LEWIS OBI 08173446632 sms only [email protected]
THE racist character of the Donald Trump candidacy finally caught the attention of the Republican brass last week. That must be a variant of willful ignorance. But Speaker Paul Ryan did rent his garment about Donald Trump alleging that he could not get justice from an American court because the judge, an American born in Indiana, was “Mexican.” Former Speaker, Newt Gingrich, earlier tipped as running mate to Trump, explicitly denounced Trump’s stance as racism. The “Never-Trump” people were feeling vindicated. The pro-Trump people, on their part, were splitting hairs over the definition of racism, and how racism is not the same thing as nationalism. Mexico is no race, it is a nation, and they lectured.
Trump, on his part, rested his twitter for all of 18 hours. He had earlier rejected suggestions that he should apologize, and he was not backing down. Indeed he advised his surrogates to double down. It made neither rhyme nor reason for Trump to back down. Racism and racist comments had always worked for him. Why would he abandon a winning strategy for “political correctness?” And the magic of Trump’s campaign success has been his disdain for political correctness. He has beaten the best of the best in the Republican Party using this strategy. Why should he change?
Since 2009 when Trump emerged as the uncrowned head of the “birther” movement in the US, a white racist vanguard dedicated to the de-legitimization of the Obama presidency, racism has been the animating factor in Trump’s politics. He discovered that although it might be odious, dishonest and destructive, it works. The audience is a huge, mostly white ‘nationalists’ whose idea of America utterly precludes a black being president, or being anything at all except where they are kept. The Trump people could not get their heads around the fact that Senator Barack Obama won the election by a landslide in 2008 and became the President of the United States. They refused to believe it.
So, it was not enough to denounce everything, every move by the Obama administration, it has to be ridiculed, and they have to show that Obama’s victory was unreal, a fraud. And if that appeared a bit far-fetched, because an American presidential election is too difficult to fake or rig or manipulate, given that too many eyes are watching, they must try something else, and that was how the “birther” idea was born.
The “birthers” wanted the world to believe that the whole Obama campaign and victory was a scheme, a ‘set-up’ and Obama was the proverbial “Manchurian” candidate, he was not even an American citizen. As nonsensical and ridiculous as it sounded, the “birthers” not only believed it, one or two networks provided them the vehicle to peddle that fiction.
Donald Trump cut his political teeth by doing nothing else than denigrating, ridiculing President Obama at every opportunity. “Well, he says he (President Obama) is American, for a start, if he says he’s an American citizen, where is his birth certificate?” It did not matter that actually when Barack Obama was born the local newspaper carried the happy event.
The existence of that incontrovertible record in the archives, nearly half a century, still didn’t change the deranged minds of the “birthers.” Obama was born in the state of Hawaii, so the state government tried to correct the “birthers,” confirming that there is indeed a birth certificate to confirm the president’s birth. It was to no avail. The certificate was placed in the Internet. The “birthers” didn’t believe it. The argument had gone from the sublime to the ridiculous. And, well, the “birthers” never conceded that President Obama had a birth certificate but they upped the ante and said “assuming he had a birth certificate, can we also see his school records, his transcripts?”
The political appeal of Donald Trump, therefore, is that he is fanatically anti-Obama and can be trusted to be intransigent, irrational, uncompromising in his bigotry and hate, against Obama or his kind. That’s why he is the darling of the Right, the Ultra Right, and the 21st Century Ku Klux Klan, also known as the Tea Party, and David Duke and other white supremacists. That’s what the Republican primary voters loved about Mr. Trump, that’s what commends him, that’s what they voted for.
As anyone who followed the campaign can testify Mr. Trump has no distinct program, the hope of his campaign is that the angry white male racists would bully the electorate enough and threaten war, hell and high water and get to a critical mass. Then the next question would be as Michael Moore imagines: ‘where do we invade first?’ They are also banking on America’s known penchant to defy the world, just as Trump seems to have defied all the laws of electoral gravity in the primary campaign.
Trump vanquished the Republican establishment with the help of the extreme right who had destroyed all the moderate Republicans and retired the Independent Republicans and threatened all those leaning center-right with primary contests. The Republican Party has long ceased being a huge tent ideologically as the resignation of Speaker John Boehner dramatized. And we all know that his offence was that he could not abrogate President Obama’s signature legislation, the Affordable Care Act. And it was not for want of trying. Mr. Boehner tabled this Act for repeal at least 51 times in the House of Representatives, but in each case he did not have enough votes. Yet it was said of him that he had no balls, he could not fight Obama, and he did not want to shut down the federal government.
Yet the experienced moderate Speaker Boehner never tired to remind Republicans that each time they had shut down the Federal Government, the joke was usually on Republicans. But his colleagues would not hear it. And, so, he had to quit.
It was pathetic listening to Mr. Trump in his lamentations to the world about the “Mexican judge who hates Donald J. Trump.” One of those signs that no matter how rich or powerful, accomplished and mighty, even a Trump can feel some pain. For every man there is one thorn-bush, said John Ploughman, and he is fortunate if there were not more. This “Mexican judge hates Mr. Trump because I’m going to build the fence,” Trump repeats.
The TV people said Jake Tapper asked him the same question 23 times before he admitted to racism showing that his strategy of wearing out reporters does not always work. Demonizing journalists has always worked for him, but there is no guarantee it will continue because the world is now beginning to learn who the real Donald Trump is.
In last week’s press conference he came out looking and sounding mean, annoyed, and utterly unpresidential. His Trump University problems seem to presage the beginning of his decline. Worse, he is up against a woman who knows no fear, who works hard and knows stuff. Trump is ripe for shaking.