Up@dawn 2.0

Tuesday, July 16, 2019

"Get out"

...Many have already pointed out the fallacies in Trump’s tweets. Three of the women were born in this country; only Omar, who emigrated from Somalia, was not. Tlaib’s parents are Palestinian immigrants; Ocasio-Cortez’s parents are of Puerto-Rican descent. Pressley is black. They are all, of course, Americans. But it is worth pausing to recognize the racist shibboleths in Trump’s tweets, ones that have been used to justify other shameful moments in our history, from the Japanese internment, during the Second World War, to the Trump Administration’s Muslim ban.

As an editor, my normal instinct regarding Trump’s tweets has been not to engage, to avoid becoming an unwitting abettor of his attention economy. But Sunday’s tweets felt different to me. They were too dangerous to go unchallenged, the path from words to action too well trodden. There’s the assumed association with the countries of the congresswomen’s ancestry, a trope that has been used to question the loyalties of immigrants throughout American history. There’s the us-versus-them delineation in the language around “our government.” There’s the reproach to get out... (continues)
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David Remnick:
In November 4, 2008, Barack Obama beat John McCain by nine and a half million votes and became the country’s first African-American President. In 2016, Donald Trump, an unapologetic racist, lost the popular ballot by three million votes but, thanks to the antediluvian rules that still govern our voting system, succeeded Obama in the Oval Office. Understanding the role of racism and its persistence in this dismal pivot will be as central to our understanding of our times as it was to our understanding of Reconstruction.

What’s curious is just how many people have resisted seeing squarely Trump’s racism, his shrewd exploitation of animosity, hatred, and division for political advantage. Trump is hardly a man of subtle concealment. W. E. B. Du Bois wrote that Andrew Johnson’s unwillingness to enact policies to give freedmen land, a decent education, or voting rights resided, first and foremost, in “his inability to picture Negroes as men.” Trump’s hostility toward minorities and his capacity to signal that hostility to others has never been a secret. This quality is central to his politics and his appeal.

The biography is plain. As real-estate developers in the nineteen-seventies, Trump and his father did what they could to keep people of color out of their buildings in Brooklyn and Queens. These slimy stratagems attracted the attention of the Department of Justice. As a tabloid big mouth eager to enhance his peculiar brand of outrageous celebrity, Trump paid for ad space in the New York papers to call for the execution of the so-called Central Park Five. Long after they were vindicated and given a collective award of forty-one million dollars, Trump refused to apologize or reconsider... (continues)

1 comment:

  1. Those who say it is only Democrats and Independents who object to what he said would do well to listen to one of Trump's early supporters, anthony scaramucci, who expresses what I believe most people realize regardless of how this is spun. https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2019/07/16/anthony-scaramucci-trump-attacks-congresswomen-lead-vpx.cnn/video/playlists/this-week-in-politics/

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