When Donald Trump publicly attacked in print a group of young black men for having committed a violent sexual assault on a young woman in a public swimming pool, most of us stood back or clucked our tongues. After all, we weren’t young black swimmers in New York City.
When Donald Trump insisted Barack Obama had been secretly born in Kenya and smuggled into America, most of us just shrugged our shoulders and said, “Well, what can you do with someone like that.”
When it became clear via both videotape and accusations from a baker’s dozen of women that Donald Trump was a misogynist of near-global proportions, most of us probably said to ourselves, “Oh well, we already knew that sordid stuff from the tabloid newspapers.”
When Donald Trump attacked Hillary Clinton, Ted Cruz, Jeb Bush, and many other politicians and ridiculed them with stupid, offensive names and half-truths about their lives and families, most of us just grimaced and assumed he was just a buffoon and a clown who would eventually get his electoral comeuppance.
When Donald Trump called nearly every US international agreement a lie, a job killer, or the worst deals in history as deals that had sold off America’s birthright and cost the country billions, most of us just assumed he was ignorant or wilfully blind and that somebody, eventually, would set him straight.
And when Donald Trump announced that, yes, there were some good people marching right among those skinheads, neo-Nazis and violent white supremacists, we went wide-eyed, but, still, we assumed it was all just foolish, empty words because he was such an ignorant man.
And so it has gone as well as he has continuously attacked the nation’s news media as if they were a gigantic, evil cabal designed to bring him low and to wreck the nation with their “fake news”, most of us just continued to shake our heads and mutter, “What can you do with such ignorance and crass stupidity?”
But finally it has come to the point that the president of the United States, in front of veteran senators and congressmen attempting to work with him to deal with America’s complex and troubled immigration laws, used that opportunity to utter gutter language aimed at Haitians, El Salvadorans and the entirety of Africa such that pretty much anybody else’s mouth would have been washed out with a stiff dose of borax soap by an actual adult; someone determined to teach this man-child some decency and manners.
Unfortunately, Donald Trump’s basest impulses have now been given a near-total free ride by a gutless Congress. His wild thoughts are blurted out whenever he wants to do so, and in the ugliest language he can muster.
By now, he has insulted, slurred, smeared and demeaned pretty much the whole world, save for Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, his own immediate family, and a small and shrinking coterie of his equally rich, equally ignorant, equally embarrassing friends and political appointees. At this point, the question is one of who’s left to protest Donald Trump’s latest diatribe? … Just as in that terrible lament from Bishop Dietrich Bonhoeffer during World War II.
By last week, and as the furore over the contents of Michael Wolff’s tell-all book on the first year of the Trump administration, Fire and Fury, had been digested by politicians, the media, and readers worldwide, it is fair to say the American president’s mental health (or the evident lack of it) had become a global topic of conversation, puzzlement and concern. One easily could have thought that by now there were few depths left to explore in relation to Trump’s mind. But, it turns out we were all wrong. The mask slipped further when, according to various people in attendance, he excoriated an entire continent (plus two Caribbean nations) as “shitholes”, a remark that, besides provoking ire globally, gave broadcast and print media the problem of whether or not the president’s latest remarks were simply too vulgar to print or pronounce without parental guidance labels – and ellipsis in spelling.
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But anger has not been limited to Africans, or Haitians, or Salvadorans. Normal people around the world have been astounded to realise that they no longer can cut Donald Trump any slack in the “is-he-or-isn’t-he-a-racist” sweepstakes. The simple answer is “yes” and it extends backwards through his life and career (from his time in business with his father and their having been sued by the feds over civil rights violations) – like the faint trail of iridescent slime left by a snail or slug in the garden.
An old friend of mine, a veteran English teacher who taught in an ethnically diverse high school in the state of Virginia for nearly four decades, and who was that school’s men’s wrestling coach for many years as well, was impelled by this latest Trumpian eruption to write, “Where does Trump think the former (his words) greatness of America came from? In thirty-nine years I taught kids from Vietnam, Iran, Haiti, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and dozens of other countries. No one, not a single student from anywhere in the world, failed to appreciate what this country offers.
“My grandparents came here from Lithuania and Russia, that did not make my parents lesser Americans. My father earned a Purple Heart and Bronze Star as a medic in WWII. My son-in-law served in Iraq and his father immigrated from Iran. People chose to come to this country because it accepted them with open arms and offered opportunities not available in their home countries.
“Our ‘President’ obviously has never met anyone who is not white and wealthy ... he wants to turn this country away from that which has made America great and a world leader for years. If he thinks calling other countries ‘shitholes’ he needs to be educated otherwise. To all of my former students from the many countries you represent … I stand with you against the asininity of our so-called leader! We shall overcome!” [Ellipsis in the original]
You could be excused for thinking that with Donald Trump’s mask having now slipped to the floor, it might be enough to even the most jaded that he is simply unfit to be president, but, wait, there has been more. Over the weekend, an emergency disaster alarm was accidentally triggered for the entire state of Hawaii, reaching millions by text or the media, announcing, erroneously as it turned out, that a foreign ballistic missile was headed directly for the islands – and that this message was not a drill.