The infestation is in the White House
It would be easy to simply ignore the divisive bile that consistently spews from the White House and its current resident, President Donald Trump.
It also would be wrong. We tried.
We tried really hard.
It’s been awhile since we wrote about President Trump. And there are those who would ask why a local newspaper in Delaware County is writing about the antics emanating from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Our critics – and they are legion – will say we are merely holding true to our Democratic leanings, and taking one more opportunity to knock the president.
The truth is this is not about politics; it’s about decency.
We made the decision awhile back to avoid writing about the president in this space. It brings back that old saying:
“Never wrestle with a pig. You get all dirty and the pig likes it.”
This is what Donald Trump wants; it’s what he thrives on.
It feeds his narcissism and his No. 1 craving: Attention.
But there comes a time when voices need to be raised. This is one of those times.
We cringed when the president attacked four new Democratic congresswomen who have been critical of his policies, urging them to go “back where they came from.” The president said that if these lawmakers “hate our country,” they can go back to their “broken and crime-infested” countries.
A few nights later an adoring crowd chanted “Send Them Back,” while Trump stood smugly at the podium, never once offering an opposing point of view or possibly a teaching moment, informing the crowd that in America this is not what we do. He simply smiled and soaked in the adulation, feeding his enormous ego.
We have no quarrel with the president disagreeing with his critics. It’s been done by every resident of the White House. It is the invective he uses, and the target he invariably chooses – women, minorities, those of color.
The “infested” theme would return last week, when the president took to Twitter to upbraid another political foe, this time longtime Democratic Rep. Elijah Cummings of Baltimore. Cummings had the temerity to criticize conditions at the southern border where families and children are being held. Cummings is the son of a South Carolina sharecropper who has represented parts of Baltimore in Congress since 1996.
The president excoriated Cummings and in doing so spilled his bile all over Baltimore, referring to it as a “rat and rodent infested mess,” a “very dangerous & filthy place,” somewhere “no human being would want to live.”
This kind of hate was not dripping from a schoolyard bully. Or a beer-fueled bigot in a bar room. It was not uttered by a third-world dictator. This was the president of the United States, talking not about some foreign land, but the
26th largest city in the country. This wasn’t even the “sh—— —” countries he once egregiously disparaged in an Oval Office tirade. This was a city that sits not
40 miles up I-95 from the White House.
It followed a theme that the president has visited repeatedly as commander-in-chief. It is the gospel of “them,” as opposed to us. It stokes fear of others, in particular anyone who opposes “us.” And it invariably targets women and those of color, as if “they” are somehow separate - and lesser than “us.”
The president seems incapable of grasping that he is the president of all Americans, not just his loyal base.
Do you want to know the climate Donald Trump has empowered?
In a recent email, a longtime reader – and longtime foe of the Obamas, Clintons and seemingly all Democrats – who also happens to be a constant critic of this newspaper and what he perceives as our tilt to the extreme Left, sent a cartoon with a disparaging image of former First Lady Michelle Obama.
He added a note, “does this make me a racist?”
No doubt he thought it was funny.
We do not.
This is Donald Trump’s America. This is the sentiment the president is not only condoning, but empowering. It is hate, pure and simple.
But it is more than that. It is a wedge that is dividing the country.
It is not unusual for us to disagree with Republican leaders. There are those who constantly point to the media’s treatment of former President George W. Bush. They say the media savaged Bush 44. There is some truth to what they say. We believe the former president was treated badly, attacked personally for his public policies.
But nothing Bush did ever approached the kind of hate the president is sowing.
At this point we have no great expectations for President Trump. We have said in the past that all we really would like for him to do is act presidential.
That’s not going to happen. Not with this kind of divisive force sitting in the Oval Office.
If anyplace in this country is “infested,” it is the White House.
It’s infested with a spirit that is the antithesis of what this country was founded on, and what binds us together.
It reminds us instead of what divides us, and it seeks only to grow that chasm wider, for no reason other than to appease the narcissist in chief and those who hail his hateful words.