It is a little rich for the nation’s plunderer-in-chief to take to his bully pulpit to condemn the ongoing demonstrations as thuggery, as he did Monday, while casting himself as a “law and order” president.
Don’t get me wrong: the anarchic side of the otherwise righteous protests against police brutality sucks. It threatens to obscure the urgent underlying message, to the detriment of all of us, and especially those whose only “crime” is skin color.
But Trump’s own hypocrisy, his shameful record as lawbreaker, liar, race baiter and implacable foe of accountability can only leave protesters and their supporters wondering about the prospects for positive change, or any change at all, as long as this MAGA-minded Don Corleone rules the roost.
And for GOP stalwarts to pretend to be Shocked! Shocked! that the “old established order” is suddenly under such threat simply means they remain in denial about the example set by their own Dear Leader.
Ingrained racism is the seedbed for our current reckoning, to be sure. And the killing or George Floyd brought the fiery blossom forth. But the president, in his lawlessness and intemperance, is the perfect gardener.
We shouldn’t be surprised, of course. His propensity for graft, gouging and racist cons has been evident from the earliest days of his career.
In the late sixties, he and his father discriminated against African Americans to keep them out of Trump rental properties, according to court filings and a later New York Times investigation.
Once flush with Daddy’s tax-hedged largess, the fledgling master builder shafted contractors and business partners, declared bankruptcy to avoid paying for bum investments – then, accepted handouts from Russian sources (per his own son’s admission) after US banks and others decided he was too flaky to be trusted with their own money.
As a candidate in 2016, he effectively cheated voters by providing alibis and cover for Russian efforts to manipulate the election to his own benefit and Putin’s.
From the moment he took office he favored rich over poor, white constituents over people of color, and fed class resentments and racial hatreds to keep his often-under-served base from realizing he was screwing them over.
After Charlottesville, he famously preached moral equivalency between white supremacists and their victims. He practiced “immigration reform” by separating brown families at the border while conjuring bogus visions of countless illegals surging north to snatch jobs from (white) Americans.
In recasting tax policy, he and fellow GOP plutocrats played Robin Hood in reverse, stealing from the poor and middle-class to support tax breaks for corporations and the top one percent. The collateral damage is a deficit that will keep on stealing from generations to come.
Despite promises to clean house in Washington, Trump pilfered his own charitable foundation to cover personal expenses, charged top dollar to oil sheikhs and foreign fat cats thronging to his hotels to curry favor, and reserved key administration jobs for cronies and next-of-kin who promptly cashed in on the access and prominence they gained.
Looking towards a second term, Trump again tried to pre-cook the vote and public opinion, this time by extorting the Ukrainian president into smearing Joe Biden and his son.
He then stiff-armed Congressional investigators, muzzled or maligned in-house critics, and doubled down against releasing his tax returns and anything else that might expose his double-dealing and self-dealing.
Come the pandemic, he has bent, buried or invented facts, at the cost of countless lives, to save face with his base. He has sidelined medical experts who challenge his lethal ignorance and fired Inspectors General who threaten to open old political wounds. He has defrauded all of us of the right to know what the hell his administration is doing, and how it is rolling us.
And now, this serial huckster, thief and exploiter of racial tension dares to demonize millions of Americans who are protesting in an overwhelmingly responsible way the inequities of American justice – the very prevalence of which Trump so graphically personifies.
Any way you look at it, he is walking, talking, gut-churning proof that lies stick, race baiting works, and crime pays, at a social and moral cost that exceeds anything we have seen from the most unruly protesters.
Until Trump is booted from office, there is no way we can even begin to right the scales or reverse the damage wrought by ancient prejudices and his own conduct.
If Trump is re-elected, the unrest we have seen will be mere prelude. And the blame will be ours.