“They turned the Obamas
into an American version
of a royal family and
then used his personal
popularity to make the
case for war crimes and
bank bailouts.”
July 08, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- Donald Trump is a national
embarrassment. Corporate media
pundits have declared this
statement to be true and
millions of people are in
agreement. As a candidate and as
president Trump has certainly
deviated from norms of
acceptable public behavior, but
how much does that really
matter? Trump’s latest social
media tirades do stand out in
comparison to other politicians
and heads of state. But when one
considers what this country is
like, the outrage over
comportment doesn’t amount to
very much.
Consider that the United States
has the world’s largest prison
population, more than two
million people. Consider again
that this mass incarceration
system has been targeted
specifically against black
people, and that one eighth of
all imprisoned people on the
planet are black Americans.
The atrocities of the law
enforcement system don’t stop
there. Death at the hands of
police is the fate of an average
of three people every day in the
United States. And those deaths
are rarely punished. They are
accepted as collateral damage
for the maintenance of white
supremacy.
Many Americans love to brag that
theirs is “the richest country
in the world.” There are
certainly big banks, rich
individuals and trillions of
dollars in the treasury but the
masses of people rarely benefit
from this wealth. This country
routinely ranks near the bottom
when compared to other
“developed” nations in any
measure of how it treats its
people. It is now considered a “second
tier”
nation in terms of the wellbeing
of its citizens.
“Death at the hands of police is
the fate of an average of three
people every day in the United
States.”
It is certainly unusual to have
such a decidedly boorish
president. Trump literally
pushes other presidents aside,
engages in public feuds with
celebrities and makes anyone an
enemy who dares to oppose him or
his policies. He makes up terms
like “bigly” and “modern
presidential” and excoriates the
press when they criticize him.
Condemning this kind of behavior
is the lowest hanging fruit.
Before Trump became president
bad behavior at the top was
usually sanitized with public
relations. The corporate media
and others among the ruling
elites hid atrocities in plain
sight with appealing narratives
and good photo opportunities.
They excused politicians who
routinely benefited the 1% and
disadvantaged everyone else. The
end result is an ugly system
that is made to look pretty with
the right amount of marketing.
This phenomenon was especially
true during the Barack Obama
administration. He had the
all-important buy-in from
corporate media. They turned the
Obamas into an American version
of a royal family and then used
his personal popularity to make
the case for war crimes and bank
bailouts. They worked hand in
hand to make dirty deeds look
clean.
“This country routinely ranks
near the bottom when compared to
other ‘developed’ nations in any
measure of how it treats its
people.”
Obama and his predecessors
undermined
climate change
agreements and made them
toothless. Trump did one better
by opting out but tremendous
damage was done by a president
who was called an
environmentalist. Obama was
called the peace candidate when
he expanded wars.
He fought hard to
ratify the undemocratic, job
killing TPP trade deal which was
stopped only by Trump’s white
nationalist ideology.
Trump can be blamed for quite a
lot during his first six months
in office. His travel ban
against citizens of seven
nations is an unconstitutional
exercise in Islamophobia and has
been struck down by federal
judges. Trump bans Libyans from
traveling to the United States,
but Obama destroyed that country
and created an ongoing
humanitarian disaster.
Let
us condemn Trump for the right
reasons. His erratic behavior is
not demonstrated only on twitter
posts. Just a few months ago his
administration stated that
regime change in Syria was no
longer American policy. Now he
uses his incompetent press
secretary to announce that their
will almost certainly be future
false flag attacks
against the Syrian government.
The secretary of state and the
National Security Council were
unaware of this pronouncement,
and that is very dangerous. It
is a lot more dangerous than the
president making personal
attacks against media figures
who fall out of favor with him.
“Trump bans Libyans from
traveling to the United States,
but Obama destroyed that country
and created an ongoing
humanitarian disaster.”
Trump is putting into practice
Republican Party voter
suppression schemes.
He has established what
he calls an election integrity
commission and asked every state
to provide names, Social
Security numbers and party
affiliation of their voters. The
inevitable result will be the
removal of black people from
voter rolls. But the Democratic
Party, which quite literally
depends on black people in order
to win elections, has
demonstrated little ability to
push back as forcefully as it
ought to. Bland pronouncements
are all they can muster when
they should be in court filing
lawsuits to protect the people
they depend upon.
The list of reasons to be
embarrassed about America is
very long and it existed before
Trump was inaugurated. He has
surely added to that ledger but
legitimate cause for concern
shouldn’t be pushed aside in
favor of phony outrage about
optics. President Trump is an
ill- mannered, impulsive,
happily uninformed bigot. Most
of his predecessors were better
behaved and followed rules of
public relations. But they
filled the jails, ended the
right to public assistance,
killed millions of people
abroad, kept wages low and used
a variety of schemes to make the
rich even richer. Despite his
obvious shortcomings Donald
Trump is not the worst among
them. And that is the most
embarrassing fact of all.
Margaret
Kimberley's Freedom Rider column
appears weekly in BAR, and is
widely reprinted elsewhere. She
maintains a frequently updated
blog as well as at
http://freedomrider.blogspot.com.
Ms. Kimberley
lives in New York City, and can
be reached via e-Mail at
Margaret.Kimberley(at)BlackAgendaReport.com.