Looking back on President Donald Trump's inauguration speech let us reflect one week on from a mass shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue, and as US military troops are being deployed to protect American from huddled masses.
Speaking to the American people at his Inauguration, Donald Trump painted a picture of America under relentless attack. He spoke of American Carnage.
It was his white nationalist campaign message distilled to its hateful essence: the attackers were “globalist' political operatives, shady immigrants, south American drug cartels, inner city gangs.
What they were not was white nationalists armed with AR-15's or pipe bombs.
“The crime and violence that today afflicts our nation will soon come to an end,” he vowed. Safety would soon be restored. There was a new sheriff in town. He was proud to call himself a nationalist, an America First-er.
“This American carnage stops right here and stops right now. I’ll be able to make sure that when you walk down the street in your inner city, or wherever you are, you’re not going to be shot. Your child isn’t going to be shot.”
Let's consider how his commitment has worked out. This weekend we saw the deadliest attack on the Jewish community in American history, when eleven innocent people were shot dead by a white nationalist with an AR-15 who had been primed to act out by internet conspiracy theories and the GOP's relentless demonization of “immigrant caravans” and “globalists” and “George Soros,” - which are all code, it can now be safely said, for “hispanics” and “jews” and “dirty Jews.”
America is listening and being incited by this sinister rhetoric.
There is great anger in our Country caused in part by inaccurate, and even fraudulent, reporting of the news. The Fake News Media, the true Enemy of the People, must stop the open & obvious hostility & report the news accurately & fairly. That will do much to put out the flame...
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 29, 2018
In 2017 anti-Semitic incidents (including physical assaults, vandalism, and attacks on Jewish institutions) exploded nearly 86% over the previous year, according to the latest Anti Defamation League (ADL) audit. That represents the largest single-year increase since records began.
One day before the F.B.I. arrested a white nationalist Trump supporter in Florida who had sent fourteen viable pipe bombs to the top tier of the Democratic party and to national media outlets like CNN from his Trump covered van. The first bomb went to George Soros. It was the worst outbreak of targeted political terrorism in the country's history.
A day earlier a heavily armed white nationalists in Kentucky tried and thankfully failed to enter a black church, where he had planned to shoot and kill all the black people inside, but he was foiled by a locked door. (Jewish and black churches are often forced to take severe security measures to prevent just such violent occurrences).
Undeterred, the man walked straight down the street to a nearby grocery store where he shot and killed two black grandparents, one right in front of her terrified grandchildren. As he was being arrested the attacker calmly assured the local police officers he would never target a white person, because “white's don't shoot whites.”
Donald Trump was in no doubt about who was really responsible for this unprecedented outbreak of anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic and anti-black hate this week: the media. On Saturday morning he tweeted that it was the news media who were responsible for the “great anger” across the country.
“There is great anger in our Country caused in part by inaccurate, and even fraudulent, reporting of the news. The Fake News Media, the true Enemy of the People, must stop the open & obvious hostility & report the news accurately & fairly. That will do much to put out the flame.”
Twenty fours hours after CNN and its senior news correspondents received viable bombs in the mail from one of Trump's most avid supporters, he was insisting the attacks were really all their own fault. Then, in the same week where violent white supremacists shot and killed black people in Kentucky and Jewish people in Pittsburgh, he still called the media “the true Enemy of the People.”
When white nationalists hear Trump talk like this what they really hear is him sending them his support. David Duke did cartwheels, immediately retweeting the president. Trump's alt-right wink was being received and understood.
Later on the evening of the Pittsburgh attack Trump refused to cancel a scheduled campaign rally as a show of respect. Instead he warned the crowd again about nefarious “globalists,” he reassured them he was a “nationalist” himself, and complained he had had to speak to reporters in the rain about the attack, which has messed up his hair. “I'm having a bad hair day,” he told the cheering crowd with a smile after the worst attack on Jewish people in America's history.
So next week will be a test of how gullible you are. Trump and the GOP have already determined you are so gullible they have devised a bit of racist political theater to drive you to the polls. Next week they have prepared up to 14,000 U.S. troops to deploy to the southern border.
These troops will be armed with lethal ammunition. There’s an additional 7,000 troops on 24-hour stand-by per the Pentagon documents obtained by the press this morning. They won't be there to hand out food and water. Things could get very ugly quick. Trump is depending on it.
There is no need to send so many troops down there, of course. America is not being invaded. The DHS could easily handle the scene. No, this is a deliberate scare tactic to make you think people requesting political asylum are actually a blood thirty Al Qaeda cell come to enact sharia law.
So poor and desperate people are being cynically used by Trump and the GOP again. If you thought last week was the worst in modern American history think twice, the truth is Trump and the GOP are only getting started.
American Carnage wasn't a warning to the nation, it was his mission statement.
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