read out” might be the most
accurate of all. Trump made these “additional remarks” with great reluctance
and only after two days of intense criticism from both the media and senior
Republicans over his original remarks blaming “many sides” for the neo-Nazi
violence in Charlottesville, Virginia. The words were not his own: they were
scripted by aides and delivered with the assistance of a teleprompter. The
president reserved his personal, off-the-cuff ire on Monday for the black CEO
of Merck, not for the white fascists of Virginia.
Much of the frenzied media coverage of what CNN dubbed “48 hours of turmoil
for the Trump White House” has overlooked one rather crucial point: Trump
doesn’t like being forced to denounce racism for the very simple reason that
he himself is, and always has been, a racist.
Consider the first time the president’s name appeared on the front page of
the New York Times, more than 40 years ago. “Major Landlord Accused of
Antiblack Bias in City,” read the headline of the A1 piece on Oct. 16, 1973,
which pointed out how Richard Nixon’s Department of Justice had sued the
Trump family’s real estate company in federal court over alleged violations
of the Fair Housing Act.
“The government contended that Trump Management had refused to rent or
negotiate rentals ‘because of race and color,’” the Times revealed. “It also
charged that the company had required different rental terms and conditions
because of race and that it had misrepresented to blacks that apartments were
not available.” (Trump later settled with the government without accepting
responsibility.)
Over the next four decades, Trump burnished his reputation as a bigot: he was
accused of ordering “all the black [employees] off the floor” of his Atlantic
City casinos during his visits; claimed “laziness is a trait in blacks” and
“not anything they can control”; requested Jews “in yarmulkes” replace his
black accountants; told Bryan Gumbel that “a well-educated black has a
tremendous advantage over a well-educated white in terms of the job market”;
demanded the death penalty for a group of black and Latino teenagers accused
of raping a jogger in Central Park (and, despite their later exoneration with
the use of DNA evidence, has continued to insist they are guilty); suggested
a Native American tribe “don’t look like Indians to me”; mocked Chinese and
Japanese trade negotiators by doing an impression of them in broken English;
described undocumented Mexican immigrants as “rapists”; compared Syrian
refugees to “snakes”; defended two supporters who assaulted a homeless Latino
man as “very passionate” people “who love this country”; pledged to ban a
quarter of humanity from entering the United States; proposed a database to
track American Muslims that he himself refused to distinguish from the Nazi
registration of German Jews; implied Jewish donors “want to control”
politicians and are all sly negotiators; heaped praise on the “amazing
reputation” of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who has blamed America’s
problems on a “Jewish mafia”; referred to a black supporter at a campaign
rally as “my African-American”; suggested the grieving Muslim mother of a
slain U.S. army officer “maybe … wasn’t allowed” to speak in public about her
son; accused an American-born Hispanic judge of being “a Mexican”; retweeted
anti-Semitic and anti-black memes, white supremacists, and even a quote from
Benito Mussolini; kept a book of Hitler’s collected speeches next to his bed;
declined to condemn both David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan; and spent five
years leading a “birther” movement that was bent on smearing and
delegitimizing the first black president of the United States, who Trump also
accused of being the founder of ISIS.
Oh and remember: we knew all of this before he was elected president of the
United States of America. He was elected in spite of all this (yet another
reminder that “not all Trump supporters are racist, but all of them decided
that racism isn’t a deal-breaker”).
RICHMOND, VA - JUNE 10: A man wears a shirt with a confederate flag on it as
Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during a rally at the
Richmond Coliseum in Richmond, VA on Friday June 10, 2016. (Photo by Jabin
Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
A supporter wears a shirt with a confederate flag as Republican presidential
candidate Donald Trump speaks during a rally at the Richmond Coliseum in
Richmond, Va., June 10, 2016.
Photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post/Getty Images
Some had hoped that Trump would be moderated by office; there was much talk
of a presidential pivot. It was all utter nonsense and wishful thinking from
lazy commentators who have found it difficult to cover, and call out, a
president who regularly traffics in racially charged rhetoric while
surrounding himself with an array of race-baiting advisers. Since entering
the Oval Office, Trump has appointed Steve Bannon — former executive chairman
of Breitbart News, which has stories tagged ‘Black Crime’ — as his White
House chief strategist, and Jeff Sessions — who was once accused of calling a
black official in Alabama a “nigger” — as his attorney general; he has
claimed, without a shred of evidence, that millions of immigrants “voted
illegally” for Hillary Clinton; and, perhaps most shocking of all, he has
publicly and repeatedly belittled Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who
has claimed Native American heritage, as “Pocahontas.”
This is Racism 101 from a sitting U.S. president. And it is the stark and
undeniable truth, and key context, that is missing from much of the coverage
of the political fallout from Charlottesville. Journalists, opinion formers,
members of Congress, and members of the public continue to treat Trump as
they would any previous president — they expect their head of government to
come out and condemn racism with passion, vigor, speed, and sincerity. But
what do you do if the president is himself a long-standing purveyor of racism
and xenophobia? What then? Do you still demand he condemn and castigate what
is essentially his base? Do you continue to feign shock and outrage over his
lack of shock and outrage?
Yes, the U.S. has had plenty of presidents in recent decades who have
dog-whistled to racists and bigots, and even incited hate against minorities
— think Nixon’s Southern Strategy, Reagan and his “welfare queens,” George
H.W. Bush and the Willie Horton ad, and the Clintons and their
“super-predators” — but there has never been a modern president so personally
steeped in racist prejudices, so unashamed to make bigoted remarks in public
and with such a long and well-documented record of racial discrimination.
So can we stop playing this game where journalists demand Trump condemns
people he agrees with and Trump then pretends to condemn them in the mildest
of terms? I hate to say this, but it is worth paying attention to the leader
of the Virginia KKK, who told a reporter in August 2016: “The reason a lot of
Klan members like Donald Trump is because a lot of what he believes, we
believe in.”
So can we stop pretending that Trump isn’t Trump? That the presidency has
changed him, or will change him? It hasn’t and it won’t. There will be no
reset; no reboot; no pivot. This president may now be going through the
motions of (belatedly) denouncing racism, with his scripted statements and
vacuous tweets. But here’s the thing: why would you expect a lifelong racist
to want to condemn or crack down on other racists? Why assume a person whose
entire life and career has been defined by racially motivated prejudice and
racial discrimination, by hostility toward immigrants, foreigners, and
minorities, would suddenly be concerned by the rise of prejudice and
discrimination on his watch? It is pure fantasy for politicians and pundits
to suppose that Trump will ever think or behave as anything other than the
bigot he has always been — and, in more recent years, as an apologist for
other bigots, too.
We would do well to heed the words of those who have spent decades studying
this bizarre president. “Donald is a 70-year-old man,” Trump biographer David
Cay Johnston reminded me in the run-up to his inauguration in January. “I’m
67. I’m not going to change and neither is Donald.”
Top photo: White nationalist demonstrators walk into the entrance of Lee Park
surrounded by counter
