On my mind

MY US friend joked that the only people who did not know what was coming in Washington on January 6 were the Capitol police. But it’s not a joke. What he calls the Trumpanzees make up almost half the population of the US with their rightwing preferences.

Support for Trump has a wide and variegated base. From evangelical Christians who bizarrely are attracted to his cynical persona, his followers can be families chasing the tainted American dream or the resentful and economically abandoned.

They like his authoritarianism and political platform of lower taxes, economic regeneration and a nationalistic America first.

Yet out of the darkness march the champions of bigotry, racism, xenophobia, white supremacy, neonazism, conspiracy theories, pro-gun advocacy and violence with their messages emblazoned on banners, flags and clothing.

However, as America implodes, the real villains are those Republican politicians who sat back for four years and watched Trumpism with all its hate speech divide the country and fuel the worst extremist values. It’s called complicity and it’s a common phenomenon.

This is the complicity that tolerated the President’s inflammatory rhetoric which continues to threaten American democracy.

Most of us are aware of the words of Pastor Martin Niemöller, aimed at the cowardice and silence of German intellectuals and the German Christian Church which supported Nazism. They begin with “First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out” and end with “Then they came for me – and there was no one left to speak for me”.

It remains a powerful call to be vocal and active in calling out and challenging in any context those, who because of their words and actions, are unfit for public office.

Follow Graham on Twitter@geetdee