In Charlottesville, Heather Heyer, was murdered. She died only yards away from heavily militarized armed far right militiaman. She died because Donald Trump has unleashed hatred made in his own image into the American mainstream.
Trump’s week long rhetorical ricocheting — from declining to even name the KKK and Nazis in the murder of a non-violent protester in Charlottesville, to his grudging (forced) acknowledgment that neo-Nazis and white supremacists “are criminals and thugs” to his classic doubling down on his original remarks — highlights the most basic truths about Donald Trump: He will always find a way to pull any conversation back to himself. And he’s inclined to always find the lowest road and then gleefully takes it.
Trump’s “low roads” include his unhinged ego as well as a nasty tendency to molest women then brag about it. But most recently he’s been highlighting his race hatreds.
Trump’s race hatreds go way back to a time when he and his father conspired to keep black people out of housing they controlled and were sued by the government. Trump has spent a lifetime as a confirmed bigot. His hobby has been blowing so-called dog whistles to energize hate groups that mirror his own disturbed personality.
In the 1980s, Trump bought full-page ads in four major newspapers calling for the death penalty to be reinstated in NY against five innocent black and Latino youths in the Central Park jogger rape case. Known as the Central Park Five, they were later completely exonerated.
The police were condemned for framing them. Trump never apologized. He never backed down. He just kept on playing his race game and worked to heighten racial division and tension.
When President Obama was in office, Trump was a holdout for the conspiracy theory that Obama was not a natural-born US citizen. Again- Trump stoked fires of hate for no reason other than his own smoldering pathology.
The Trump run for the White House was built, on ugly comments about minority groups and women.
White evangelical misogynists and racists heard the call. Nazis heard the call. Southern bigots heard the call. White supremacists heard the call.
This call was no longer coded. It was overt: “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you … they’re bring drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists, and some, I assume, are good people,” he said when he first announced his run.
The context of Trump’s lifelong racism isn’t encouraging.
As Bill Curry writes in Salon:
Trump got to be president in part because there were so many things Democrats and the media didn’t think or couldn’t bring themselves to say. Trump’s whole life is a fraud that Robert Mueller may soon expose as a criminal enterprise. His business career was a disaster till a book someone else wrote and a TV show someone else produced made him a celebrity. He then fell into the only line of work he ever prospered in: licensing that celebrity. He does it pretty well, but Zsa Zsa Gabor did it first and Kim Kardashian did it better and neither of them should be president.
In 2016 Trump’s real vulnerabilities were his mental health and personal finances. We can now add his proto-fascism … There are effective and responsible ways to talk about all such things, but first our media and political elites must find the courage to name them. They know as well as you or I who he is.
Trump’s Nazi, KKK and “alt-right” fans also know “as well as you or I who he is.”
As the Huffington Post noted Richard Spencer, the 39-year-old white nationalist leader, said that he didn’t take President Trump’s statement denouncing hate groups seriously, and two of Spencer’s associates shared a somewhat similar sentiment with HuffPost. “The statement today was more Kumbaya nonsense,” Spencer said, speaking to reporters in his office and part-time home in Alexandria, Virginia. “He sounded like a Sunday school teacher. I just don’t take him seriously … it sounded so hollow and vapid.”
Another associate, Nathan Damigo, a white supremacist and Marine veteran who was filmed punching a 95-pound female protester in Berkeley, California, earlier this year, also told HuffPost he was not too worried about Trump’s statement.
When HuffPost asked another Spencer associate about Trump’s statement, he said, “Yeah, of course he’s going to do that.” The man added, “It’s the same platitudes over and over. You’ve heard it once, you’ve heard it a thousand times.” The truth is Trump is true to himself. He always–but always–returns to the darkest corner of his seething dysfunctional brain.
Trump’s problem is not that he lacks the courage to denounce racists. Trump’s problem—and America’s eternal shame—is that he’s one of them and has been a dedicated bigot for his entire adult life.
There is, amid all the random tweets and undisciplined press comments, a remarkable consistency to Donald Trump. He is a racist, and above all an Obama-hater.
Having a black man in the White House literally drove Trump the-life-long-racist over the edge.
The only consistent compulsion directing of Trump’s troubled presidency seems to be his visceral hatred of Barack Obama. Trump has no other clear ideology and no other clear purpose to his presidency… other than his obsession with overturning everything Obama stood for from Obama defending clean air and water regulations, to climate Obama’s change activism, to his fighting for medical care for the poor.
Trump’s presidential campaign began with a racist lies about Obama’s birth certificate and his presidency continues to this day to smolder with resentment about the enduring life of Obamacare. In fact Trump is a microcosm of the white backlash against a smart, kind, upright black man who somehow got elected thus proving to bigots everywhere that whites no longer can take for granted their unearned leadership.
In his third set of statements about the murder of a young woman Trump once again reverted to defending the Nazi and KKK by spreading the blame. “I’ve condemned neo-Nazis,” Trump said. “I’ve condemned many different groups, but not all of those people were neo-Nazis, believe me. Not all of those people were white supremacists, by any stretch … Those people were also there because they wanted to protest the taking down of a statue of Robert E. Lee.”
But there were no chants about Gen. Lee on that hot torch-lit Friday night, as the gun-toting fascists thugs carried their torches through the University of Virginia campus. The chants were about Jews, gays, blacks and others who the marchers hate. That torchlight rally was populated by men who the Nazi salute, chanted “blood and soil!” — the Nazi slogan — and “Jews will not replace us!”
In Trump we face the fate of those who gloss over their sins.
America has never had the moral equivalent of the Denazification program launched in Germany after the war (the Allied initiative to rid German and Austrian society, culture, press, economy, judiciary, and politics of any remnants of Nazism.
Proof?
- That there are ANY monuments to the traitors of the South who attacked us from within
- That a slave-holding rapist like Thomas Jefferson — who raped and impregnated a 14-year-old slave and didn’t even free his own children he had by her–has his very own monument in Washington DC
- The 8-year slow motion lynching President Obama endured at the hands of the Republican white oligarchs who obstructed him at every turn.
Trump is an aberration only because of his pathological self-evident mental unfitness to lead. In every other way Trump is the logical fulfillment of the racist American past that has never been honestly addressed.
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Keep up the great work!!! I think you would have more shares on your FB page if people weren’t so scared of what others think. You are saying what we are all thinking and it is refreshing! Please keep you knowledge and love flowing!
When President Trump says things Schaeffer, and other leftists agree with, they claim he isn’t sincere and is only saying it because he is “forced” to say it. So, no matter what the President says, or does, leftists like Schaeffer will never be happy. It does the President no good at all to say or do anything that the left wants. So, President Trump should just say and do what he wants and ignore the Schaeffers of the world.
When Schaeffer says things Gary, and other “Bible believing Christians” disagree with, they whine about how he is picking on the “pussy grabbing,” misogynistic, homophobic, bold face liar, and race baiting President. We all know 81% of those family value evangelical voters (who voted in 2016) voted for Trump. So, no matter what Schaeffer says, or does, Bible believing Christians like Gary will never be happy. It does Schaeffer no good at all to say or does anything that religious right winger wants. So, Schaeffer should keep speaking the Truth to Power and ignore Bible believing Christians like Gary of the world. To which I say “Amen.”
joelyn, I’m happy. I expect what I get from Schaeffer. And from you. I’m not asking any of you liberals to change a thing about yourselves. You’re all enemies. God’s enemies, and my enemies. And I’m constantly working for your defeat.
O my. I’m an enemy of your imaginary sky god and you are constantly working for my defeat? LOL! Well, I am not afraid of you or your worthless prayers and beliefs. And I will constantly push back against religious folks like you who want to ruin our secular democratic republic with your religious foolishness. Woo hoo!
You’re going to lose.
Gary, Trump is God’s enemy. If you believe in a just God, you should condemn this hatred and bigotry. Modern American christianity has become a monster, defined not by people living a Christlike life, showing love and compassion, feeding the poor, healing the sick, but defined by who you hate. Nowadays you can only call yourself christian if you share mutual hatred of feminism, Islam, LGBTQIA rights and civil rights. I am not American, I am British, and was brought up, like Frank, in a conservative family in a 99% white part of the country. I’ve seen changes in the last few years as the overspill of American media has poisoned the minds of well meaning christians who used to have values and compassion for others. Only last year, a Labour MP named Jo Cox was murdered because of Brexit. The Tory deal with the DUP shows that even the UK has a problem with proto fascists who call themselves christians. Can you find any scripture in the Bible you so love which suggests that Jesus Christ was a Nazi? No, of course not. He was not even a homophobe as he healed the Roman centurian’s footman.
Virgin Mary, Your understanding of Christ and Christianity is flawed. Christ was not a socialist, or a liberal. If Jesus Christ was God, then he was the same God who told Moses to execute those who practiced homosexuality. I dispute your claim that the Roman centurion’s servant was a homosexual. God has rules for people to live by. Feminists, Muslims, lgbtq are in rebellion against those rules. And against the God who gave the rules. God says for us to resist evil, not surrender to it.
Hatred and bigotry from Trump? That isn’t what I have seen. And you haven’t seen it either.
The evangelicals have no spiritual life, and have a purely materialist understanding of scripture. They follow the ideas of Dutch Calvinism and the Protestant work ethic, and consider the most wealthy to be the most favoured by the Lord. They exhibit this in their blind adoration of Trump as a god king, and their condemnation of the poor and those on welfare as they consider poverty to be a result of sin. The only reason these people believe in the rapture and the Holy City is because they have read of the gold and jewels which will be there, and they imagine themselves being surrounded with vast wealth whilst the damned grovel in the dirt for all eternity. This evangelical religion has more in common with the Ferengi religion from Star Trek than it does CHRISTIANITY. They follow the arises of Aquisution, and Trump is their Grand Nagus.
It is not surprising that Trump supporters like Gary haven’t seen his decades’ long well-documented hatred and bigotry. Alternative facts and religious blindness go hand in glove. Gary’s comment is the perfect demonstration of this phenomena.
In contrast to President Trump’s “both sides” false equation fallacy, President Obama’s tweet featuring three adoptable babies and Nelson Mandela’s quote about race is the third most retweeted comment on Twitter ever.
And given the rank hypocrisy of Christians who voted for Trump, it is not surprising that after several CEO resigned from President Trump’s advisory groups, not a single member of Trump’s Evangelical Council has resigned. Seems corporate America has a greater moral compass that these Bible quoting, ya going to hell, waiting for Jesus to return folks.
Sorry, I meant “adorable,: not “adoptable”. LOL!
Thank you Frank. Where do evangelicals stand on this, in your opinion? (Nazi, KKK, etc.) Many people have said that white supremacy makes Christians complicit, but this seems to go beyond mere complicity. It’s verging on actually believing that some lives matter less than other lives. I’d like to hear your take on this. Thank you.
You and your Dad predicted this and also observed the phenomenon of diametrically-opposed “news” coverage over 40 years ago. Do you remember, Frank?
https://youtu.be/2E9VaWOrDlw
I still remember the long-lasting impression made on a very young version of myself by the scene you and your ol’ man made portraying two very different perspectives of the same “news” event. Shades of the past, indeed!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJ4sDk4LkAM&list=PLP0lSOp9RORx7W0REI8SVK2CNIrMjhS_T
Every video you have put out, I have passed on. I truly believe if you had your own show….coming from your home. You would convince those that “HE” hood winked! We all knew 45 was Lying and is a crook! I truly believe your videos will go down in History known as a Man that warned us about a Dangerous man that could end this world with his hate! Thank you for Caring for America !
It was a pleasure hearing you get roasted on CrossTalk some years ago by the callers.
Good Grief . . Jefferson’s misceginating filthy brother did those deeds . . not Jefferson.
I’ll just list the rest with the same believability that you fail to convey.
-ash-