dailyO
Variety

Charlottesville remarks: Trump has dangerously supported racism and bigotry

Advertisement
DailyBite
DailyBiteAug 16, 2017 | 13:59

Charlottesville remarks: Trump has dangerously supported racism and bigotry

The presidential bundle of insanity occupying the White House since January 20, 2017, has once again committed what some would call a monumental blunder, but is, in reality, a mere extension of the man’s extreme xenophobia and fundamentally racist core.

US President Donald Trump took to defending his earlier comments on the heinous white nationalist violence that gripped Charlottesville, Virginia, and blamed “both sides”, in a terrifying equivocation evoking “alt-left” and “alt-right”, and essentially saying that they are one and the same.

Advertisement

 

Trump’s defence of far-right protesters on August 15 night, at a press conference that went awry has been widely condemned, in fact shattering the iota of “good will” that the president had garnered when he called the Charlottesville incident’s James Alex Fields Jr a “murderer”.

On Saturday, August 12, Trump had called Fields “a disgrace to himself, his family and this country”, since Fields had driven a car into the counter-protest in Charlottesville organised by leftist students, that had resulted in the death of a woman called Heather Heyer.

Though Trump was compelled to term the incident one of “racism”, and “bigotry”, which had “no place in America”, he was also panned for failing to call white nationalism by its name.

Advertisement

Trump’s mincing of words got the thumbs down from many in the news media, but on August 15 night, the POTUS broke all bounds by saying that the white supremacists and the neo-Nazis were the same as those wanting liberty, equality and fraternity, universal healthcare, anti-racist affirmative action and secularism in a country splintered along colour and ethnicity lines.

Trump on Tuesday said: “Not all of those people were neo-Nazis, not all of those people were white supremacists”. The latest statement – which was clearly impromptu and even caught the president’s aides off-guard – flies in the face of POTUS denouncing racism on August 12.

In fact, Trump said that many at the Charlottesville protest were simple “there to protest the taking down of the statue of Robert E Lee” – a Confederacy leader, who rebelled against the federal government of the United States in the mid 19th century because the latter wanted to abolish slave trade that deployed blacks as bonded and bought labours owned by white plantation owners.

Trump essentially ended up equating the American greats such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson with the Confederacy icons, Lee and Stonewall Jackson, in a highly dubious comparison that is blind to history. That the POTUS got thumbs down from even his Republican cohorts is an indication of the mammoth blunder that the former has ended up committing, though something that is hardly out of place with his initial “Mexicans are rapists” campaign.

Advertisement

Trump’s comments were denounced by none other than Paul Ryan, Marco Rubio and a number of others in the Republican party.

This is the typical moral and political equivocation that provides fodder to the neo-Nazi groups, which cash in on the POTUS’ half-baked, inadequate condemnation, which really works like cheerleading from the White House itself.

For example, Trump saying that he’s “putting nobody on a moral plane” essentially fails to distinguish between those who act in the name of racism and those who act against the bigotry and despicable ideology. Trump saying “you had people that were very fine people on both sides” takes the sting out of the white nationalist paranoia and rising hate crimes in the United States, thereby emboldening these groups further.

In fact, British writer and activist JK Rowling has called out the far-right groups’ hunger for exposure and notoriety multiple times, saying that fascists who dwell on the negative energy must be condemned and not allowed to gain a toehold in the political strata.

In addition, Al Jazeera has done an expose’ with an FBI officer infiltrating white nationalist groups and he has only horror stories to share. But the moot point of the officer was Trump’s own heavy investment into and implication in the neo-Nazi groups and their fascist ideology of racial superiority, white victimhood, which he exploited to the hilt.

Trump denouncing “alt-left” is typical of the white nationalist paradigm, and similar currents of political equivocation can be seen even in India when Sangh-affiliated violence is equated falsely with the protests against them, as happened in the #NotInMyName campaign. This is typical whataboutery and a denial of responsibility where it truly lies. No wonder then that Trump continues to jab at the liberal media which calls out his disgraceful blindness to history and his million attempts to whitewash it according to his false and fake beliefs.

In fact, Trump got a commendation tweet from none other than David Duke, the leader of the long banned Klux Klux Klan, when he refused to explicitly term the Charlottesville violence as a neo-Nazi hate crime, when others, including Republicans, had called it an act of domestic terrorism.

Trump’s constant mincing of words, shifting of the blame for white violence, his own racist and discriminatory policies such as the travel ban on Muslim-majority countries, visa restrictions, immigration tightening impacting the black and brown poor, harping on the Mexican border “wall”, and the general “America First” white Christian paranoia fanning – have all led to the groups that voted him in feeling a sense of fresh historical buoyancy.

That’s precisely the reason that the 19th century civil war and the chapter on slave trade has been reopened not for critical reflection, but racist reinvention. This is the reason why Trump fails to remove Steve Bannon, the architect of the POTUS’ far-right alt-universe, from the White House, despite sinking ratings and extreme criticism from the liberal global media.

Also read: Shame. Trump ‘wrestling CNN to the ground’ tweet is a call for more attacks on press

Last updated: August 16, 2017 | 13:59
IN THIS STORY
Please log in
I agree with DailyO's privacy policy