Since news broke a few days ago that the President’s former personal attorney had pled guilty to numerous felonies, naming the President himself as a co-conspirator, things haven’t been looking so good for the Trump administration. And Donald Trump has responded just like the organized crime boss that we know him to be, talking openly about those who turn against their criminal superiors in criminal cases as “rats,” and saying on Fox News that it should be illegal for prosecutors to encourage criminals to “flip” on one another. Today, though, things took an even darker turn, as Trump, now facing real legal jeopardy for the first time since taking office, signaled that, unlike Richard Nixon, he would not leave the White House willingly, choosing instead to push us to the brink of civil war rather than accept responsibility for his actions and step down from the presidency.
Today, in a clear signal to his white nationalist base, Donald Trump posted about the plight of white land owners in South Africa, a favorite subject of the race-obsessed far right, who love to talk of the white farmers of South Africa as the “canary in the coal mine,” in world headed hurdling toward “white genocide”. Trump, on Twitter, expressed grave concern for these white farmers, saying that he’d asked his Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, to monitor the “large scale killing” of white farmers closely.
Of course, the reality is that instances of such murders have fallen significantly over the years since apartheid was abolished in South Africa… The following comes by way of the Washington Post.
…White-nationalist groups have for years spread false claims about the murder rates, assertions that have been widely debunked. Local police data shows the number of people murdered on farms has dropped by half over the past two decades — from 140 in 2001-2002 to 74 in 2016-2017, according to the Associated Press…
White nationalists in the United States and South Africa, where a fringe group called Afriforum has advanced the conspiracy theory, hailed the president’s remarks. David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan leader, thanked Trump on Twitter and tweeted an image of a white woman holding a sign reading “Stop white genocide.” Mike Peinovich, a far-right podcast host, called Trump’s endorsement “very big” and said that “this is how we slowly chip away at the all-consuming anti-white discourse.”
Critics lambasted the president for endorsing the conspiracy theory to his 54 million Twitter followers. Patrick Gaspard, who served as U.S. ambassador to South Africa under President Barack Obama, noted that this was the first time Trump had mentioned Africa on Twitter since he took office…
It, of course, is not a coincidence that the President chose this moment to tweet about Africa for the first time in his presidency. Fear is all that he has left, and he knows it. He knows that the best chance he has to avoid responsibility for his criminal activity is to push us toward an internal conflict along racial lines. As much as I hate to quote Omarosa Manigault Newman, I fear that she was probably right when she said yesterday that Donald Trump “wants to start a race war in this country.”
And it isn’t just that he’s started pushing this narrative of black people rising up in South Africa, and taking the lives and property of white Afrikaners. He and other Republicans, over the past two days, have also started leaning heavily on the story of Mollie Tibbetts, a white college student from Iowa who is thought to have been murdered by an illegal immigrant. While the family of the young white student has asked that her death not be politicized, the Republicans clearly think that this is a story that will serve them well during the midterms. As Trump ally Newt Gingrich is reported to have said today in a letter to the conservative news site Axios, “If Mollie Tibbetts is a household name by October, Democrats will be in deep trouble.” Requesting them to cover the story of her death, the former Speaker of the House then went on to say, “If we can be blocked by Manafort-Cohen, etc., then GOP could lose [the House] badly.” In other words, he asked them to cover the death of Mollie Tibbetts not because he felt anything for her, but because he had come to the conclusion that exploiting her death, and stoking the fires of racial animus, was the GOP’s best chance of stopping the Democrats from retaking the House in the wake of the Mueller investigation, which has already claimed half a dozen of the President’s closest associates, including his national security advisor, campaign chairman, and personal attorney.
So, as the Republicans can’t talk about their signature tax legislation, which gave $1 trillion to America’s most wealthy while doing little for anyone else, or their plans to reform health care, by gutting Medicare and Medicaid in order to pay for said tax cuts, they’re left to tell a story of fear… a ridiculous story about how Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats want MS-13 gang members to rape and murder the young, white women of America. And, so, they’re moving farther toward the right, embracing the talking points of those who discuss “the future Africanisation of the planet” on white nationalist websites like Stormfront.
Desperate people do desperate things. And Donald Trump, as probably the most desperate politician we have ever seen in our nation’s history, is now moving into new, uncharted territory, promising the American people that, without him, they will face poverty, violence and death. There is no appeal to our humanity, no invitation to work together to form a better world. There is no positive vision of the future. There is only fear.
Ignoring the fact that the economy grew significantly faster under President Obama, Donald Trump went on Fox News today to say that our families would essentially starve without him. “If I ever got impeached, I think the market would crash,” he told Fox News today. “I think everybody would be very poor.” And, meanwhile, speaking from a Trump golf resort in Scotland, our President’s new attorney, Rudy Giuliani, warned of violence in the streets if the President were removed from office. “The American people would revolt,” he said.
These threats, for what it’s worth, and I know I don’t need to tell most of you this, are not sufficient reasons to support a party that has proven to be both thoroughly corrupt and comically inept… When the continued existence of your party depends on young white women to be murdered by men of color, it is time to burn that party to the ground and build something new. And when you’re a politician that cannot articulate a vision of the future that doesn’t involve rape, murder and starvation, you should find a new profession. Oh, and when your best idea to improve schools involves shifting funds earmarked for mental health services to the purchase of firearms for teachers, you should probably just walk straight into the ocean.
I could go on, but I suspect you get the point. We need leaders with vision who can lead. We don’t need fear. We don’t need demonization. We need real solutions. We need healthcare, education and an optimism for the future that reflects the great diversity of our nation, and not just the fantasies of unemployed, under-educated, white incels who are convicted that, if not for affirmative action, and feminism, they would be heroic captains of industry. In short, we need a return to reality. And, god willing, we’ll have a chance to make that happen come election day.