Trump's Racism Is a National Emergency
By Jamil Smith
I often learn about President Trump doing or saying something bigoted before I’ve had a chance shake the cobwebs loose, as my father’s expression goes. Thanks to my phone alerts and my cursed curiosity about the news, I have to swallow some newly reported cruelty before I have brushed my teeth or have had a glass of water. What is old is often still old, often a regurgitated version of some former divisive strategy Trump has employed as far back as his old housing discrimination and Central Park Five ad days. He rarely changes what has worked since the 1970s, since it seems to resonate both with Republican Party sycophants and his entranced supporters. Racism doesn’t really have seasons.
It may be easy for some to digest, but not for me. There is no getting used to this when you are in the crosshairs of this policy, when people who look like you sit patronized by a president who tells them all the time about how he got a few more of us some jobs and few more of us out of jail, then acts as though we should be satisfied with that. “What do we have to lose?” he asks, while we sit in this systematically racist America. “Why do we hate America?” he wonders aloud, as we criticize his administration for working consciously to exacerbate inequities in everything from health care to education to housing. “Why don’t we want safety and security?” Trump proclaims, as we see his government treat migrants (the ones who survive) like literal vermin while comparing our communities to “infestations.” Again, there is no getting used to this.
A white-nationalist presidency is untenable. Having to endure one while the man in the office has committed obvious crimes, such as obstruction of justice, is even worse. Add on the ever-increasing threat of white-supremacist domestic terrorism — which the FBI director warned about just last week and the administration’s anti-immigrant policies and rhetoric fuels like gasoline — and it is impossible not to conclude that the presidency is too powerful for someone as racist as Donald Trump.
Saturday’s attack on Elijah Cummings may seem like a small example, just another episode in his reality show, but it was actually a demonstration of how grossly his power can be misused. The president reminded us that we are governed in part by a cable channel. He tweeted what Media Matters researcher Matthew Gertz called a “straight recitation” of a Fox segment comparing the supposed lack of cleanliness of Cummings’ 7th Congressional District — which covers West Baltimore, has a mix of mostly urban and suburban areas, and is 53 percent black — to the inhumane conditions ongoing at Border Patrol detention facilities, conditions about which the House Oversight chairman berated acting Homeland Security head Kevin McAleenan at a July 18 hearing.
Being a propaganda operation for the president, Fox naturally depicted the city as a decrepit, rodent-ridden ghetto, all caused by the neglect of Democrats. Both Trump and disciples like Kimberly Klacik, a Baltimore-based black Republican, continued through the weekend, posting selectively edited videos of filthy areas of the city and accusing Cummings of neglecting his district in favor of overzealous oversight of the White House.
Prideful Baltimore residents rebutted with hashtags, statistics, and beautiful imagery of their city that belied the president’s slander. Reminders of Jared Kushner’s history as a slumlord in the city flooded social media. CNN anchor Victor Blackwell, who is African American, nearly broke down in tears live on the air defending his hometown. Bristling in particular at Trump’s insistence that “no human being would want to live there,” Blackwell said, “People get up and go to work there. They care for their families there. They love their children who pledge allegiance to the flag just like people who live in districts of congressmen who support you, sir.” He concluded, “They are Americans, too.”
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/trump-baltimore-cummings-impeach-864796/