Trump's Tweets About Congresswomen of Color Are the Words and Scorching Racist Debasement of a Slave Master
July 16, 2019
A slave trader brands a female slave. (Wikipedia)
BUZZFLASH EDITOR’S BLOG
In its re-launch, BuzzFlash is committed to not determining the news by Trump's latest tweets. Since his campaign for the president, he has had an uncanny ability to divert attention from pressing issues of destructive and corrupt administration policies – and perils facing the earth such as climate catastrophe – by launching twitter tirades that also ignite the hate and white grievance of his base.
The mainstream media – and some of the progressive press – allow him to crack the whip and change the focus from whatever latest potential scandal he is involved with to the fourth estate focusing on his latest landmines. Trump has several times straightforwardly stated that the press likes him as president because he is good for ad revenue based on readers and viewers drawn like moths to a flame to his incendiary statements and tweets.
However, Trump’s vitriolic lacerating and diabolic attack on four congresswoman of color compels BuzzFlash to condemn the malevolent authoritarian narcissist in the White House for evoking the words and odious stance of a slave master. Although much of the mainstream media (including The New York Times) refrains from calling Trump a racist — or even that he regularly employs racism — his attack on “the squad” leaves little doubt that he is evoking the Confederacy and the justification of slavery: people of color are inferior and should be subjugated (think of the concentration camps on the border and the incarceration system) or exiled.
This is what the slave master (who made his mark as an ardent and wrongful defamer of the Central Park Five and as a birther) tweeted over the weekend:
BUZZFLASH EDITOR’S BLOG
It is worthy to recall, although facts are not of concern to Trump (only “alternative facts”) that three of the four congresswoman he condemned were born in the United States. On the other hand, Melania Trump only became a US citizen because she married Trump, and her parents only became US citizens because of a practice Trump wants to outlaw called “chain migration.” Of course, that is acceptable because they are Europeans and of a superior race.
What Trump was evoking to his rabid white grievance base — and don’t doubt that he believes it himself — was the core view on race that the slave holding states were steeped in. To Trump, the four congresswoman are as contemptible as chattel.
It is telling that Trump “tripled down” by responding to outraged criticisms of his remarks, including by the four congresswomen and Nancy Pelosi, by claiming that he is the one who is owed an apology. The slave is always at fault and must make amends to the slave master no matter if the slave master is responsible for whatever wrong is claimed. This is an essential component of white supremacy.
One cannot help but recall Trump’s reported remarks that he does not want immigration from “shit hole” countries in Africa. Does one need any further clarification about the direct line from slavery to Trump’s latest series of abhorrent tweets?
Conservative columnist George Will told a New York Times podcast:
"I believe that what this president has done to our culture, to our civic discourse ... you cannot unring these bells and you cannot unsay what he has said, and you cannot change that he has now in a very short time made it seem normal for schoolboy taunts and obvious lies to be spun out in a constant stream. I think this will do more lasting damage than Richard Nixon's surreptitious burglaries did….”
"What Donald Trump's revolutionary effect has been [is] to make things acceptable that were unthinkable until recently,"
That last conclusion by Will is not accurate. Trump is the lanced pustule of white supremacy that has threaded its way through America from the first importation of slaves, through the sanctioning of slavery in the Constitution, through the Civil War, through the post-Reconstruction South, and through the GOP dog whistling of Black racial inferiority over the past several decades.
This slave master stance also is intimately entangled in Trump’s war on brown people. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is of Puerto Rican descent, but born, like Trump, in New York City. However, many whites in New York hold Puerto Ricans in contempt and Trump and many Republicans consider Puerto Rico another “shit hole” country, even though Puerto Ricans are US citizens.
What we are witnessing is the normalization of racism that should have long ago been eradicated from the US. How naive it now seems that the press trumpeted Barack Obama’s election as evidence of a post-racial society. The Tea Party was just one representation of the backlash to that Pollyana-like notion.
If we are to survive as a democracy, it is time to stop the frog of egalitarianism and civility from slow boiling to a sordid death. Trump needs to be defrocked of his impunity and accountability, and his white hood needs to be removed.
It must be acknowledged that the slave master wears no clothes and is an enemy of a Union that emerged from the Civil War.
Abraham Lincoln said in the Gettysburg Address:
The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
Under Trump, however, “the new birth of freedom” is perishing, and the racism of the Antebellum South is a permanent characteristic of the. slave master in the White House.