Trump Just Needs a Moat With Alligators and Sharp Spikes on His White House Wall to Complete a Despot's Bunker
June 11, 2020
The White House was built by Black slaves. This is a photo of “the People’s House” in its pre-fortification day. (Tom Lohdan)
MARK KARLIN, EDITOR OF BUZZFLASH
The headline of this commentary is not a big stretch. After all, The New York Times reported of remarks that Trump made last March in a staff meeting about his dream Southern Wall:
Privately, the president had often talked about fortifying a border wall with a water-filled trench, stocked with snakes or alligators, prompting aides to seek a cost estimate. He wanted the wall electrified, with spikes on top that could pierce human flesh. After publicly suggesting that soldiers shoot migrants if they threw rocks, the president backed off when his staff told him that was illegal. But later in a meeting, aides recalled, he suggested that they shoot migrants in the legs to slow them down. That’s not allowed either, they told him.
Just what Trump needs, now that additional fencing has made the White House into a fortress for the moment (some of it may be removed), is to implement his desire for sadistic measures that he has wanted for the infamous (and still largely unbuilt) Wall with Mexico and implement them in DC.
It’s dismaying to think of the house of our head of state, which was built by slave labor, becoming a fortification. Allegedly, the “precautions” are being taken because of so-called violent protests, which certainly the peaceful protest on June 1 refuted. This uprising, which has spread across the nation to big cities and small towns and even internationally, is centered on America’s unending legacy of racism and killing of Blacks by police. In return, the White House stood behind police brutality across the nation and condoned police riots, such as the one on June 1 to clear the way for Trump’s cheesy photo-op,
In short, protests against police killing and brutalizing Blacks has been frequently met by the state-sanctioned use of police to brutalize protesters.
Trump added to his 19,000 lies when he claimed he didn’t go to the White House protective bunker our of fear, but rather that he wanted to inspect it in the wee hours of the morning.
Meanwhile, those who want to memorialize and honor George Floyd have turned part of the new fence designed to keep Americans from the “People’s House” into a tribute to him.
A June 8 NBC article reported:
New fencing put up around the White House to keep protesters at bay has become a magnet for demonstrators, who've been decorating it with signs honoring George Floyd and demanding police reform.
The new fencing, which is 8 to 10 feet tall, obscures views of the White House from the street, but protesters have turned it into a tourist attraction in its own right by hanging numerous signs along it, including some with images of Floyd and others that say "Black Lives Matter" and call for "police reform now."
Numerous demonstrators and visitors have been posing for pictures in front of the signs.
Meanwhile, Trump is now, according to an aide, “past” the Coronavirus as it has started to spike up again, has started to insidiously incite racism, and is sending up all sorts of diversionary flack to eat up much of the media coverage and reduce the number of George Floyd and protest reports.
Snug as a diseased bug in a rug, Trump represents the legacy of slavery and white supremacy whether it be the Wall with Mexico or the new wall around the White House. He resides in a house built by slaves, as noted above, and uses it as his base for continuing the tradition of Southern slave oligarchs. Only now the oligarchs are making their unseemly fortunes on Wall Street or through corporations. The goal, however, is still the same. as we noted in a recent editor’s commentary: “Oligarchy Was Behind the Confederacy and Slavery, as the Plutocracy Today Backs the Infection-Spreading White Protesters.”
Thom Hartmann has frequently written that urban police today are the descendants of slave-patrols from the pre-Civil War era. They are the thin blue line that protects the oligarchy, then and now, from any possible mass uprisings of those still oppressed and suffering from increasing income inequality. Meanwhile, as the slave patrols often represented a white working class that was often poor because only a small percentage of Southerners were wealthy due to slave ownership, the modern urban police force represents the same use of racial division that protects the oligarchs of today, with cops keeping exploited minority communities from exploding through arrests, imprisonment and brutality.
At the time the Civil War began, it was estimated that the combined financial value of slaves as a “commodity” was perhaps $4 billion, the largest single equity asset in the US at the time. That may be why there shouldn’t be much surprise that Trump regards “essential workers” and others risking infection to “reopen” the economy as disposable human commodities.
To Trump, if you are not an oligarch, you are a loser. You are expendable, and if you succumb to the Coronavirus when you return to work, you are weak.
Meanwhile, he now has a fortress made for a totalitarian, which The New York Times characterized in a June 5 article:
Every day, more fences go up and more concrete barriers are put in place as the security perimeter expands farther and farther. The universally recognized symbol of American democracy increasingly looks like a fortress under siege in the heart of the nation’s capital, a Washington version of the Green Zone that sheltered American and Iraqi officials in Baghdad during the worst of the war.
The measures taken over the last week have made the compound occupied by the president, his family and his staff more sealed off from demonstrations but also more removed from the American public. National Guard troops and riot police will certainly withdraw at some point, and White House officials say the barriers will be eventually removed. But history shows that security changes made at the White House in the heat of a momentary perceived threat often become lasting fixtures.
We can’t wait for the moat and the alligators.
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