“He who saves his country does not violate any law”. Donald Napoleon Trump

by Vijaya Chandrasoma

I have been writing on American politics for nearly a decade, apparently misleading the readers of the Island about the politics of a country I thought I knew, with the experience I had gained living there for over 20 years at the turn of the century. I emigrated to the USA in the early 1990s, from the beginning of the Clinton years and returned to Sri Lanka after the election of President Barack Obama, in 2009.

Trump’s re-election and the mandate he has received from the American people seem to indicate that I had misjudged the manifest destiny of the nation which gave me a second chance in my life. However, the first month of the Trump administration’s second term seems to indicate that my worst fears may have been justified. Perhaps I could continue writing in the future on an “I told you so” theme, after the dust settles!

But I would like to end my previous comments before Trump’s re-election with this statement by Michael Gerson, speechwriter to former Republican President George W. Bush. He has expressed far more eloquently than I could, my sentiments about the acceptance by a majority of Americans Trump’s white supremacist, oligarchic future for the nation.

Which is really a return to a past of unbelievable racism and cruelty.

“I had fully intended to ignore President Trump’s latest round of racially charged taunts against an African American elected official, and an African American activist, and an African American journalist and a whole city with a lot of African Americans in it. I had every intention of walking past Trump’s latest outrages and writing about the self-destructive squabbling of the Democratic presidential field, which has chosen to shame former vice president Joe Biden for the sin of being an electable, moderate liberal.

“But I made the mistake of pulling James Cone’s ‘The Cross and the Lynching Tree’ off my shelf — a book designed to shatter convenient complacency. Cone recounts the case of a white mob in Valdosta, Georgia in 1918 that lynched an innocent man named Haynes Turner. Turner’s enraged wife, Mary, promised justice for the killers. The sheriff responded by arresting her and then turning her over to the mob, which included women and children. According to one source, Mary was stripped, hung upside down by the ankles, soaked with gasoline, and roasted to death. In the midst of this torment, a white man opened her swollen belly with a hunting knife and her infant fell to the ground and was stomped to death.

“God help us. It is hard to write the words. This evil — the evil of white supremacy, resulting in dehumanization, inhumanity and murder — is the worst stain, the greatest crime, of U.S. history. It is the thing that nearly broke the nation. It is the thing that proved generations of Christians to be vicious hypocrites. It is the thing that turned normal people into moral monsters, capable of burning a grieving widow to death and killing her child.

“When the president of the United States plays with that fire or takes that beast out for a walk, it is not just another political event, not just a normal day in campaign 2020. It is a cause for shame. It is the violation of martyrs’ graves. It is obscene graffiti on the Lincoln Memorial. It is, in the eyes of history, the betrayal — the re-betrayal — of Haynes and Mary Turner and their child. And all of this is being done by an ignorant and arrogant narcissist reviving racist tropes for political gain, indifferent to the wreckage he is leaving, the wounds he is ripping open.

“Like, I suspect, many others, I am finding it hard to look at resurgent racism as just one in a series of presidential offenses or another in a series of Republican errors. Racism is not just another wrong. The Antietam battlefield is not just another plot of ground. The Edmund Pettus Bridge is not just another bridge. The balcony outside Room 306 at the Lorraine Motel is not just another balcony. As U.S. history hallows some causes, it magnifies some crimes.

“What does all this mean politically? It means that Trump’s divisiveness is getting worse, not better. He makes racist comments, appeals to racist sentiments and inflames racist passions.

The rationalization that he is not, deep down in his heart, really a racist is meaningless. Trump’s continued offenses mean that a large portion of his political base is energized by racist tropes and the language of white grievance. And it means — whatever their intent — that those who play down, or excuse, or try to walk past these offenses, are enablers.

“Some political choices are not just stupid or crude. They represent the return of our country’s cruelest, most dangerous passion. Such racism indicts Trump. Treating racism as a typical or minor matter indicts us.”

These are the fears and warnings I have been predicting ever since a sexual predator and fraud, a convicted criminal of 91 felonies including Obstruction of Justice, Sedition and Espionage, gained the favor of the majority of the American people, who elevated him to the highest position in the land. For the second time. This time with a majority in both the Electoral College and the popular vote.

The 2025 Project white supremacist agenda, the official Republican administration policy that the American people have chosen as their manifest destiny for the future, really a return to the cruel past of the Apartheid days of Jim Crow, disgusts me.

Trump has spent three weeks of doing absolutely nothing on the issues, inflation and high prices, on promises that he will reduce them overnight, which won him the election. Instead, he is intent on carrying out an agenda which will transform the American government into a white supremacist, oligarchic kleptocracy ruled by a cruel psychopath and the richest men in the world.

Trump’s approval rating stands at 53%, the highest rating he has ever enjoyed in both presidential terms. The American people seem to be willing him to this transformation, permanently abandoning the Great Experiment, the bedrock that had made the United States the undisputed Leader of the Free World, a title it enjoys no longer.

And they will keep using the weapons of the ugliest era of American history, which they have always dreamt of using but couldn’t because of the hypocritical facade with which they had hypnotized themselves from the years of FDR and World War II to the election of an African American to the presidency. Trump and his MAGA (Make America Great Again) cult have exposed this facade of progress and decency for the sanctimonious fraud it was, and unleashed the forces of Christian Nationalist (Nazi) white supremacy which had always been seething beneath the surface.

The same weapons our neighboring Indians used against the Dalits (untouchables), the weapons the white plantation owners in the United States used against the African slaves, the weapons the Nazis used against the Jews, and in historic irony, the weapons the Jews of Israel are now using against the Palestinians. With the complete endorsement of the Trump administration.

What Americans have chosen for their country today is not a “Brave New World”, as described by a columnist in the Sunday Island last week without a trace of irony. They have chosen the modern version of a return to the worst era of the nation’s history. A Christian, White Supremacist Oligarchy, devoid of the Rule of Law. A virtual monarchy, as indicated in the tweet by Donald Trump last Thursday morning, in which he elevated himself to the level of a King. Little does he realize that he is merely the Court Jester, the real King is Elon Musk.

I am not for a moment predicting that the current trend of a movement to the radical right in America, indeed in many parts of the world, will drag the United States to that terrible era in its history. Just as Hitler only came close to imposing the idea of a Master Race in Europe. But I have no doubt that Donald Trump and the evil, white supremacist cult he leads, eerily similar to the Nazi Brownshirts of the Third Reich, will do their damnedest to achieve Hitler’s ambition of creating a Christian, white supremacist nation in the United States.

Or, most likely, the most powerful nation in the world will end up as an oligarchy, ruled by Musk and the richest men in the world. Allied to the other totalitarian governments in the world.

The Democrats can either roll over and take this consummate evil, or we can fight. But we can’t fight Republicans with the weapons they use – weapons against our conscience, inhuman, abhorrent weapons we teach our children never to even think of using – against any living being.

We will fight them with eloquent, erudite letters, brave resignations, lengthy newspaper articles, peaceful protests against the crimes against the rule of law, the breakdown of the constitution. All in vain. They have received a mandate from the people of the United States to do whatever the hell they want, however hell they dare. And just as reinsurance, they have a lickspittle, corrupt Supreme Court backing them. So they laugh at us.

Let us pray that the wisdom of the Mahatma will ultimately prevail, when he said:

“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”