TRUMP’S DIRE WARNINGS ARE ABOUT — HIS AMERICA
Over the past two weeks, the competing visions of President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden have been laid out — starkly — and the narrow slice of undecided voters will have to settle on what kind of country they want.
Do they want an America that strives toward racial justice and equality, that values its place in the community of nations, that will work to reverse the catastrophic effects of climate change?
Or do they want four more years of chaos? Trump’s performance over the past three-and-a-half years has made it clear that his greatest passion is himself, which means he is loyal only to those who are loyal to him, a group that includes his white base and selected international despots. His tax cuts have benefited the very richest, his wall on the southern border remains unfinished, an entirely foreseeable pandemic caught him unawares, the economy has tanked, millions of Americans are unemployed and schools, most of them anyway, are shuttered.
He does not even pretend to be the president of all of us, and his best argument against Biden is downright nonsensical.
If Biden is elected, Trump predicts, the country will explode with the kind of racial unrest and protests against police brutality that we saw this summer after a white police officer choked the life out of a Black man, George Floyd.
It’s a neat and cynical trick: Vote for me because what’s happening on my watch is unacceptable.
Cities run by Democratic mayors and states run by Democratic governors are not going to magically turn into Republican strongholds if Trump is re-elected. If they were, they would have done so by now. If Trump is returned to office, expect more of what we’ve seen this summer, not less.
What Trump is promising is four more years of what is already devastating our country: a pandemic he tried to wish away that has killed more than 180,000 Americans and counting; violent reactions to police brutality and the systemic racism that allows an unarmed Black father to be shot seven times in the back while a white teenager who is alleged to have murdered two people with an AR-style rifle walks calmly past police, who ignore him.
As Biden told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell on Thursday, “This happens to be Donald Trump’s America.”
Trump also went all out last week to prove that he is a friend of Black Americans, the bloc of voters who put Biden on the road to the Democratic nomination after he scored a huge win in the South Carolina primary.
In 2016, Trump earned 8% of the Black vote; current polls show that number has not much changed, despite Trump’s increasingly desperate attempts to prove he is not a racist. Winning over a relatively small number of Black voters could help him win hotly contested states.
I do not question the sincerity of the Black Americans who are Trump supporters. Rather, I question how he uses their support to further an agenda that has no interest in ending systemic racism, police brutality, the rise of white nationalism or an economic system that disadvantages people of color.
The extent of Trump’s gaslighting on race is something to behold.
On Thursday night, Trump repeated a travesty he has uttered before: “And I say — very modestly — that I have done more for the African American community than any president since Abraham Lincoln.”
Does Trump really believe that he has done more for Black Americans than President Lyndon Johnson, who signed the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act and the Fair Housing Act? That he has done more than President Harry Truman, who desegregated the armed forces by executive order?
Historians remind us that President Ulysses S. Grant sent troops to South Carolina to protect the rights of freed Blacks during Reconstruction, and that Grant was president when the 15th Amendment was enacted, giving African-American men the right to vote.
Trump has shown no regard for truth in the past. Why would anyone expect him to start now?