Let’s begin with two things upon which the facts agree: (1) During his lie-filled, fear-mongering, “American Carnage” presidential campaign, Donald Trump promised his cultic following that, if elected, he would prevent immigrants/asylum-seekers/refugees from illegally entering the country via the southern border by building “a big, beautiful wall” that would, despite his present-day claims to the contrary, extend the length of the southern border; (2) During his lie-filled, fear-mongering, “American Carnage” presidential campaign, Donald Trump promised his cultic following that, if elected, that “big, beautiful wall” would be paid for by Mexico.
Amirite?
Yes, Irite!
THE ORIGIN OF THE PROMISES
On June 16, 2015, King Donald and Queen Melania did their poseur best to mimic a royal entrance by descending a staircase into the gaudy, gauche-gilded, Versailles-wannabe lobby of Trump Tower. After lying that the crowd numbered “in the thousands” (seriously, in the lobby of Trump Tower?), the Donald extended the lie by definitively stating that its size—size, it’s always about size for Tiny Hands!— surpassed any other in the history of candidacy announcements. Having thus given away the reason for the assemblage—oblivious much, Donald?—Trump announced that he was throwing his hat in the ring per the Republican presidential nomination for the 2016 election cycle.
Beginning with his ensuing announcement speech/screed and continuing until the close, on January 20, 2017, of what had to be the strangest, most dark, and most devoid of aspiration/inspiration inaugural speech any American president has ever delivered—at its end, George W. Bush, laughing, leaned over and whispered to Michelle Obama, “That was some weird s**t”—Trump’s campaign was defined, to a great degree, by (1) his relentless screeds/lies about U.S. immigration policy and (2) his relentless fear-mongering, lying and seeding of misinformation/disinformation about its consequences for everyday Americans.
Both Trump’s personal life and his business life have, throughout his decades as a public figure, evidenced his amoral, transactional, autocratic nature—a trait set that would make any mama proud! Combine those swamp-critter instincts with a long, well-documented history of misogynistic, racist and xenophobic statements/actions and what one gets is a character-disordered, arrested development—he daily pin-balls between the infantile and the juvenile—man/child for whom applause, adulation and power are like mother’s milk to an infant. One also gets a man/child who proved to be easy prey for the likes of alt-right, white nationalist/supremacist sympathizers like Steve Bannon and Steven Miller. Thus did a distinctly un-holy union produce a distinctly un-presidential campaign for the presidency that employed tactics one might expect to find highlighted in Chapter One of The White Demagogue’s Handbook.
Urged on by the likes of Bannon, Miller and related ilk, Trump effectively utilized explicit/implicit race-baiting rhetoric in order to play to the explicit/implicit racism that, despite their claims to the contrary, seems almost endemic to a large percentage of his white base—especially those that attended the campaign’s “Make Daddy Feel Good” adulation fests and alternately
(1) foamed at the mouth,
(2) screeched “Lock Her Up!” in unison at every mention of Hillary Clinton,
(3) participated in the antiphonal “What are we gonna’ do?”/”Build that wall!” and “Who’s gonna’ pay for it?”/”Mexico!”/”Damn right!” chants,
(4) foamed at the mouth some more and,
(5) their faces contorted with fear/anger/hate, hissed, booed, hoisted a big middle-finger to and occasionally threatened media-types confined to a “press pen” at the back of whatever rally hall the Trumpsters were soiling.
He then played to the racist fears of his #Snowflake base by painting a disgustingly false, dystopian landscape of an America overrun by vicious, non-human/animal-like brown or black males whose only reasons for “invading”/immigrating to the United States are to
(1) “kill white people” (as viciously as they can),
(2) in the storied vernacular of the Ku Klux Klan, “rape your women” (because we all know, don’t we, that dark-skinned males live to, uh, “rape white women”?),
(3) “steal high-paying jobs from white people standing in line to apply for them” (working on landscaping crews, working fields and orchards across the country, working cattle ranches, hog farms and chicken houses, working slaughterhouses and meat-packing plants, working lobster boats and shrimp boats and fishing boats, working construction as unskilled laborers, cleaning motel/hotel rooms at Donald Trump properties, keeping Donald Trump’s golf courses and grounds trimmed and cut—you get the picture, right?),
(4) “get your kids addicted to illegal drugs so they can turn your sons into pushers and your blonde, Norwegian-looking daughters into hookers who would do anything for a heroin fix or a vial of crack.”
“Illegal alien” females of color? They only cross the border, according to Trump, in order to have babies on U.S. soil so that they can free-ride for the rest of their lives off the taxes paid by hard-working white Americans. “Anchor babies,” Trump called them, to the delight of his evangelical, family-values hypocrites/sycophants.
Put simply, in the tradition of racist autocrats, he sought to sow division in the populace by creating an “Us” (white people) v. “Them” (people of color) paradigm and casting “Them” as presenting an existential threat to “Our Way Of Life” and “Our Civilization.” According to Donald Trump—who, in his pre-presidential life, was a world-renowned scholar known for his ground-breaking sociological/anthropological research into the rise and fall of societies/cultures—the societal and cultural problems “We” face (breakdown of traditional values, loss of moral grounding, crime, diseases of epidemic proportions, rampant drug use, unemployment, inequality, lack of economic mobility, et al) are primarily attributable to the presence of “Them.” America has lost its “greatness,” claimed Trump. America is “in decline,” claimed Trump. And “They” are responsible.
Hence, the way to “Make America Great Again,” said the self-proclaimed “nationalist,” was clear. “We” must, in essence, turn on “Them.” “We” must limit their numbers in order to limit the harm they can do to “Our” country and “Our” way of life and, for that matter, “Our” civilization. And “We” must elect Donald Trump to the presidency because, as he definitively stated, “Only I can fix it.”
Who knew?
Yes, Donald Trump posited himself as the Savior not only of “Our” country, not only of “Our” way of life but—wait for it!—of Western Civilization.
Grandiose much?
So, how did the Grifter from Queens plan to “fix it?” How did he plan to “save” not only “Our” country but “Our” way of life and, by God, Western Civilization itself?
First, there would be a ramped-up effort to purge the country of non-white immigrants. Some—we term them “undocumented”—lack the proper “papers” (these would include many of the the service workers, for whom fraudulent “papers” were obtained via Trump Inc connections, who cleaned his personal quarters at his Bedminster, N.J. golf club and, as we now know, worked the grounds, the grill rooms, the restaurants and the hotel quarters at several other of his golf clubs/resorts). Some actually have the proper “papers.” And others have already become naturalized citizens . But, under the Trump/Sessions reign of terror, whether an immigrant-of-color be illegally or legally in-country, the sense of things was going to be “We’ll find something on you so we can put you on a bus or a plane to somewhere else.”
Second, Trump promised that, in order to “protect the country” from non-Norwegian, non-white refugees and asylum-seekers looking for sanctuary in “The Land of the Free and The Home of the Pearl-Clutchers,” he would build that “big, beautiful wall” along the southern border. Oh, and he promised to make “Mexico pay for it.”
In other words, Trump’s plan to save “Our” country, “Our” way of life and the entirety of Western Civilization could be boiled down to (1) Kick “Them” Out and (2) Keep “Them” Out. Trump has even, of late, come up with his own little ditty for it: “Build the Wall, Crime will Fall!” It hasn’t really caught on yet, but give it time and maybe 10,000 “executive time” tweets.
It wasn’t difficult to figure out that the president who struggles to formulate a compound sentence, the Wharton School of Finance graduate (well, he spent two relatively non-notable years there after transferring from Fordham University) who apparently was having his bone spurs treated while his first-grade classmates were in Spelling 101, liked easy-to-remember slogans and simplistic-to-the-point-of-embarrassing solutions. Kick “Them” Out and Keep “Them” Out did not, after all, portend serious conversations about immigration policy. It was easier and less intellectually taxing to go for the racist/xenophobic applause lines—and go after the mainstream media for calling out the demagoguery—when speaking to rally-goers at, say, Columbia Metropolitan Airport.
I’M NOT OBLIGATED TO HELP DONALD TRUMP FULFILL HIS PROMISES
Supplicants of The Savior of Western Civilization by-and-large justify their reflexive, visceral support for the #TrumpWall—otherwise known as Donald’s Mega-Billion Dollar Totemic Vanity Project—by reciting talking points from his bogus, fact-averse rants about “the crisis on the southern border” or “our national emergency” or the apocalypse to come if “We” don’t Kick “Them” Out and Keep “Them” Out.
Whatever.
When they discover that I, like the majority of all Americans and the even greater majority of those who populate the congressional districts along the southern border (including all nine congressional representatives from districts along the border and the vast majority of the 59 sheriffs who oversee local law enforcement across the entire southern border), am opposed to the #TrumpWall, they by-and-large accuse me of favoring “open borders” and “unrestricted, unlimited, ‘just let ’em all in and don’t even bother to get their names’ immigration.”
I don’t. I don’t know anyone who does. But, whatever.
They have shown no interest in listening to my rebuttal of Trump’s bogus meta-narrative and even less interest in listening to my takedown of his gobsmackingly simplistic solution to a “national emergency” that, according to the chiefs of every U.S. intelligence service, isn’t. And they have saved their most disdainful, dismissive eye-rolls for that moment when I begin to make my case for smart, comprehensive immigration reform that takes seriously the complexities and nuances of humanitarian, economic, political and border security issues.
I have, however, on more than one occasion, had a #TrumpWall supporter tell me that, despite the fact that they pretty much agreed that Trump’s narrative about immigration was false, they still supported it. And, they continued, so should I. Indeed, despite my opposition to it, I should feel obligated to support it—a talking point that has actually gained traction with a number of GOP operatives who have taken to radio and television talk-shows to tout it.
Why?
Brace yourself.
I should feel obligated to support the #TrumpWall because, during his presidential campaign, Donald Trump promised his supporters that he was going to “Build that Wall!” And, given that he was elected to the presidency, all patriotic Americans should work together to help him fulfill his promises.
Really???????
Really???????
I have suggested to those who suggested this preposterous puffery that things did not turn out well for the last monarch—or, his loyalist followers—who attempted to exercise “the divine right of kings” over the American people; the tyranny of obligatory obedience and all that. And, given that George III’s rule over the American colonists ended with the beginning of an evolving democratic republic that has become the longest in the history of the world, one senses that any attempt to return us to, uh, royal rule would turn out even less well for “he who would be king”—and, his loyalist followers.
Off with his hair!
As an American citizen, I don’t serve Donald Trump and I am under no obligation to agree with or support either his personal statements/policies/actions or his official statements/policies/actions. My allegiance is not to any one person or any group of people. My allegiance is to my country, to the Constitutional framework that orders its values and its life, and to the American Idea, the possibility of whose fulfillment, in the best of times and with the best of leaders, pulls my country inexorably toward its best future.