Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
These divided States
Mirror’s man in US on grim era of turmoil and lies under Trump
STANDING barely 100 yards from Donald Trump when he was sworn in as the 45th president, I listened as he told what has proven to be his biggest lie.
“This American carnage stops right here and stops right now,” the new US leader vowed on the steps of the Capitol on that freezing January day.
Almost four years on, the country is filled with more hate, death and destruction that has left it unrecognisable to the one I arrived in almost eight years ago.
Amid a backdrop of Trump’s tsunami of untruths, I’ve borne witness to some of the most shameful events to take place in a supposedly civilised society.
They say journalism is the first rough draft of history but only time will tell what will be taught in US high schools in 50 years’ time.
Whether it will be America’s biggest mass shooting in Las Vegas, US leader travelling to toady up to murderous dictators, immigrant children being held in cages while separated from parents, withdrawing from the fight against climate change or emboldening the rise of the far-right, the list seems endless.
The writing was on the White House walls no sooner had Trump and First Lady Melania moved in. Amid made-up crowd sizes, an obsession with Barack Obama and “alternative facts”, the Trump presidency has been a factory of falsehoods from the get-go.
It has churned out distortions, deceptions, conspiracy theories and brazen lies at a production-line pace that has fuelled an industry of fact-checkers.
The firing of former FBI director James Comey was more significant than most could have thought. During a dinner, he was asked by Trump whether he would pledge loyalty to him . Comey explained that his role is to serve the people.
Months later, he was sacked without being told.
It illustrated Trump’s disregard for the rule of law that has since led him to turn the US Department of Justice into his own legal firm.
To see Trump in July 2018 side with V l adimir Putin against t h e F BI , contradicting his own US intelligence agencies which said there had been
Russian interference in the 2016 election, was jaw-dropping. If allies such as the UK had not been put on notice before the Helsinki summit over where the US leader’s feelings lay, at that point they were. He single-handedly shattered America’s global image.
Only the month before, I had travelled to Singapore to see Trump meet North Korean despot Kim Jong-un in the hope of de-escalating the rogue nation’s proliferation of nuclear weapons.
What followed was an abject failure on his administration’s part yet he still crowed about how he “fell in love” with the murderous dictator.
If the problems were not bad enough on a world stage, domestically they were worse. Shortly after his inauguration, the simmering rise of white nationalism emboldened
Simmering white nationalism emboldened under his leadership boiled over
Trump’s handling of Covid will go down as one of the worst US disasters
under his leadership boiled over. During a Unite the Right Rally in August 2017 members of the alt-right, neo-confederates, neo-fascists, white nationalists, neo-nazis, the KKK and right-wing militias marched on Charlottesville, Virginia.
Hitler-loving James Fields Jr ran over 19 counter-protesters, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer.
As the country became a tinder box of racial divide, Trump initially refused to comment but I watched in New York as he then said there were “very fine people on both sides”.
It was the first of many instances of his apparent support for the far-right that, along with the radical left, has seen many of America’s cities more recently go up in flames. The fact no one blinks an eye when the leader of the free world is called a “racist” should be of huge concern to us all.
It was never more apparent than in the wake of George Floyd’s death in May – killed after white cop Derek Chauvin knelt on his neck for almost nine minutes. As I watched Minneapolis being looted and torched, it was a time for the President to bring together a country in turmoil.
Instead, Trump added fuel to the burning fire, pitting Black Lives Matter protesters against police and, more shamefully, white nationalist groups.
Despite high-profile incidents of police violence against black Americans, including the shooting of Jacob Blake, renewed calls for the removal of Confederate symbols and public condemnations of systemic racism from lawmakers, corporations, sports leagues and others, research shows white America feels largely unmoved.
Americans are sceptical that the current moment of reckoning will lead to major changes, according to a Pew Research Centre poll. They found:
“The public is about evenly split on whether the increased focus on i ssu e s of ra c e a n d racial inequality in the past three months will lead to major policy changes to address racial inequality – 48% say it will and 51% say it will not.
“A sizable share (46%) say this will not lead to changes that will improve the lives of black people. And while a majority say the heightened attention to racial issues represents a change in the way most Americans think about these issues, just 34% say this represents a major change.”
They found nearly half of adults say the country has not gone far enough when it comes to black people having equal rights but “white Americans are virtually unchanged”.
But it is not just the races that Trump divides, it is gender too.
While campaigning for the White House, he was heard on tape saying of women it was perfectly acceptable to “grab ’em by the p****. You can do anything.” America’s women still voted for him in their millions.
He has repeatedly, even during this
campaign, belittled women – none more so than the two dozen who have accused him of sexual impropriety and even rape.
In response to writer E. Jean Carroll’s claim he sexually assaulted her in a dressing room at a Manhattan department store in the mid-1990s, he simply replied: “She’s not my type.”
Despite the accusations, the evangelicals embrace him as he claims to be a good Christian – “a man of God” – using the Bible as a prop for any photo opportunity.
Even after his alleged 2006 affair with adult film star Stormy Daniels came to light, paying her to keep silent, that was OK because he was a “changed person”.
He also pushed for transgender servicemen and women who, unlike him who dodged the Vietnam draft, were prepared to put their lives on the line for American freedoms, to be banned from the military.
Trump also became only the third president to be impeached. It is challenging to know which of his
policies have been for the greater good. There is no doubt he continued to build on the economy inherited from Obama and almost wiped Islamic State from the earth.
But his handling of Covid-19 will go down as one of the worst disasters in US history. The deaths of 232,000 Americans, with a further 9.4 million infe ct ed , may in 2070 US hi stor y classes be the one thing that stands out above all about his leadership.
The first job for any president is to protect the p eople. Inst ead , h e has falsely claimed that America is “rounding the corner” and the virus will “simply disappear” – all while numbers of those infected set new daily records.
The message for those who lost loved ones, while infected Trump received treatment unavailable to others, was simple: “Live with it.” America will be living with Trump for decades, whether he wins or loses.