Trump’s name should not adorn landmark
American commentators in journals as respected and dissimilar in political opinion as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal are now calling billionaire Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump a fascist. That’s in response to his remarks advocating rounding up and deporting minorities, building an East German-style wall to keep out Mexicans, whom he described as rapists and criminals, and banning Muslims from entering the United States. Even his own party’s stalwarts — former vice-president Dick Cheney, for example — have begun renouncing his Islamophobic scapegoating, Hispanic stereotyping and mockery of women, the disabled, the media and — let’s not forget — political rivals, whom he disparages as losers, idiots and dummies.
Some have likened Trump’s populist pandering, ethnic scapegoating and demagogy to that of Adolf Hitler. The Philadelphia Inquirer dubbed him “The New Furor” and ran a photo of him, arm upraised in what looks like Nazi salute. And the Trump-is-Hitler trope has been gaining traction in social media. But this overstates the case almost as badly as Trump’s vile, cruel and divisive rhetoric. It does a disservice to our collective memory of what Nazism and the Holocaust really represented and trivializes their monstrous evils. Trump may wish to cast himself as a racist, bigoted, foul-mouthed oaf; a Hitler he is not. He may employ the media strategy that Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels immortalized as “the Big Lie,” uttering brazen untruths and ignoring all denials, but that doesn’t make Trump a Nazi. The British newspaper, The Guardian, was closer to the mark with its plain-spoken dismissal of his anti-Muslim tirades as “utterly repellent and malignant.”
And that’s good enough reason to support Vancouver city councillor Kerry Jang’s campaign asking that Trump’s name not appear on the 63-storey Trump International Hotel and Tower on West Georgia Street. At a time when relatively benign sports franchises are under pressure to change nicknames associated with demeaning ethnic stereotypes, why would anyone want a downtown architectural landmark in a multicultural city that celebrates its diversity associated with values so disgraceful and so contemptuous of basic human rights?
Nor, it seems, is the councillor alone in his view that Vancouver doesn’t need a “beacon of racism” on its horizon. Similar dismay and disgust is being expressed in the United Kingdom, where an anti-Trump petition gathered more than 300,000 signatures almost overnight, and in Toronto where city councillor Josh Matlow has called for removal of the real estate mogul’s name from a 68-storey hotel tower in that city.
Jang is not alone because if silence represents consent, then disgusting claptrap from political demagogues that appeals to the basest instincts of the lowest common denominator deserves a vigorous public rebuke and stern repudiation. Vancouver is a city proud of its cultural and ethnic diversity. Public spaces are respectfully adorned with the names of British and Spanish explorers, Jewish business leaders, Chinese statesmen, First Nations poets and Japanese diplomats. The name of a person espousing values worthy only of the deepest disapprobation cannot be welcome on any monument, either public or private.
Of course, the decision rests with the developer, Holborn Holdings, which will make that judgment on the merits of the business case — damage to the Trump brand, breach of contract penalties, legal recourse of unit buyers, impact on its own reputation — rather than any political or emotional consideration.
Nevertheless, citizens have sent a clear message that should be respected.