Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Trump needs to know we don’t think it’s fine to stick babies in cages
THE year of 1968 was a pretty radical one in many countries around the world.
It’s why France, America and the Czech Republic have been commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Paris Uprising, the Martin Luther King assassination riots and the Prague Spring.
Britain meanwhile remembers the year by releasing stamps marking 50 years of Dad’s Army’s first episode. Forget the surge of internationalism that encapsulated the spirit of ‘68 we’re going back to ‘39 and old men flicking two fingers across the Channel at foreigners. It somehow seems apt.
But what about the Battle of Grosvenor Square when hundreds were arrested outside America’s London Embassy protesting the Vietnam War? What an ideal chance to recall that day in ‘68, and celebrate our tradition of radical protest, when Donald Trump visits on Friday, July 13? What an opportunity to prove we have no intention of shrinking after Brexit into an insignificant island whose only foreign policy is not to endanger the risible Special Relationship.
A relationship so special Trump twice snubbed Theresa May at the recent G7 summit and his only motive for visiting next month is so he can take tea with one of his mum’s heroes, The Queen.
Let’s stage a mass demonstration on an unprecedented scale for a visiting head of state and party like it’s 1968.
And with the level of venomous loathing emanating from The White House the world would applaud it.
Even the majority of Americans are appalled at a leader who seems hellbent on changing the phrase you’ve got to be cruel to be kind into you’ve got to be cruel to be cruel.
In a week Trump pulled America out of the UN’S Human Rights Council because it “makes a mockery of human rights”, we saw 2,000 distraught children forcibly separated from their parents at the Mexican border. Repugnant scenes which a top UN official called “government-sanctioned child abuse” and Holocaust survivors called reminiscent of Hitler’s Germany.
A comparison given further credibility by film of mocking security guards and regime apologists claiming the children must be actors because conditions in these detention centres were “essentially summer camps”.
It was deliberately inflammatory stuff from a man playing only to his core audience of mostly white, mostly Fox News-consuming bigots.
We teach our kids to stand up to a bully by fighting back because they fear being made to look weak. So here’s what we do need to do next month.
Get outside Windsor Castle, Chequers and wherever else the CIA hides him and remind Trump that we don’t regard as civilised men who think it’s fine to grab pussies or rip babies from mothers then stick them in cages.
Petition Prince Philip to take the one thing he does well, insulting strangers, to a new level. Show Theresa May a photo of a backbone and demand she finds some. Urge ordinary people to produce the ugliest masks, the cleverest songs, the loudest horns and the funniest placards (I quite liked SUPER CALLOUS FRAGILE RACIST SEXIST LYING POTUS at the Washington Women’s March or TRUMP IS A BLERT on show in Liverpool).
Show that a country which thinks of itself as the mother of all democracies can give the mother of all humiliations, on the island of his mother’s birth, to the world’s biggest mother ****** . Make Friday the 13th a horror show this nightmare-peddler and his fellow ghouls will never forget.
Whaddaya say, guys?
Trump only plays to his core audience of white bigots