Combating climate change. Addressing income inequality. Rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure. Preserving access to health care for people with pre-existing conditions. The shortage of affordable housing. The high price of prescription drugs. These are the things that the nation, and its representatives in Congress, aren’t talking about while they talk about President Donald Trump and his racist tweets.
With every flush of his Twitter account, Trump swirls the nation deeper into division and distraction. His suggestion that four female representatives, all women of color, “go back and try to help fix the totally broken and crime-infested places they came from,” are part of Trump’s ongoing campaign to pit us against them – “us” in his case being white America. Three of those places, by the way, were Detroit, the Bronx and Chicago.
Trump is attempting to make the four women, new and intemperate members of Congress, the face of the Democratic Party, to equate Democrats with socialists. In doing so he runs the risk of making Republicans the party of racism and white supremacy.
Just four House Republicans voted with Democrats to censure Trump for his tweets. The vote should have been unanimous. Instead, members of the Grand Old Party curled up like possums, armadillos and pill bugs out of fear that if they stood up they might be blistered by their vindictive leader, the angry red face of the Republican Party.
Trump’s statements mark a new low for an American president, though we expect his rhetoric to sink further as the 2020 election nears.
South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham signaled the direction Republicans may take as the campaign heats up. “We all know that (Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) and this crowd are a bunch of communists, they hate Israel, they hate our own country,” Graham said while defending Trump’s tweets on CNN.
Lindsey Graham is no longer a person to be taken seriously.
The tactic, for that’s what it is, of labeling those who disagree with a president’s policies or actions as un-American has an old and scurrilous history. It includes the red-baiting of the McCarthy era, when careers were ruined and people persecuted, and the cries of “Love it or leave it” by President Richard Nixon’s supporters 50 years ago. The tactic is ugly, cynical, divisive and prone to lead to violence. It should have no place in American politics.
Trump has infected the daily lives of millions of Americans with his incendiary rhetoric, mean-spirited actions and attacks on any who disagree with him. This newspaper’s editorial board resolved early on not to fall into the trap of responding to his every provocation, to run tongue-wagging after every stick he throws. But this time it’s incumbent on us to go on the record.
Trump’s statements were vile, racist, beneath the dignity of the presidency and, yes, un-American. America is a country built largely by people who came from elsewhere, people of all races, faiths and nations, people who, once they become citizens, are all Americans.