Every four years when a new presidential administration comes to town, they bring something different. Jimmy Carter and his Georgia crew put hominy grits on the menus of trendy Washington restaurants, and so they remain today.
Now that he’s settled in to rule … or rather to govern … President Donald J. Trump and his supporters and staff — like Sean Spicer, Kellyanne Conway, Jeff Sessions and Michael Flynn — have made lying and trading in “alternative facts” the new normal.
They are just like their boss — liars and bullies, and they feed The Donald’s massive narcissism and vanity with enormous and seemingly endless prevarications and departures from the truth.
Black people have lived among these people for 470-odd years, and it seems we don’t know them as well as we thought we did, and they certainly don’t know much about us. I for one, never dreamed that the support for Trump among “normal” white people who did not drink bootleg whisky out of a jug and marry their cousins was nearly as deep as it is.
Trump is the entire White World’s Guy. Racist, xenophobic, right-wing European candidates are now being touted as the “Dutch Trump” or the “French Trump,” because of their openly expressed hostility to Muslim refugees.
In Arizona, Trump-istas — heavily armed militiamen and white nationalists — recently held a “March for Trump.” It displayed vintage hatred which has been released by the popularity among white folks of the Trump regime, even with all of its ugly warts.
“If you don’t like it here, go to Syria, go to someplace else,” one attendee said. This, after the Americans and the French and the Brits went into that country and fomented an uprising that has led to hundreds of thousands of deaths and millions of refugees fleeing the carnage.
You broke it, you own it, White Americans. Syria, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Yemen — Americans invaded and broke those countries.
One so-called “oath keeper” at the Arizona rally said: “I just want to let them know that I can’t wait for the liberal genocide to begin. That’s the way to make America great again. Liberals are destroying the country.”
Sorry, Mr. Oath Keeper, we are not going through another genocide in this country.
Meanwhile, at North Cobb High School in Georgia, a white student was captured on video proclaiming a desire to bring back slavery and expressing not only an admiration for Abraham Lincoln’s assassin but also a desire to “exterminating all n*****s.”
What has gotten into these white people is “Trump-ism.” It can lead this country to its destruction, on a rocket ship.
Even as these scoundrels in the White House secretly contemplate interring Muslim citizens in concentration camps, the way the president once cited the internment of Japanese citizens during World War II as justification for his own nefarious dreams, they have probably not taken into consideration the potential black military reaction, both among the generals and colonels in the Pentagon, and among soldiers in the barracks.
Imagine, if you will, the dissent among the ranks in the uniformed services, at being tasked to carry out orders in cities all over this country, to arrest and take to detention camps, black Muslim grandmothers and great-grandmothers, and children who have never been arrested for so much as jaywalking; and the men and the boys, redeemed from lost lives into productivity and service to their families and communities; imagine the dissent in the ranks at being given those orders to carry out.
Probably close to 25 percent of the U.S. armed forces are black folks, thinking black folks, conscious black folks. What could a black urban population, or a Muslim population possibly do that would be so dangerous to the American way of life that it would justify their mass detention or extermination? Difficult orders to contemplate. Difficult orders for a soldier to have to carry out.
So, sorry, Angry White People who think Donald Trump will “Make America Great Again,” at the expense once again of compliant black people: you are simply mistaken this time. It’s a new day. No genocide. No slavery. No deportations. No mass incarceration.