Robert Reich. (photo: Steve Russell/Getty)
17 August 17
rump’s
unwillingness to denounce the white supremacists who came to
Charlottesville last weekend bent on violence has been part of his
political strategy from the start.
Remember, weeks after he began his campaign by
alleging that Mexican immigrants were criminals and rapists, two
brothers in Boston beat up and urinated on a 58-year-old homeless
Mexican national, subsequently telling police “Donald Trump was right,
all these illegals need to be deported.”
Instead of condemning the brutality, Trump excused it
by saying “people who are following me are very passionate. They love
this country and they want this country to be great again.”
During campaign rallies Trump repeatedly excused
brutality toward protesters. “You know what they used to do to guys like
that when they were in a place like this? They’d be carried out on a
stretcher, folks.”
After white supporters punched and attempted to choke a
Black Lives Matter protester, Trump said “maybe he should have been
roughed up.”
Trump was even reluctant to distance himself from David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan.
Since becoming president, Trump’s instigations have
continued. As Representative Mark Sanford, a Republican from South
Carolina, told the Washington Post, “the president has unearthed some
demons.”
In May, Trump congratulated body-slamming businessman
Greg Gianforte on his special election win in Montana, making no mention
of the victor’s attack on a reporter the night before.
Weeks ago Trump even tweeted a video clip of himself
in a WWE professional wrestling match slamming a CNN avatar to the
ground and pounding him with punches and elbows to the head.
Hateful violence is hardly new to America. But never
before has a president licensed it as a political strategy or considered
haters part of his political base.
In his second week as president, Trump called Wayne LaPierre, CEO of the National Rifle Association to the White House.
Soon thereafter, LaPierre told gun owners they should
fear “leftists” and the “national media machine” that were “an enemy
utterly dedicated to destroy not just our country, but also Western
civilization.”
Since then the NRA has run ads with the same theme,
concluding “the only way we stop this, the only way we save our country
and our freedom, is to fight this violence of lies with a clenched fist
of truth.”
It’s almost as if someone had declared a new civil war. But who? And for what purpose?
One clue came earlier last week in a memo from Rich
Higgins, who had been director for strategic planning in Trump’s
National Security Council.
Entitled “POTUS & Political Warfare,” Higgins
wrote the seven-page document in May, which was recently leaked to
Foreign Policy Magazine.
In it Higgins charges that a cabal of leftist “deep
state” government workers, “globalists,” bankers, adherents to Islamic
fundamentalism and establishment Republicans want to impose cultural
Marxism in the United States. “Recognizing in candidate Trump an
existential threat to cultural Marxist memes that dominate the
prevailing cultural narrative, those that benefit recognize the threat
he poses and seek his destruction.”
There you have it. Trump’s goal has never been to
promote guns or white supremacy or to fuel attacks on the press and the
left. These may be means, but the goal has been to build and fortify his
power. And keep him in power even if it’s found that he colluded with
Russia to get power.
Trump and his (now former) consigliere Steve Bannon have been
quietly encouraging a civil war between Trump’s base of support – mostly
white and worried – and everyone who’s not.
It’s built on economic stresses and racial
resentments. It’s fueled by paranoia. And it’s conveyed by Trump’s winks
and nods haters, and his deafening silence in the face of their
violence.
A smaller version of the civil war extended even into
the White House, where Bannon and his protégés have been doing battle with
leveler heads.
National security advisor Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster fired Higgins. Reportedly, Trump was furious at the firing.
McMaster was quick to term the Charlottesville
violence “terrorism.” Ivanka Trump denounced “racism, white supremacy
and neo-nazis.” Reportedly, chief of staff John Kelly pushed Trump to
condemn the haters who descended on Charlottesville.
Now that Bannon is gone, let’s hope the leveler heads win the civil war in the
White House. Let’s pray the leveler heads in our society prevent the
civil war Trump and Bannon want to instigate in America.
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