Have the majority of Americans reached their tipping point? The trials of so many of Trump’s accomplices have yet to get under way and it will be months before the final report by Robert Mueller and his investigators is published. (Does anyone have any idea how many lawsuits against Trump and his policies are working their way through state and federal courts? The cumulative fees will be staggering by the time the cases are decided.) Patience may be a foundational democratic virtue but what if we’re in the midst of a cold civil war? Maxine Waters seems right on. The time for civility-mongering is past.
Paul Krugman, in a NYT June 21, 2018 Op-Ed—-“….America’s moral descent under Donald Trump is breathtaking. In a matter of months we’ve gone from a nation that stood for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness to a nation that tears children from their parents and puts them in cages….The mass influx of murderers and rapists that Trump talks about, the wave of crime committed by immigrants here….are things that simply aren’t happening. They’re just sick fantasies being used to justify real atrocities…[Trump’s] is a vision of, ‘American carnage’; of big cities overrun by violent immigrants. This vision bears no relationship to reality….Trump’s ‘carnage’ is a figment of his imagination….”
Krugman continues “…if we look across America there is a correlation between violent crime and the prevalence of undocumented immigrants—a negative correlation…places with a lot of immigrants, legal and undocumented, tend to have exceptionally low crime rates. The poster child for this [truth] …is New York, where more than a third of the population is foreign-born, probably including around half a million undocumented immigrants—and crime has fallen to levels not seen since the 1950s….This really shouldn’t be surprising, because criminal conviction data show that immigrants, both legal and undocumented, are significantly less likely to commit crimes than the native-born…The Trump administration has been terrorizing families and children, abandoning all norms of human decency, in response to a crisis that doesn’t even exist.” A crisis Trump has staged to excite his racist base.
Krugman makes a very significant correlation between what Trump and his sycophants are doing, and the “blood libel” claim that Jews sacrificed Christian children as part of Passover rituals. That lie wasn’t perpetrated only in Old Countries. A half million copies of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a fake document, were distributed to Americans by Henry Ford, who, after learning of the forgery, apologized. The latest such fake claim is being aired by Fox News commentator, Lou Dobbs. Dobbs claims that a cabal of lobbyists who he refers to as, “The Illuminati of K Street” are plotting a pro-immigrant fight. If only that were true. As Paul Krugman noted in his op-ed column: “…we’ve seen this movie before, in the history of anti-Semitism. The thing about anti-Semitism is that it was never about anything Jews actually did. It was always about lurid myths, often based on deliberate fabrications,that were systematically spread to engender hatred.”
Trump and his crew are inventing fantasies about crime waves perpetrated by illegal immigrants, claiming “illegals” are murderers and rapists when they are much more likely to be refugees from countries where real, documented carnage is taking place. According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, 48% of all Salvadorian migrants are women and 43% of Honduran migrants are women. Apprehension of MS-13 gang members and Barrio 18 gang members represent just 0.095 percent of interdicted migrants and refugees nationwide.
Henry Ford apologized but the damage was already done. Trump reversed himself but the damage has already been done. Parents who lost their children into the bowels of various Federal bureaucracies, without recourse to legal representation or contact information for their children, have been deported–without their children. Trump and his Republican supporters have committed one of the gravest moral crimes possible, the destruction of families.
The religious right’s support for Trump and his administration’s policies strikes me as surreal. (Though I was glad to see leaders of Session’s denomination are suing him for child abuse.) Sessions, Miller, Azar, Kelly–all of them are complicit. They are guilty of acts of omission and acts of commission. None have taken a stand against the moral crime perpetrated by Trump. The unrelenting irony in all of this is that every white American is a descendant of an immigrant or a refugee. What kind of hubris does it take to support the Trump administration’s immigration policies?
Yet on they go, mouthing one stupidity after another. As Mose Allison once sang, “Their minds are on vacation while their mouths are working overtime.” They contradict each other endlessly, even as they undermine moral certitudes based on family structures. Like the Vichy Regime of Marshal Petain, our Republicans collaborate with Marshal Trump. If you think your neighbor is undocumented, turn them in to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
The willful destruction of families is having, and will continue to have consequences for Americans and our allies. It will put a smile on the faces of our totalitarian enemies. There is nothing complicated about Trump’s moral crime. You do not need a law degree or a college education to understand it.
Trump presents as a caricature—a type infected with unrequited wet narcissism. With his tie-stroking, finger pointing swagger and a mouth whose lips are most often shaped like a mini megaphone, his narcissism has spread like some disease to his fellow Republicans. Trump’s exaggerations, fantasies and lies have given his base orgasms of hatred.
When he acts out, his supporters stand erect and salute as though his extremes were natural. The damage to the American psyche will not be reversed with the flourish of Trump’s autograph on some document purported to stop stripping families of their children. This moral crime cannot be undone. The callous use of children as bargaining chips in Trump’s war-on-the-world goes on. America will not begin to heal until the last child in custody is returned to their parents. Only then will we be able to begin to erase this stain on America.
For those who think Melania Trump is a victim, think again. Her recent fashion statement tells why she’s Trump’s wife. That saying on the back of her jacket is an acknowledgement that she too lacks a moral core. For both of them, life is predicated on transactions. What did Melania get for wearing that jacket with that amoral statement on the back? Another mink coat? Gold jewelry? Plastic surgery? Maybe all she needed was the thrill of attention. Wearing that jacket might’ve been like posing nude; the pimp pimping herself and, with the jacket, pimping her husband.
How long will it take for America to return, if ever, to one of its guiding moral principles articulated by Emma Lazarus and set in the stone base of the Statue of Liberty?
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
xxx
Post script: The Washington Post reports (6-25-18) that the nearly 1500 children held at the converted Walmart, known as Casa Padre, are required “to recite the Pledge of Allegiance in English to the country that holds them apart from their parents”:
Why must they say those words, some of the children ask at the shelter in Brownsville, on the Mexican border in Texas? “We tell them, ‘It’s out of respect,’” said one employee of the facility…who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of losing their job.