Trump's Retweet Madness: The President Of The United States Is Unwell
01 December 2017EsinIslam And
Agencies
This is obvious to anybody not ideologically beholden to supporting the man at
all costs.
In the space of just a few days, he has tried to walk back his own admission
of sexual assault while crowing about liberals accused of the same, attacked
CNN's global credibility for petty score-settling - while boosting his beloved
Fox News - and broke off from a ceremony of American Indian Second World War
veterans to hurl slurs at Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren - which his
office inexplicably scheduled to happen in front of a painting of President
Andrew "Trail of Tears" Jackson.
And now, in a burst of retweets fired off as casually as he whines about #FakeNews,
Trump felt compelled to tell his followers:
"VIDEO: Muslim migrant beats up Dutch boy on crutches!" -
"VIDEO: Muslim destroys statue of the Virgin Mary!" -
"VIDEO: Islamist mob pushes teenage boy off roof and beats him to death!"
No context - just Muslims, Muslims, immigrant Islamist Muslims, doing terrible
things that we need to watch out for.
The fact that at least two of the videos have proven to be fake or
deliberately mislabelled - the "Muslim immigrant" beating up the Dutch
teenager was neither Muslim nor an immigrant, it turns out - is neither here
nor there.
For those following at home, the author of the tweets, Jayda Fransen, helps
head up Britain First, a vile amalgamation of the British Nationalist Party
and Northern Ireland's militant Unionists - a group whose idea of a political
"ground game" entails storming British mosques to hand out Bibles.
She is evidently pleased, tweeting her thanks in all-caps with the acronym for
"Onward, Christian Soldiers" as a signoff.
As post-Brexit Great Britain deals with its own witches' brew of stoked-up
xenophobia and political chaos, a shared language makes it all too easy for
right-wing hatemongers in the United States to draw on such rhetoric in their
demonising crusades at home.
Nigel Farage, not content to see his lies and demagoguery destroy the
remaining global clout of the United Kingdom, is increasingly a transnational
phenomenon, even travelling to Alabama - Alabama! - to campaign for
now-accused-of-being-a-paedophile-but-still-likely-to-win GOP Senate candidate
Roy Moore.
Yet toxic as Farage is, he is ultimately a marginal figure bent on salvaging
some sense of relevance after consigning himself and his country to oblivion.
President Trump commands the attention of millions of Americans, among them
hundreds of well-educated apologists willing to leap to his defence, and bears
ultimate responsibility for maintaining the - relative - unity of the nation
at home, while ensuring that the myriad interests of a far-flung empire do not
collide in a snarled, smoking heap of destruction.
How do you think that will turn out?
Already, the worst predictions of the late political scientist Juan Linz about
the dangers of presidential systems are coming to pass: "In his frustration he
may be tempted to define his policies as reflections of the popular will and
those of his opponents as the selfish designs of narrow interests… The doleful
potential for displays of cold indifference, disrespect, or even downright
hostility is not to be scanted."
Sure, plenty of pearl-clutching conservative homebodies will be glad that the
president is giving voice to their fears, while plenty of DC pundits will carp
that out-of-touch liberals need to understand these fears as somehow valid
because of coal mines or something.
B*llsh*t.
Even a majority of Trump voters want the president to stop tweeting. And
people's policy preferences don't excuse the president getting his jollies by
demonising an American religious group undergoing a wave of hate crimes worse
than the spate of anti-Muslim assaults that followed the 9/11 attacks - ie:
worse than literally any other time in US history.
He has little compassion for people who don't vocally sing his praises, just
as he suffers from an utter lack of empathy - something blatantly obvious from
the moment he set foot on the campaign trail.
Empathy is, of course, not a common quality among America's political elite -
one looks in vain for a sign of heart-felt contrition among the Iraq War
boosters now jumping on the (admittedly roomy) bandwagon of defending American
norms and values against an ongoing onslaught.
Yet unless Republican leaders intend to stand up and face ample stores of
xenophobia and race hatred they have long excused and stoked up among their
supporters - channeling an all-too-long tradition in American politics - this
kind of fear-mongering will continue. And continue. And be rationalised as the
president being willing to speak uncomfortable truths, "telling it like it
is". And continue.
You know which president was good at "telling it like it is"?
President Abraham Lincoln, with the end of the Civil War in sight, used the
occasion of his second inaugural address not to trash his (literal) enemies or
spike the football, but to drive home the evils of slavery as practiced in the
American South and tolerated by the North:
"If God wills that [the war] continue until all the wealth piled by the
bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and
until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn
with the sword… so still it must be said 'the judgments of the Lord are true
and righteous altogether'."
Great men and lesser men have occupied the Oval Office in the 200-odd years
that the American Republic has endured. Yet while terrible deeds and
destructive policies have issued from that office before, and will issue
hence, few things have made such a dangerous mockery of the office as the
president's unhinged tweeting and his ill-considered one-liners.
Andrew Leber is a PhD student in the department of government at Harvard
University.
Follow him on Twitter: @AndrewMLeber
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