Cue the music, the arm-waving, the fanfare, and out onto the podium waddles the Presidential candidate. A nausea-inducing wreck, whose gimlet eyes and pouty lips are framed by a wild floppage of orange peels, curls of which some biologists identified as hair. Donald J. Trump, one of nature’s curiosities, born with an unnatural talent for mass-producing millions of little lies, all clamoring out of him like the countless offspring of a seahorse in the act of giving birth. Not a nice picture, and certainly not a nice man.
Trump derives from an aristocracy of idiocy that includes such ignobles as George Wallace, the segregationist Alabama Governor, who sought the White House on the violent platform of “Law and Order.” Elections, in our current age, are forever based on the cult of personality rather than on issues. Political grifters slick up their filthy engines of charm, then plow full-steam ahead as they manipulate crime statistics for their advantage.
Consider, if you might, that in 2015, police killed at least 102 unarmed black people. That’s nearly two killings a week. One in three of all black people killed by police, might I add, were unarmed. Not to mention the countless cases that have gone unreported. Any appeals to the black community from Trump are vacuous, as activist Deray McKesson has diligently reminded people. Trump was never counting on black people to vote for him, but solidifying a racist base. He has not been trying to recruit black voters so much as give his own cult more public cover to patronize and smear the black community. I can see why rapper Rejjie Snow remarked how he resembles, “that white stuff that accumulates at the corner of your mouth.”
For years, this insufferable furball-in-a-suit has depicted the country as being plagued by rampant crime, fecklessly finger-pointing at different non-white communities, including “urban blacks,” Hispanic immigrants, and Native Americans. Trump’s hatred of women, also, has never been more crystal-clear than in the recent leaking of a 2005 Access Hollywood tape. On the tape, Trump, then a D-list celebrity at best, was heard to be bragging that he could grab a woman “by the pussy” without her consent and get away with it because he sees himself as a star. Cathy Heller recently became the ninth woman to have publicly accused Trump of allegedly sexually assaulting her, including accounts of kissing and groping. Trump has vehemently denied all the allegations, suggesting they are surfacing now because of a “smear” campaign to derail his candidacy.
Trump, lest we forget, argued in favor of unleashing the New York Police Department to remedy social unrest. And which, pray tell, upstanding models of Law and Order might one imagine he finds more fanciful? Vladimer Putin of Russia, the communist dictator who opposes the personal expression of marginalized minorities in the country he controls. Trump, of course, has done some failed business with Russians before; one need only google the words ‘Bayrock, Trump SOHO’ to unlock a casket of inflammatory information. Other failed enterprises include Trump Casinos and Trump Vodka.
Ever the jester, one of Trump’s more jocular yet dangerous suggestions, was how useful it might be for Russia to hack the American government’s website. I am rather confident that Edward Snowden found this one funny, and no doubt Chelsea Manning split her sides laughing, if not of course, from the pain inflicted on her by the so-called caretakers stationed in the ghastly Guantanamo Bay. Manning made her second suicide attempt in recent days in reaction to not getting adequate medical assistance for her gender transition, a gross human rights violation imposed by the US State. Torture as technique, was endorsed by Trump in regards to Muslim immigration and terrorism suspects, terrorism being that frenzied neurosis that appears at all times, everywhere. I recently put the question of torture as a tool to Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, while she visited Dublin, and she admitted it is time to repeal its contemptuous implementation.
Other luminaries in the aforementioned Aristocracy of Idiocy, from which Trump descends, include Ross Perot and Lee A. Iacocca, modern industrialists who got into politics and fanatically expressed wide-eyed conspiracy theories about Asia and Latin America. Trump incidentally, expressed compliments for the Chinese government’s handling of the Tiananmen Square riots in China in 1989, when troops with assault rifles and tanks killed at least several hundreds student demonstrators and civilians. If not thousands.
As for industry, when it comes to business and Trump, there is almost never any truth to be found. This is exactly why, after generating so many falsehoods, Factcheck.Org declared that in the twelve years since its founding, they have “never seen any of his claims match.” And that was even before this year began. When asked by Anderson Cooper if he used a $916 million loss “to avoid paying taxes” for nearly twenty years, Trump clumsily replied, “Of course I do, and so do all of her donors.” He further declared that this made him “smart.” I suppose that makes millions of working class people dumb, by his estimation. This was the same debate, incidentally, in which he threatened Clinton with jail over her email scandal, if he was in fact elected. An outcome that looks increasingly unlikely in the final run up to the election.
There is a trash heap of lies Trump has regurgitated. There was the time he told Larry King that he had been paid more than $1 million to give a speech about his business acumen, when in fact he was only paid $400,000. Then there was the rigmarole surrounding his deferment from serving in Vietnam.
Trump received several deferments during the Vietnam War. Five times in total, actually, because of ‘heel spurs.’ The condition of heel spurs are protrusions caused by calcium built up on the heel bone, treated through stretching. In the 2005 biography, ambitiously titled “The Truth About Trump,” author Michael D’Antonio described interviewing the ginger-furred gas-bag, who at one point slipped off his loafer to display a tiny bulge on his heel. Being questioned about it at a news conference last year, Trump could not recall which heel had been involved, prompting his campaign to panic and release a statement saying that it had been, in fact, both heels.
This inconvenient fact drew fresh scrutiny after the grief-stricken parents of an Muslim-American soldier who was murdered in Iraq, publicly questioned if Trump had ever sacrificed for his country. Trump responded by belittling the parents of the slain Muslim-American, saying that the father delivered the entire speech because the mother was not allowed to speak up.
There are, of course, occasions when Trump does indeed endorse women speaking in public, not least of all when his wife Melania delivered a speech at the Republican National Carnival, when she reportedly plagiarized a speech once given by another woman, a woman who happens to be married to the current President. This woman is Michelle Obama, who gave a devastating address in New Hampshire last week. “This is not normal. This is not politics as usual,” Michelle Obama said, regarding Trump’s treatment of women, as she teetered on the verge of tears. “This is disgraceful. It is intolerable. And it doesn’t matter what party you belong to — Democrat, Republican, independent — no woman deserves to be treated this way. None of us deserves this kind of abuse.”
That speech will be remembered for its powerful condemnation of the abuse and harassment that women endure on streets and in the workplace — in a speech delivered, fittingly, almost exactly 25 years from the date another talented black attorney, Anita Hill, testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee about having been harassed by Clarence Thomas, who had been nominated for the Supreme Court.
Regarding that Republican Convention – Carnival? – one of the most bizarre events held was a photography exhibition, “Twinks 4 Trump,” curated by a young Republican called Lucian Wintrich. One of the speakers attending was Geert Wilders, leader of the third most popular party in the Netherlands, a right-wing movement gaining in his country’s polls. “This is war,” Wilders recently declared via Twitter, “and it will not stop until we close our borders, for Islam and de-Islamize our societies. No more Terror! No more Islam!” Wilders have many things in common with Trump, not least of all a freakish fixation for hairstyles inspired by the film genre science fiction. Wilders is currently under scrutiny for a legal investigation for his hate speech.
Now, in the final stretch of the election, with almost everything indicating that Clinton is to become the next President of the United States, and the first woman to ever hold that office, we should probably ask ourselves how someone like Trump could manage to gain so much support. I think of how liberal a society Germany was at the start of the last century, and how quickly that changed. On 6 May 1933, while Magnus Hirschfeld was on a lecture-tour of the US, the Deutsche Studentenschaft made an organized attack on the Institute of Sex Research. A few days later, the Institute’s extensive library and archives on sex research were publicly hauled out and burned in the streets of the Opernplatz, while Nazi officials gave speeches to crowds. Around 20,000 books and journals, and 5,000 images, were destroyed. I point out this tragedy because it is always worth acknowledging that another casualty of tyranny is civilization itself.
We must always be vigilant that tyrants who appeal to the destructive and uncivilized aspects of human nature never be enabled or put in positions that allow them to destroy what generations of hard-working, decent, creative people have built to pass on to younger generations. The most dangerous thing in the world is not hate, but indifference. We need to inspire people out of indifference and to mobilize against bigotry, stigma, and destruction. One way of doing this is to prevent dangerous idiots like Trump from ever having positions of power. I hope enough people agree with me for the betterment of our world.