Trump's selective "indignation"

Last week he dedicated his work vacation to invoking Armageddon in his war of words with the North Korean autocrat, Kim Jong Un, with whom he shares more similarities than he thinks; And, like everything else he does, Trump believes it's one more game to raise his television ratings.

Hence his warnings against North Korea seemed like the bravado of a wrestler, with the only difference that here the consequences of continuing to challenge one mental imbalance (to another) would mean the loss of life.

But for Trump everything is a game. In the middle of the Trump-Jong Un billboard, the president called the governor of Guam, which Kim threatened to disappear from the map with his nuclear weapons, and dared to tell Governor Eddie Calvo that all this was making Calvo "famous" and that certainly tourism to the tiny island would multiply ten times, and all without spending a single penny.

Trump, who evaded military service, is now the dangerous Commander-in-Chief of the US Armed Forces and believes he is in the middle of a Battleship game. He is surrounded by generals, but gives advice and makes off the cuff military threats against Venezuela. When he said on Friday that even the military option was on the table in the case of Venezuela, the facial expressions of his Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, ff his United States Ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, and his National Security Adviser, Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster, were worth a million.

There was Trump, master of bravado, threatening with bombs and wars right and left.

But the next day, when white supremacists, neoNazis and members of the Ku Klux Klan converged in Charlottesville, Virginia, to incite violence and their conduct culminated in an act of domestic terrorism in which one woman died and dozens were injured, Trump condemned violence “on all sides.” He could not condemn directly and by name the white supremacists who are an intrinsic part of the base that supports him blindly and which he does not want to pester or alienate.

Facing intense external and internal pressure, Trump finally condemned neo-Nazis, white supremacists and the KKK on Monday, two days after the weak initial statement that generated the controversy, calling them "disgusting."

But for Trump all terrorists are Muslims and all immigrants are criminals. He does not condemn attacks on mosques and is silent when immigrants are suffocated in a truck in Texas. In that case, his Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spoke of human trafficking, but without humanizing the victims and only as a process. His son-in-law is an Orthodox Jew and his daughter, Ivanka, converted to Judaism; But Trump does not seem to mind the antiSemitic attacks of his followers and endorsed by some of his closest advisers.

When the ugly reality of violent domestic racism leaves a trail of death in its own backyard, Trump reads a feeble statement from which he deviates to say that he condemns violence, but from all sides; that is, not of the provocative white supremacists, and only "clarifies" his statements under intense pressure.

And when he engages in a war of words with a dictator, he does it with Kim Jong Un, but he is at no time prepared to do so with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Trump's selective "indignation" is priceless.

Maribel Hastings is executive advisor to America's Voice