The recent apparent escalation of insanity in the Trump Administration has led many pundits to speculate on the set of circumstances that could possibly have led to the current sad state of affairs in the capital city of the so-called Leader of the Free World. Never before have they seen such audacious, boldfaced corruption in defense of a hypocritical and incompetent regime, they say. They insist that the United States has reached a new low in mendacity with the criminal actions of members of the Trump Administration, possibly leading all the way to Trump himself. Only impeachment, they say, followed by a pair of “extra-small handcuffs”, will tell.
These people have not been paying attention.
At least from Day One of the Trump Administration, it was clear that truth and competence were not highly valued, despite Trump’s claims during his campaign that he would find “the best people”. His then-press secretary, Sean Spicer, would angrily insist that the public coronation of his president was the largest to ever witness such an event ever, “period”, in spite of clear visual evidence to the contrary. The only thing that was perhaps more shocking than that assertion was the fact that, before the year was out, Spicer would be replaced by someone who appears to be even more comfortable angrily dispensing disinformation to the public in Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
Rudolph Giuliani, formerly (and improperly) dubbed “America’s Mayor” merely because he happened to be entrenched in New York’s City Hall when the September 11 terrorist attack took place, was long known to Pan-Afrikan activists and Black communities in New York as a racist mayor who never thought twice about enabling the brutality of his police, from the Abner Louima attack in a police station bathroom to the Amadou Diallo murder by police in the vestibule of his own home to the repressive tactics used against the 1998 Million Youth March in Harlem. Giuliani had used the month leading up to the Million Youth March to turn up the heat in New York’s racial drama, threatening march organizer Dr. Khalid Muhammad and lying about Dr. Muhammad’s intentions right up to the immediate aftermath of the march, insisting that he had exhorted followers to “go out and murder people” during the march when in fact no such statement was ever made (I personally made tapes of everything that was said, and there was no such exhortation at any time during the march). He had used these false assertions to justify the use of his riot police to attack the march organizers as they were ending the march three minutes late. Thus, Giuliani’s current antics in support of an unlawful “law-and-order” president were anticipated by his critics who knew of his behavior as Mayor of New York City.
Alt-right enthusiasts have been discussing the racist credentials of former adviser Steve Bannon and current adviser Stephen Miller since they emerged from the shadows and joined the Trump campaign. From Miller’s first public words that Trump’s edicts “will not be questioned”, we were duly informed that his boss was nothing if not a megalomaniac, and that he had in Miller a willing acolyte who seemed to relish any opportunity to lead the Stormtroopers forward into the “lawless rabble”.
Omarosa Manigault-Newman, his once-loyal “Apprentice” reality-star adviser, has recently come out to acknowledge her own (allegedly unwitting) complicity in enabling Trump’s destructive policies (perhaps the only one to have done so, at least until onetime Trump attorney Michael Cohen finally turns State’s evidence), but she has been known as an opportunist for years, one who was more than ready to embrace a man whose historical image is that of an unrepentant racist, and to whom she had bragged that his opponents would be forced to “bow down” after he was elected president.
Trump’s choices for the Department of Energy (Rick Perry, who could not even remember the name of the agency as he was campaigning on eliminating it four years earlier), Housing and Urban Development (the apparently narcoleptic Ben Carson, whose commitment to increase rents in federal housing for poor people caused many to wish he had stuck to brain surgery), Environmental Protection (the anti-environment Scott Pruitt, followed by the equally anti-environment Andrew Wheeler), Education (Betsy DeVos, whose lack of public school experience has led some to question whether she ever went to school at all) and Homeland Security (Kristjen Nielsen, who claims not to have known that Norway was a White country and whose incompetence and heartlessness led to her public harassment at dinner one evening) have smacked of a level of cronyism that is the only possible explanation for the appointment of individuals who are so woefully unqualified for those positions.
It appears the only members of Trump’s Cabinet who are actually qualified to do their jobs are Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats and Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, who ironically goes by the nickname “Mad Dog”.
The United States Legislative Branch has completely failed to serve the American people as a “check” on the Trump Administration, from the obstruction of the Republicans to many Obama Administration policies, to their current efforts to obstruct all investigations into the crimes of Trump Administration and campaign officials, to their pushing of tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans at the expense of the working and underclasses, to the relative fecklessness of too many in the Democratic Party. As a result of the Legislature’s dysfunction and even treachery (Congress, the opposite of progress), the Supreme Court now is composed of a majority that will likely back any Trump Administration excess, and thus all of the so-called “checks and balances” that we were so proudly taught were the hallmark of American governance and a guarantee against dictatorship are now gone.
And let us not forget the most egregious culprit of all, Donald Trump himself. In the 1970’s, he and his father were consistently sued by Black residents of their apartment buildings for housing discrimination. In the aftermath of the April 19, 1989 assault, rape and sodomy of the Central Park Jogger, Trisha Meili, Trump first called for the execution of the Central Park Five (Antron McCray, Raymond Santana, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, and Korey Wise), but then continued to insist on their guilt after they were cleared of the crime by DNA evidence and the detailed confession of the real attacker. He embraced the “birtherism” conspiracy theory against Barack Obama from the time he had launched his 2008 candidacy for president. His gleaming towers along the Atlantic City boardwalk loomed for decades over an inner city suffering from neglect and decay as his casinos flourished, apparently blissfully unaware and unconcerned about the public price being paid for their private success. And his presidential campaign was replete with anti-Mexican, anti-immigrant, anti-disabled, anti-Muslim, anti-protester, anti-environment, racist and misogynistic screeds that only increased and were translated into official national policy when he was scandalously named president through an Electoral College victory that went against the actual popular vote.
Why are people so stunned and shocked about the loss of the soul of the US political system only now?
But this is not what is the most stupefying about all the hand-wringing that has been going on in analysts’ circles about the Trump Administration. They speak as though this level of self-interested, incompetent opportunism is a new development. This has been an ongoing trend for decades, centuries even.
The 2000 Presidential election, with its politically-motivated “hanging chad” recount in the pivotal Florida polls courtesy of Catherine Harris, the Republican Secretary of State who had been an open supporter of George W. Bush, swung the election in Bush’s favor after a 5-4 Supreme Court decision that was made on partisan lines. This, and Bush’s subsequent 2004 re-election (courtesy of fellow Bush supporter Ken Blackwell, the Republican Secretary of State in Ohio, through another contested process along partisan lines), were engineered, again in spite of losing the popular vote, with the assistance of the Electoral College and a systematic campaign of voter intimidation and vote-suppression in which Afrikan-American voters were disproportionately “scrubbed” from the voter rolls, robbing them of their Constitutionally-protected franchise. During Bush’s presidency, Administration operatives used shadowy accomplices from private firms Blackwater (mercenaries) and the Corrections Corporation of America (jails and prisons) to extend a brutal war in Iraq that was largely considered illegal, expand mass incarceration in Iraq and the United States, raise the privatization of public resources to an art form and, as a result, rake in tons of illicit profits for their corporate cronies. This was accomplished, again, through political strong-arm tactics and a relatively compliant Congress weakened by the growing-in-influence Tea Party.
Ronald Reagan launched the best-known War on Drugs when he was president in the 1980’s, aided by the importation of huge amounts of cocaine into South Central Los Angeles and other poor Black neighborhoods (all to help facilitate his “dirty wars” in El Salvador and Nicaragua). His campaign to shrink government helped usher in a new wave of privatization that would enable the abuses of the George W. Bush Administration, and now Trump.
Bill Clinton, the once-dubbed “first Black president” because he picked up a saxophone on the Arsenio Hall Show, race-baited Sista Souljah and Jesse Jackson in his two presidential campaigns, and then set us all up for the increased privatization of public resources (such as water) as he helped lead the Democratic Leadership Council in a political Race to the Right. And even though he has since apologized for the catastrophic impact of his policies on the people of Ayiti (“Haiti”), he never enacted any policies or embraced any initiatives to reverse the damage his administration had caused there.
But, of course, all we remember about Clinton’s misdeeds boiled down to a blue dress. No wonder people are so shocked by revelations that should have been intuitively obvious to the casual observer.
Even Jimmy Carter, the former president who has done the most for the cause of humanitarian work through his various charitable organizations, backed dictatorial presidents in Indonesia (Suharto) and Iran (Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi), perhaps his most visible and famous misdeeds (“mistakes”?) as Head of State.
In the late 1960’s, Richard Nixon perfected the “Southern Strategy” that exploited Southern White fears of a Black Planet and then, as president, launched the first systematic War on Drugs that started Black America on a manufactured plunge into the abyss of mass addiction and mass incarceration.
George Wallace openly campaigned on racial hatred before an assassin’s bullet magically seemed to transform him into a civil rights supporter. His status as a Democrat reflects the onetime position of the Democratic Party as the party of the Ku Klux Klan during Reconstruction.
Indeed, when one goes all the way back to the founding of the United States on the mass murder of the Indigenous First Nations, the building of the new country’s economic base on the backs of enslaved Afrikans, the repeated broken treaties with the survivors of the genocide brought on by the Westward Expansion, the backing of slave states in the Caribbean and the subsequent support and rule of dictatorial regimes in South America, Afrika and Asia, and the dropping of not one, but two nuclear bombs on the two most heavily populated cities of Japan during World War II, killing 220,000 civilians (when Japan was retreating on all fronts and trying to find a way to surrender without losing face or sacrificing their Emperor), one can hardly miss the unifying thread of exploitation, genocide and terror that has supported the prosperity and the might of the United States to this day.
Those among us who continue to tout the fantasy that this is the “greatest country in the history of the world” conveniently overlook these mortal sins that were committed on the rest of the world to allow this nation to form and to prosper. If it is to truly live up to the hype of its own self-proclaimed greatness, it has massive debts to pay, debts that were amassed by the same putrid, rotting soul that creates leaders such as Trump today.
If, and when, the United States truly atones for those historic wrongs committed against so many around the world, it may finally earn the title “greatest nation on earth”, and then, finally, the shock many analysts proclaim upon seeing a regime as corrupt as this one may be justified.