Trump and Charlottesville

I think I understand why revulsion at Trump's comments on Charlottesville is so universal.

Trump's “both sides are wrong” response didn't shock or surprise me. Local Republican County Chair Roman Jimenez's vicious writing didn't surprise me. Why would they? 

But Trump is suddenly isolated, deserted by business, the military, and other Republicans. Jimenez has resigned under fire. Republican fire. 

A book review helped me see why this week's events elicited such a strong, universal reaction: what we saw dredged up distant images locked in all our hearts because they were so unthinkable.

The book review mentioned conductor Arturo Toscanini getting beaten up by Nazi thugs in Berlin in 1931. One of many harbingers of what was to come. 

We have a president who encourages violence. He plays to his audience by urging security to beat protesters at rallies and by urging police to bang black arrestees' heads against the hard steel roofs of police cars. When his supporters do violence, he can't criticize them unambiguously. Nazi wannabes shouted slogans against Jews. A nutcase from Ohio drove into a crowd of people. Trump doesn't see the problem.

He can't unambiguously criticize an insane and homicidal supporter. The victims were asking for it. Were both sides guilty in the Miami nightclub shooting, because gay people were dancing with each other in public? Democrats condemned the shooting of Republican Congressmen at a baseball practice. I loathe Steve Pearce's politics, but I'd sure stop someone from shooting bullets at him if I could! 

If a Muslim nutcase had driven that car, Trump would rail against Muslims. But the White Supremacists who egged this guy on? They were Trump's first supporters. 

Even Republicans are appalled. Even many conservatives are speaking out.

On the radio a black woman says she's surprised not by the racism but by the Quad Cities speaking out against that racism. She never saw that while she was growing up. She felt good seeing white faces at a protest. In Doña Ana County, Jimenez's extreme rhetoric is suddenly unpalatable to the people who had made him their leader. 

Why? Because a dangerous buffoon as Chancellor, with thugs who support him beating people, feels eerily familiar.

Whatever our political or social views, we do not want that Nazi world. Trump and his supporters have trod too close to indelible images from history carved somewhere deep inside us: photographs from the Holocaust, Nazis kicking a pregnant Jewish woman's belly. (I also recall TV footage of skinny little black girls being escorted to school by the national guard, on a sidewalk lined with jeering white adults.) Whatever our beliefs, we know we do not want a world like that. 

Trump is not Hitler. He's a narcissist who's lived a privileged life. He has no strong political views. He's greedy, shallow, and self-absorbed. He hasn't Hitler's sharp focus or deep hatred. Trump looks down on blacks, but has no desire to eradicate them. Particularly if they stay in their place.

 

And our middle class and lower-middle classes aren't (yet?) nearly as shell-shocked as Germany's were during the 1930's. Yeah, the last few decades have about made the middle-class an endangered species, widening the vast inequality between rich and poor and pushing more of us toward that latter.

But things aren't as bad as they were in Germany.

We have a long democratic tradition. Germany didn't.

But historical repetitions need not be precisely identical. 

The young woman murdered in Charlottesville posted online that we must speak up against hatred, that failing to speak was to support it. 

It's heartening that so many are speaking out. This time.

                                     -30-

[The above column appeared this morning, Sunday, 20 August 2017, in the Las Cruces Sun-News, as well as on the newspaper's website and KRWG's website.  A spoken version will air during the week on KRWG and on KTAL-LP, 101.5 FM.]

[If it isn't clear what I'm saying and what I'm not: it feels dangerous to have a fellow in the White House spewing violent thoughts and encouraging the more vicious among us; when thugs do pro-fascist violence, he basically smiles upon them; and that can't help remind anyone who's old or has read any history of Germany in the 1930's.  Not an appetizing prospect.
I'm not saying Trump is Hitler; but if a man drives a car into a crowd because he's too busy looking at himself in the mirror to concentrate on driving, the people he kills are just as dead as if he'd planned it all out carefully.  Same with our democracy, already under threat by Citizens United, Koch Brothers, ALEC, and the rest.
That is, there are dangers here.  Bad things are happening and more could be in store.
There are a lot of reasons -- the responses of our business and military leaders, our democratic history and traditions, Trump's basic incompetence, and above all the fact that such a vast majority of people loathe Trump -- to hope nothing so vile as happened in Germany will happen here; so I don't believe anything similar will happen here.  But most Germans couldn't  have imagined what occurred there.
I don't think we'll descend to that level; but I do think every thinking person of good will needs to pay attention and speak up.  Hitler was even more marginal than Donald Trump when he started.  Folks didn't suppose either would become their nation's leader.  These are troublesome times, which I believe we'll survive -- but not if we sleep.]


[Saturday, as I was copying this column into my blog, I ran across these statements by U.S. Senator Ben Sasse (R-Neb).  And although he and a couple of other prominent Republicans may be angling for visibility in a possible post-Trump Presidential race in 2020, similar sentiments seem widespread right now.]

[And this just in: Evangelical students at Liberty University are returning their diplomas to protest Jerry Falwell's continued support of Trump.   Liberty University? These are not leftwingers.

September 12, 2011