aNewDomain — Donald Trump is Archie Bunker, Monty Burns and Howard Beale all rolled into one rich and angry white man.
The cynical billionaire marches forward unabated, buoyed by the latest polls that have him at roughly 20 percent of the Republican electorate.
Poll figures like that are for sure a victory for gullible couch potatoes everywhere. They’d vote for any pretend authoritarian figure served up to them on the teevee, I suspect.
But now there’s Trump’s most recent declaration, which seems crazier than anything that came before.
On Sunday, on national TV, Trump said that President Obama is not a credit to his race, that he’s done nothing for African Americans, that African Americans’ lower than average income levels are Obama’s fault. He also said that the situation of African Americans now is worse than ever, and it’s all Obama’s fault. Trump’s full interview from ABC News Sunday is viewable below.
In case you haven’t reached your Trump daily dose, here’s an excerpt of what he said about Obama:
He has done nothing for African Americans. You look at what’s gone on with their income levels. You look at what’s gone on with their youth. I thought that he would be a great cheerleader for this country. I thought he’d do a fabulous job for the African-American citizens of this country. He has done nothing …
They have problems now in terms of unemployment numbers; look at their unemployment numbers. And you have — here you have a black president who’s done very poorly for the African Americans of this country …
Sadly, because President Obama has done such a poor job as president, you won’t see another black president for generations!
Trumpzilla is probably impervious to logic and facts. But what the hell, let’s give it a go …
For starters, Trump’s critique is kind of like Jeff Davis criticizing Frederick Douglass for not doing enough for African Americans. Nothing short of outrageous.
I’ll be the first to say it’s plausible Donald Trump doesn’t believe much of what his public persona says. The real Donald Trump attended the Kew-Forest School as a kid, his sister is a federal appeals court judge, and he lives in an apartment seemingly decorated by Liberace.
Maybe Trump’s cozy with a word or two of it, but most of the public Trump persona has been carefully combed and cultivated over many years by hordes of paid handlers, promoters, marketers and producers. The brand they cumulatively created — the brand that now is Trump the Candidate — is the selfsame one that so keenly appeals to a certain and quite large segment of the American electorate. Judging from the polls, anyway.
These are the people who think they know him from TV. They’re the same people who, incidentally, would run into Oprah in a mall in the midwest somewhere and yell: “Hey, girl! Let’s go out for a fun dinner at (trashy chain eatery here) tonight. We’ll have a great time, girlfriend!” Such people seem to have a terribly hard time separating on-screen fiction with actual reality.
Listen. If Americans think they know The Donald because of what they’ve seen on a series of carefully crafted and edited TV shows, then we are truly doomed. Because it was shown long ago that Americans, most often, vote for candidates whose names or personas they think they “know.”
Obama has set a low bar for African Americans, says Trump …
In his latest remarks, Trump didn’t actually use the phrase “credit to his race,” a very old fashioned phrase long ago recognized as a code phrase for racism. What Trump actually said was the reverse: He said he thought Obama had “set a low bar” as an African-American president, and that because of this there won’t be another African-American president for many years.
So, in Trump’s critique Obama was elected as something akin to the presidential candidate of the African Americans as a population group rather than as a man who just happens to be African American. Following this logic, maybe this year we should look closely at the presidential candidate put forth by the Samoan Americans. Hey, that Dwayne Johnson is lookin’ good.
Interestingly, Trump’s remarks are somewhat averse to his previous birther position on Obama — that is, he is one of those who believes and carries on the fiction that Obama was not American-born but, rather, a Kenyan-born foreigner. But it’s possible, come to think of it, that in Trump’s mind, Obama is only an “African American” because his father was an African (from Africa) and his mother an American. I don’t know. Trump’s logic reminds me most of a recurring nightmare I’ve had, where my next door neighbor morphs into an axe-wielding dragon with no warning whatsoever.
I can’t figure that out — or Trump’s logic — no matter how much I stand ready and prepare myself.
Even crazier, if that’s possible, is that Trump next blames Obama for African-American unemployment. He says Obama is solely responsible for it, too. Interesting.
If I’m not mistaken, Trump has firmly advocated that the federal government should have no role aiding the unemployed. In Trump’s view, unemployment should be entirely solved by the private sector.
So, how exactly could a president help solve unemployment? Nothing that Trump would have ever approved of, that’s for sure.
Oh, wait. Sorry. Trump would solve unemployment by cutting the tax rate. Because that’s the solution for nearly every domestic problem, isn’t it?
So, if a tiny oligarchy of billionaires could own everything, we’d all be hired to work for them in incredibly lucrative, satisfying and infinitely upgradable jobs. Oh, wait. That’s the phantasm we’ve been building since Reagan.
It didn’t happen, though. Wonder why?
Maybe the billionaires and corporations who run everything and earn all the money in this brave, new world need to be richer to really open up the prosperity gusher.
Let’s make them richer so their good graces will rain upon us, starting with Trump. Yeah, that’s the ticket.
As they say on both the Disney Channel and Nickelodeon, “You just gotta believe!”
And FYI: Trump opposes any rise in the federal minimum wage. At least he is beginning to draw the beginnings of a platform, and finally he has a position on something. He says wage rates should be entirely set by private employers like him.
Obama’s done “Nothing” for African Americans.
Of course, if Obama had done some special just for African Americans, Trump and his Tea Party pals would have unleashed rivers of bile. Obama instead accomplished a few things that benefited all Americans. Like affordable healthcare.
Before the Affordable Health Care Act, which is universal health care that Trump once strongly supported but now bitterly opposes, African Americans were 55 percent more likely to be uninsured than white Americans.
Obamacare, for all its shortcomings, is actually changing that.
Obama is responsible for the state of African American youth? What state is that?
Trump next makes a vague complaint about African American “youth.” I guess that’s a veiled reference to Ferguson and Baltimore. If young African Americans are not appropriately polite, I suppose they might mind their manners a smidge more if they had educational, health, and economic opportunities on par with their white compatriots. Just a crazy thought, Don.
It’s bizarre, I know, but Trump didn’t even bother explaining how Obama is responsible for African American youth. So who knows what to make of that comment? To the extent that President Obama hasn’t done more to level out American’s longstanding white privilege, then I guess I agree with The Donald on this one.
Then again, I don’t think that’s what he had in mind. Do you?
Trump ended his tirade by claiming that the situation of African Americans now is about as bad as it’s ever been. That’s true if you discount and overlook 200 years of slavery, and 100 years of Jim Crow laws, and decades of police brutality, and chronic unemployment, and … well, Trump’s not a details guy. And history? It’s for weenies anyway.
Now, it shouldn’t surprise you a bit that Trump believes he’ll win the majority of African-American votes in the next election. He said the same about Latinos, after he totally dissed Mexican immigrants as rapists and criminals. Believing in yourself no matter what the reality is might be the secret to Trump’s success.
But his hair-trigger temper and nutty, off the cuff comments are going to be what undermines him in the end. If it doesn’t do so now for Trump the Candidate it will do him in later, when he’s the ham-fisted President Trump.
But do you think it’s possible he really might have something here? Let’s think. Okay, I got it:
If Trump is worth as much as he says he is, then he could give every African American $773.
How’s that for a gesture in racial harmony? Throw in his pals, the Koch Brothers, and he could make it an even $8,000. Imagine that: A check for $8,000 from three wealthy white guys to every one of their 42 million fellow citizens who happen to be African American. Talk about kumbaya a la noblesse oblige.
Could they be bought? Well, probably not. But it would be one helluva gesture. In a world like that there wouldn’t really be much of a need for the federal government, would there? Let’s put Trump’s money where his mouth is. After all, that’s where it belongs.
Why have critics been calling Trump a racist since 1973? So not FAIR!
Before you get too comfortable with a dashiki-clad Trump recall and pay out, you know, critics have been calling him a racist since 1973, Weird. That’s longer than most Americans have even been alive.
Maybe those charges were trumped up, though. Maybe Trump isn’t the dangerously arrogant and angry old white dude that he seems to be.
Americans of all political persuasions seem to be really, really, really hoping that he is what he says he is. Especially Tea Partiers. They eat this crap up. Even though Trump departs with them on the subject of eminent domain, which they claim to care so much about. But I digress.
Maybe Trump is just a Tom Sawyer-style huckster. Maybe all of us, supporters and detractors alike, already know this deep down.
Then again, maybe he’s just the last angry American white man flaming out. I don’t know about you, but I’m officially resolving to stop renting space in my head to this nincompoop.
I need to stop following all his inane comments and so-called news events now, too. At first it was fun. Then it was fun and troubling. Now it’s as boring and predictable as Season Two of any reality show. Later.
Here’s the full Trump interview:
Source: TheWorldIsYoursNews
For aNewDomain.net, I’m Tom Ewing.
Photos and Credits
Cover collage comprised of: Donald Trump,”Donald Trump by Gage Skidmore” by Gage Skidmore. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons; Monty Burns: “Mr Burns” via Wikipedia; Howard Beale: “Network12″ by source:http://www.threemoviebuffs.com/review.php?movieID=network; Ultimately Network: by MGM Pictures via Wikipedia; and Archie Bunker: http://genius.com/25824.
Frederick Douglass image: “Frederick Douglass portrait” by George K. Warren (d. 1884). – This media is available in the holdings of the National Archives and Records Administration, cataloged under the ARC Identifier (National Archives Identifier) 558770.
Scan from DOD War and Conflict CD collection: A lossless version is here. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.
Unemployed African-American man image: “A BLACK MAN WHO IS JOBLESS SITS ON THE WINDOWSILL OF A BUILDING IN A HIGH CRIME AREA ON CHICAGO’S SOUTH SIDE. HE HAS… – NARA – 556156” by John H. White, 1945-, Photographer (NARA record: 4002141) – U.S. National Archives and Records Administration. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.
