July 22, 2019

BUZZFLASH COMMENTARY

Donald Trump’s grandfather, Frederich Trumpf had first become an immigrant to the US in 1885. Under Trump’s proposed criteria for immigrants to the US, his grandfather would have been disqualified from entering the US. That is because Trumpf spoke no English and had no skills, as recorded in immigration records.

According to an article in the Independent a while back, longing for his father country, Frederich Trumpf returned to his native Bavaria after spending years earning a living in the US. However, in 1905, the Prince Regent of that section of Germany ordered Trumpf deported for not serving in the military — we don’t know if Trumpf avoided military service due to alleged “bone spurs” — and for not informing the Bavarian authorities of his move to the US 20 years prior.

Trumpf was mortified and wrote a letter to Prince Luitpold, pleading his case that he and his family should be allowed to stay in his beloved Germany. Some of his argument drips with irony, considering Trump’s brutal treatment of non-white migrants and his contempt for them. According to the letter, which Harper’s translated, Trumpf wrote an impassioned plea that included the following passage:

But we were confronted all at once, as if by a lightning strike from fair skies, with the news that the High Royal State Ministry had decided that we must leave our residence in the Kingdom of Bavaria. We were paralyzed with fright; our happy family life was tarnished. My wife has been overcome by anxiety, and my lovely child has become sick.

Why should we be deported? This is very, very hard for a family. What will our fellow citizens think if honest subjects are faced with such a decree — not to mention the great material losses it would incur. I would like to become a Bavarian citizen again.

Of course, Donald J. Trump, who is proud of his German heritage, would argue that it was perfectly in order to allow his grandfather to re-immigrate to the US and become a US citizen, and would no doubt scorn the Prince Regent of Bavaria for treating his grandfather so harshly that he was deported. After all Frederich Trumpf was white and not from a “shithole country”: he was from a “great European power.”

While Donald J. Trump’s father Fred, the infamous real estate mogul who discriminated against Blacks along with Donald, was born in the US, his mother, Mary McLoed, immigrated from Scotland to America in 1930 with no skills. McLoed became a naturalized US citizen by marrying Fred Trump. This indeed became a pattern passed from father to son.

Two of Donald J. Trump’s wives, Ivana and Melania, became US citizens by marrying Trump. Both had questionable routes in coming to the US — and a controversy remains about whether Melania began working as a salacious model before she had a working visa — but, nevertheless, their pathway to citizenship was through Donald. Furthermore, Melania’s parents became US citizens through a US immigration regulation Trump regularly denounces called “chain immigration.” A Newsweek article from earlier this year was headlined, Donald Trump Says “Chain Migration” Immigrants “Are Not the People That We Want.” However, it is with a metaphorical wink and nod that we know that Trump is talking about Black and Brown immigrants, not “good” white European citizens from Slovenia, or in the case of Ivana, Czechoslovakia.

According to the Independent article, a large number of Trump’s present and former staff members are either first generation Americans (the nefarious Stephen Miller’s mother reportedly came to the US speaking Yiddish as her first language) or immigrants themselves such as Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao, who is the wife of Mitch McConnell.

Basically Trump’s policy on immigration boils down to something akin to David Duke’s European-American Unity and Rights Organization, which promotes white nationalism and supremacy. It’s a movement that has spread to Europe, which has attracted the attention and support of Stephen Bannon.

Why the media is still reporting on Trump’s perennial bob and weave over his racism, his distracting charges that the media is “crazed” and that the Washington Post is guilty of “presidential harassment,” and that he didn’t stand back and bask in the racist chant of “Send her back!” (Ilhan Omar) at his North Carolina rally, among other of his ludicrous cycle race-baiting and denials begs the question: why is the media committing journalistic malpractice?

We are once again confronted with a corporate media that turns even the most appalling racism into a malleable uncertainty: “Is he really racist? Is he just doing this to energize his base? Did he really encourage the cultish crowd to chant “Send her back!”?

Full stop: Trump is a racist and he is threatening the foundations of our Constitutional Democracy by reigniting emotions of white supremacy and the inferiority of people of color that may end up setting this nation ablaze. Trump’s history of racism from housing discrimination to treatment of Blacks at his now failed casinos to his false accusations against the Central Park Five to his role as a Birther conspirator to his remarks about the alt-right neo-Nazi gathering at Charlottesvile — to name but a few — prove the point beyond the incessant media need to re-litigate this abhorrent reality.

We have an incendiary racist running our government. The Guardian calls racism “a common thread throughout his [Trump’s] career and life.” There is no debating this. There is no wasted time to be spent giving credence to his latest denials and feints.

“Send her home!” is not a spontaneous abomination. This was the man who led his base in chanting “Lock her up!” about Hillary Clinton. He is fully comfortable with the toxin of white supremacy.

Yes, immigration is fine for his relatives and Norwegians, as he once said in the White House. But just as the photo at the top of this page bears a poster saying “Go Back to Africa Negroes,” that is what Trump is thinking should happen to four US citizens, with a variance for ancestral countries (and Puerto Rico in the case of AOC, which is part of the US), who are duly-elected Congresswomen. However, their home, as we know, is the United States.

Say their names: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan. They are America. If anyone should go back home, it should be the white European settlers who stole this nation from the Indigenous residents and then established slavery, bringing untold numbers of forced immigrants here in chains.

If any immigrants or descendants of immigrants should go “home,” that would be the white nationalists who so rabidly support Trump. They are all the descendants of immigrants to America. Trump should take his extended immigrant family and go back to his ancestral home, Germany. Trump would have been right at home during the Nazi era of marginalizing “non-Aryan” populations.

But it’s never too late. Not that we wish such a pestilence on modern day Germany.

BUZZFLASH COMMENTARY