It’s a terrible thing to think that the leader of our country brings out the worst in us and stifles and demeans the best. But that’s where the hate speech, the bombastic demeanor and draconian policies of Donald Trump and his administration have taken us — to a hate-soiled nadir that we have not seen in this country in our life times.
When we first witnessed candidate Trump stalking and sneering and belittling Hillary Clinton on the stages of their three debates, many of us knew we were watching a psychological morality play and that one of the characters had maliciously assumed the role of the snotty, evil arch bully — for what reason we were unsure of at first.
But it didn’t take long for us to realize the terrible truth — that the president was playing the role of boastful, arrogant, loathsome villain to inspire the worst kind of hate and self-pity on the part of his “base.” He was igniting a horrifying level of bestiality in his followers, a demagogue playing to their deepest fears and basest instincts.
Following a spate of pipe bombs delivered to a dozen or more opponents of the president, and the massacre of eleven innocents at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, Vice President Mike Pence denied that President Trump’s “strong language” had anything to do with inspiring domestic terrorism. He went so far as to characterize the president’s inflammatory speech and demeanor as his “style”
and that “people on both sides of the aisle use strong language,” employing the insulting canard of false balance to let the hissing and roaring president off the hook.
Trump has assumed the character of a mythological political devil. There’s no posing as the “father of our country,” no posturing as a noble figure, no pretense at wise family man. There’s not a smidgen in Trump of the upstanding, smiling mannequin that Mike Pence supplies the American political theatre.
Maybe Trump is really playing a role. Maybe it’s all a put on, a mask, a strategic ploy. Maybe nobody can be as big and dangerous a political buffoon as the president so successfully presents himself to be. Maybe he’s a brat and a bully through and through. But mask or no mask, Trump has drawn out the worst in the American character and inspired murderous rage in the psychologically troubled people who mingle with the neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and bully boys who make up an active part of Trump’s “base.” One of his followers, a self-proclaimed anti-Semite, killed eleven people in their house of worship. Three weeks ago one of his followers sent real pipe bombs, or fake ones (think of fake anthrax), to the offices of Trump’s political opponents.
A rally of Trump supporters in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August last year, who were opposing the removal of Civil War confederate monuments, turned into a riot. “Protesters were members of the far-right … neo-Confederates, neo-fascists, white nationalists, neo-Nazis and various militias. The marchers chanted racist and anti-Semitic slogans, carried semi-automatic rifles, swastikas … Confederate battle flags … and other symbols of various past and present anti-Muslim and anti-Semitic groups,” as an entry in Wikipedia put it. A counter protester, Heather Heyer was murdered by one of the “Unite the Right” marchers. President Trump tweeted the old canard again that “both sides” were to blame for the violence, not just the marchers he inspired.
Some say it’s unfair to associate Trump and his hate speech with the murder of nine worshipers at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, after Trump announced his run for the presidency in June of 2015. But the man convicted of the slaughter and sentenced to death could well have been one of the marchers in the “Unite the Right” rally in Virginia two years later. And at the time, then South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, current UN Ambassador, indirectly blamed the shooting on inflammatory campaign rhetoric associated with Trump, saying “I know what that rhetoric can do. I saw it happen.” Last week, Haley tweeted that people should stop blaming Trump for the Pittsburgh shooting and respect the families and their loss.
The worst church shooting and act of domestic terrorism in recent history also took place in the hate-saturated political environment of the Trump presidency. A shooter murdered 26 parishioners at a religious service at the Sutherland Springs, Texas, First Baptist Church in November 2017, shooting some of them point blank.
When the President of the United States incites racist hate and paranoia with his political messages, he is validating what every decent person, and every major religion, knows is morally wrong — racism, class hatred, religious intolerance, and violence of any kind, especially the self-righteous violence of extremist personalities and political movements. One shouldn’t have to say that. It should be, and indeed used to be, a given in our country and most places in the world. But not any more. President Trump, and those who advance his agenda and methods, are directly responsible for lowering the moral stature of our nation. What a catastrophe for all of us.
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
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A brilliant yet horrifying piece. Thanks Barrett for laying it out so plainly. I’m praying that tomorrow’s election shows that this is not who America wants to be. But I have to say that I am very worried.
Trump “… was playing the role of boastful, arrogant, loathsome villain …” because he’s a boastful, arrogant, loathsome person – end of story.