Not all Americans—Trump included—are “dreamers,” save in their racist nightmares

Well, during his SOTUS Donald Trump, as expected, “trumpeted” his “brilliance” in bringing the country back from the “abyss” of the Obama era, although to be perfectly frank I (nor should anyone else) see any difference in my workaday life since forever. Outside that faucet of existence, there are “differences” and all of them in time will prove to be disasters for this country, sooner or later.  Trump didn’t talk about things that really matter to ordinary people—like the massive ballooning debt that his tax “reform” will only make worse, or the way he and the Republicans are finding ways for a slow kill of the Affordable Care Act without a “replacement,” and the way he is gutting social programs (and with the help of Paul Ryan, Medicare and Medicaid) to pay for his “great military” and his “beautiful wall.” He is more interested in ridding “bureaucrats” in government who are not in lock-step with his program of fear and hate, and, of course fostering an atmosphere of fear and hate appeared to be the only time he spoke “from the heart."

Trump continued his racist presumption that Hispanics only bring crime, drugs and violence into this country, when the truth of the matter is that immigrants are much less likely to be involved in such acts as full-blooded “Americans.” I didn’t see any family members sitting behind Trump representing the victims of the record number of mass shootings (nearly all by white American “dreamers”), and the MS-13 gang problem that he is fixated on because they are Hispanic (Russian and Chinese immigrant organized crime in this country is a much bigger—albeit not discussed—problem) is wildly overblown, and in no way is representative of the Hispanic “culture” that so many disparage. Ignorance abounds, and why not? Trump’s appalling lack of knowledge about “chain migration”—in fact in takes as long as 25 years (in the case of Mexican immigrants) to bring an aged family member into the country proves that this man is out of his depth morally and ethically. 

Even in a “progressive” city like Seattle, most people are too “superior” to even be seen in the same company as a Hispanic individual (well, maybe an attractive Latina with something to “sell”), and in places that are not “progressive,” like Kent (where a black man was brutally battered in the head with a baseball bat yesterday by a Samoan man for the mistaken belief  that he had sexual relations with his sister), I constantly encounter scraggly-bearded white men in filthy clothes looking for scapegoats for their pathetic lives who just want a reason to beat-up someone who looks like me, or  bigoted white women who make it a “point” that I know they’ve locked their car doors (actually, according to a police memo I happened upon, the Russian mob controls the car theft and drug racket in the area). I wish these bigots could walk a mile in my shoes.

Let’s be open to historical truth for once. This land “belonged” for tens of thousands of years to Native Americans, and most Hispanics have indigenous people “blood” in them—which is more than what white Americans can say. Nobody asked or wanted Europeans to come here, but they did. The simply took what they wanted, with or without “treaties.” They all had “dreams,” hoping to escape religious persecution like the Puritans, or hoping that a “new world” would bring new opportunities that they did not find in their home countries. Until 1924, all they needed to be a “legal” immigrant was the price of boat fare, and the majority of white Americans today benefitted from that rather lax immigration policy. But like white women who have benefited from affirmative action far more than under-represented minorities, they hate the idea now because in their arrogance and conceit they can only see the world through the prism of white privilege. 

Thus in regard to the recipients of DACA, Trump can’t help but disparage them as “undeserving.”  In The New Yorker, columnist Amy Davidson Sorkin noted during the SOTUS “At another point, Trump said, in a petulant tone, ‘Americans are dreamers, too,’ as if anyone had been given reason to doubt that. As my colleague Jonathan Blitzer noted this was a complaint about the Dreamers (who, the ‘too’ suggested, were not Americans) and one of a peculiar kind. It wasn’t just the substance of the Dreamers’ aspirations—their hope for documentation, for a chance to work in the country they grew up in—that Trump seemed to resent but that they aspired at all. Dreaming was something Americans did; why did they think that they deserved to? More than that, he made it sound as though dreams could be intruded upon—as if it cheapened dreams if the wrong sort of people shared them. But dreams are not hotel suites. It is, perhaps, odd that a career peddler of mass fantasies like Trump could be so put off by what he presents as presumption, to the point where he regards it as a theft. This is, perhaps, where pride comes in. Trump, it seems, mistakes exclusivity and arrogance for strength. But they are not the same thing, not remotely.”

Once more, we must channel Aldous Huxley and note the refusal of Trump and his anti-nonwhite immigrant following to treat these people as individuals with their own aspirations for something better than what they had before. “They” are all lumped together in one group with disparaging traits applied to them; there is no effort to understand any of these people’s personal point of view, or what it is like to be constantly beaten on with ignorant falsehoods and never being able to speak for themselves, especially on 24-hour cable news programming like CNN, where the only people that “matter” are either white or black. 

Comic Andy Borowitz tried to put a humorous spin on the proceedings, satirizing Trump’s failed effort to be appear compassionate:

“In all my years of practicing medicine, I have never met a patient as healthy and vigorous as President Trump,” Dr. Ronny Jackson said. “But the sustained effort of simulating compassion proved too much for someone who has never exercised that part of his brain before.”

Shortly after Trump spent a gruelling ninety minutes pretending to care about immigrants, the unemployed, and other people whom he normally dismisses as losers, aides noticed that he was turning from a bright orange to a slightly paler orange before crumpling to the ground in a giant heap.

“If you have never spent a moment thinking about a human being besides yourself, imagine trying to pretend you are doing that for a solid ninety minutes,” Jackson said. “It’s physically punishing.”

Immediately following his collapse, Trump was rushed to the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, where a brain scan showed that his brush with human feelings did no permanent damage.

But as others have pointed out, Trump reserves his “compassion” only for white nationalists, xenophobes and nativists who fear the “browning” of America, and not just by Hispanics, as the growth of south and east Asian immigrants have exploded both in legal and illegal terms (one in every six persons from India are technically in the country illegally). Although the media did not mention it, most of the targets of the ICE raids on 7-Elevens a few weeks ago were Indians, and here in Washington I noted that a few local convenience stores seemed to subsequently be shy a few employees, probably out of fear that their operations might be targeted too. 

We ought to strive for something better, morally and ethically. After all there was a time when America promoted itself as a land where the “tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free” were welcome. Did this only mean for Europeans? I blame the U.S. for most of the drug violence in Mexico today that so many in that country are trying to escape on two counts: it's insatiable appetite for illegal drugs, and its "war" on the Colombian drug lords, which didn't stop the trade, only moving it and its violence further north. There has to be a "price" to pay for American stupidity. And the immigrants from Central America—an area that as I noted before that the U.S. had the devil’s hand in creating inequality, impoverishment and violence--no doubt see themselves in the same light as those European immigrants back then (today, the arrogant among them are just trying to take high-paying jobs). But "Mexicans" are not really “human” are they? Not like white people, right? They have nothing to “contribute,” except doing the “dirty work”—but we have unemployed black persons who should be consigned to that type of thing. So much for their "dreams," huh? At least they are “Americans”—although not as “real” as those who are white.

There was an American from a humble background who lived his dream as a great singer, and who never forgot where he came from. His name was Elvis Presley. When he performed “If I Can Dream” on his 1968 television comeback special, you could tell he was speaking from the heart:

There must be lights burning brighter somewhere,
Got to be birds flying higher in a sky more blue
If I can dream of a better land
Where all my brothers walk hand in hand
Tell me why, oh why, oh why can't my dream come true
oh why

There must be peace and understanding sometime
Strong winds of promise that will blow away the doubt and fear
If I can dream of a warmer sun
Where hope keeps shining on everyone
Tell me why, oh why, oh why won't that sun appear

We're lost in a cloud
With too much rain
We're trapped in a world
That's troubled with pain
But as long as a man
Has the strength to dream
He can redeem his soul and fly

Deep in my heart there's a trembling question
Still I am sure that the answer gonna come somehow
Out there in the dark, there's a beckoning candle

And while I can think, while I can talk
While I can stand, while I can walk
While I can dream, please let my dream
Come true, right now
Let it come true right now
Oh yeah

This is not the kind of “dream” that Trump, his neo-Nazi pal David Duke, the worm in the White House apple Steven Miller or the xenophobe Ann Coulter are talking about. This is the kind of dream that America is supposed to be about, or pretends to be about. The reality, it seems to me, is that it is hard to distinguish between people pretending to live what the American Dream is really about, and those who would deny it to others simply because of the color of their skin.

More bragadoccio from Trump tonight, and then what? More of the same nothingness, more likely

Donald Trump's “State of the Union” address has been the subject of mass speculation about what he will say, maybe bragging about  a "New America," or something. But does it really matter what he says? First of all, we all should know by now that Trump is all over the map ideologically—although the range is mostly from “compassionate conservatism” to fascist far-right. It is interesting to note a comparison between Trump and Richard Nixon; Nixon was a racist, but he kept his commentary on the matter “private,” in as far as they could be given that he recorded everything he said in the White House (who knows why, given all the trouble he was in). But on the other hand, even if he was not empathetic with their problems and goals, Nixon nevertheless actively courted the support of minorities and liberals, with what one could regard as “progressive” policies on civil rights and the environment. Let’s not forget that it was the Nixon administration Justice Department that sued Trump’s company for discrimination and civil rights violations; according to a recent story in The Guardian,

It also charged that the company had required prohibitively stringent rental terms and conditions to black applicants and had lied about unit availability to keep black residents out. A then 26-year-old Donald Trump was the president of the company at the time.

Three Trump doormen also told the DoJ they had been instructed to deflect African Americans who came to Trump buildings to apply for apartments. The suit was later settled “without an admission of guilt”, as Trump is keen on reminding.

Trump also called for the death sentence of the Central Park Five, who were later exonerated after being wrongly convicted of raping a jogger in the park. In another “accommodation”  to Trump’s racism, according to the Guardian “Another former Trump employee told The New Yorker that black staff were hidden from Trump when he visited (the Trump Plaza) casino with his wife. ‘When Donald and Ivana came to the casino, the bosses would order all the black people off the floor,’ said Kip Brown.”

And we also know that Trump still has a hard time separating “Dreamers” from the “murderers and rapists” that he imagines most “Mexicans” are. It seems that time, self-reflection and conscience have not had any impact on Trump, as if any of that even was a part of his make-up;  we shouldn’t keeping our fingers crossed that it will happen any time soon, if ever. Trump’s ego and thin-skin must constantly be massaged, even when he now offers outrageous and impossible terms for a DACA “deal.” This is no “deal”—this is the kind of hostage taking that even Dr. Evil would know is absurd. 

Another “liberal” issue is environmental policy, and Trump has allowed his completely unqualified Interior Secretary (as are most of his appointments for their cabinet posts), Ryan Zinke, run over environmental laws like a road grader. But does that stop Trump from making more bizarre and head-scratching pronouncements? Are you kidding? His belief in the concept of global warming was muddled before he was elected, then “coalesced” around the idea that it was a “myth,” or at least wasn’t caused by “human” factors. Zinke ordered the EPA to remove all mention of “global warming” on its websites, and the opinions of scientists working for the department that were contrary to that of the administrations were to removed. 

Yet there was Trump just the other day telling the world that he “might” revisit the Paris climate accord after having abandoned it as being against U.S. “interests.” What this means could be anything; Soon afterwards, Trump was telling an interviewer that global sheet ice was at “record” levels, seemingly denying once more that global warming was occurring. Climatologists say that Arctic ice sheets continue to shrink, while any increase in the Antarctic is due less to “growth,” but the addition of usually more northerly ice sheets, in reaction to rising sea temperatures. Trump’s comments are “baffling” scientists, but his defenders are careful to note that he didn’t “exactly” say if the “records” being set are from increases or decreases; so much for the “on-the-job training” of this president.

Of course, tonight Trump will take “credit” for things he doesn’t deserve to take credit for, and deflect blame for the mass failures of his regime to others. He won’t admit that the reason why there is no DACA deal is because he has courted the fringe fascist-right to such an extent that he has alienated most of the population, and being a glutton for undeserved praise, he finds that his only true “friends” are those who respond favorably to his most racist and anti-immigrant policy pronouncements; "naturally" he must "accommodate" them first. And House Speaker Paul Ryan always pretends to be “uncomfortable” with racist rhetoric coming from the fringes, but an immigration deal is unlikely to be forthcoming from the Republican-controlled House because Ryan is either in secret agreement with these lunatics, or he “imagines” that they are a much more powerful force than they actually are, and he is just too lily-livered to stand-up to them. But he and Trump don't deserve all the blame; Mitch McConnell on the Senate side has also been called a "weak-chinned sellout" for Trump's latest outrages.

So really, it doesn’t matter what Trump says; the only thing that can be said for certain is that even if he does say something “conciliatory,” we have heard this song and dance before, and nothing positive has ever come from it.   

Trump: “the least racist man you know”—or the most racist man in America?

The Trump administration’s fixation on immigration and using the most abhorrent language and images to describe nonwhite immigrants is without doubt what makes Donald Trump the most racist president in U.S. history. It’s just a fact. Deal with the blow to your moral “credibility” that you allowed this happen. Now, when asked if he is racist, Trump has claimed that he is the “least racist” man anyone knows. However, everyone knows—even his “base”—that this is a crock because that is why there are still those who support him against all reason. His rock-solid base wants a racist in office who reflects their own views, which have been “marginalized” since the civil rights era. 

Of course, you may point out that Trump really isn’t the “most racist” person in the country. There are plenty of others in his own administration, like Jeff Sessions, John Kelly and Steven Miller, who are “technically” more racist than he is, and have been the “worker bees” toiling overtime to feed him their gruel of bigotry and hate, causing him to continuously expectorate vile nonsense from the sluices of both of his bodily portals, which frankly there is no apparent differentiation from what is expelled.

But for all practical purposes Trump is the most racist man in America because he has become—either by allowing himself to be used by racists, or willingly being their mouthpiece, or more likely simply from being a congenital  belief in his own “superior genes”—the symbol of racism in this country (even his choice of wives—at least two of them—demonstrate this, from a desire to procreate with “pure-bread” European stock, albeit fashion models desired  more for their “superior” looks than their brains). As president of the United States, he is supposed to set the moral tone; instead of being representative of anything even sniffing at the “moral center,” he has—as Aldous Huxley said of Hitler—denied nonwhite people in this country their own unique individuality as human beings, ridding from them any positive human qualities, rather lathering upon them every hateful pejorative he can think of as a group. 

It is no longer useful to simply blame Trump’s stunning display of contradiction in at one time hosting a televised meeting with a bi-partisan Senate group in which he wanted a DACA law that showed “love” to just a few hours later denouncing any plan that didn’t include the most irrational anti-immigrant policies (that do not take into account the labor requirements of this country) to simple mental illness. That he fully embraces the most extreme view of nativists and xenophobes concerning so-called “low skill” labor in that they have no “merit,” blindly refusing to take into consideration that we live in a country whose “native” population is growing older, and that immigrants from Russia (or Norway or India for that matter) are too arrogant to work the jobs that this country needs to survive on the most basic level, demonstrates that racism completely clouds any sense of reality. Like Winston Churchill, he see the world through the prism of skin color, and there is nothing more or less to that.

DACA should be an "easy" issue to settle; polls show that as many as 9 in 10 Americans support it. But we see now that it isn't so easy for people like Sessions to accept even that, seeing how we saw this cruel, inhuman man literally shaking with race hate during his press conference attacking "sanctuary" mayors who refused to attend a mayoral meeting with Trump today. Who is the "outlier" on this issue? The American people, or at least those with any claim to moral credibility, need to tell Trump and Sessions that they are the ones. When Charles Schumer called Trump’s bluff and accepted his “wall” requirements during the short-lived government shutdown, the hypocritical Trump quickly followed-up that this was still not being “enough” and added on even more outrageous demands, proving that he doesn’t even want an immigration reform bill at all (let alone DACA), at least not one that makes sense for future labor needs of this country.

Trump now claims to be "open" to a DACA deal with an even higher dollar sign for a wall. Are we to be fooled again? Believe it when you see it. There is every reason to believe that what Trump and his racist stooges would prefer to do is simply round-up every "Mexican" in sight and dump them across the border, just as this country did during the Great Depression when as many as 600,000 U.S. citizens of Hispanic heritage were simply rounded-up like cattle and deported without any due process rights--which is something Trump appears to desire to do again with his demands for greater power for the ICE. Sessions in particular wants to create a country that is as pallid as he is, but it is Trump who is the one where the "buck" stops. Because he is one to set the moral and ethical tone for the country, and because the tone he is openly supporting is one that demonstrates a complete lack of moral authority, this makes him America’s Number One Racist.

When will Trump and House Republicans come to THEIR “senses”?

Democratic leaders in Congress have been rightly criticized for “caving in” to Donald Trump and Congressional Republicans during the three-day government shutdown without any real concessions on DACA. Look, since anti-nonwhite immigrant fanatics Jeff Sessions and Steven Miller “reminded” Trump on the reasons he was actually elected, and DACA was rescinded on September 5 of last year, Trump has been positively schizophrenic on the subject. One day he seems “empathetic, “ but far more often he is back to equating “Dreamers” with murderers, rapists and perpetrators of drug violence (note that in the last several days there has been at least two more mass shootings—by white Americans). Instead of acknowledging his error in making deliberately racist and ignorant attacks on nonwhite immigrants (from “shithole” countries), he and his henchmen and henchwomen deny even making the reference, and then Trump tweets about how DACA recipients are so dangerous that they threaten our “great military.” 

Meanwhile, Trump is once more engaging in what he calls “bi-partisan” talks. No, he doesn’t want to talk to Dick Durbin again, who called him out on his and his cronies’ racism, or Lindsey Graham, who called Trump’s insistence on “merit-based” immigration flawed and bigoted because it assumes that immigrants who work on farms and in construction have no “merit.” No, his idea of finding a “bi-partisan” solution to DACA is to first have a meeting with hardline anti-immigrant Republicans, and then a second meeting with two Democrats from Deep South states he apparently believes will be more “amenable” to a hardline “solution”—as if just simple Congressional approval of DACA is that “hard” to do. After all, there are approximately 1.5 million South and East Asian “guest workers” and “visitors” currently with expired visas in the country (thus illegally), and neither Trump or any Republican seem to think that is a particular “problem” that needs addressed.

But Trump and his handpicked “team” of Senators are not the only roadblock to immigration reform. There is definitely a need for reform, especially one that recognizes that this country also needs so-called “low-skill” workers in industries (like agriculture, forestry and construction) that have been difficult to fill, and immigrants tend to be more willing to move to where the jobs are rather than just sit and wait for jobs to come to them, like most Americans, it seems. Just as bad as Trump and his unstable personality is House Republicans, who blocked immigration bills in 2006 and 2013 that the White House was willing to sign. Is there such a thing as a “moderate” Republican in the House? Supposedly there are a handful and most of them have announced there are resigning their seats because they feel they have no place at the table, having to compete with far-right fanatics from the “Freedom Caucus” for “attention” from the party leadership—and usually losing.

No thanks to jelly-spined Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, the House majority is all fire and no substance when it comes to anything useful or human, let alone immigration reform. Yes, on occasion Ryan will mumble something about “unhelpful” commentary from the radicals in his party, but more usually he is so desperate not to appear weak and ineffectual he will gladly wilt before the foul breath of the far-right. Not that Ryan is without “principle”; after all, he has long advocated deep cuts in or eliminating Medicare and Medicaid, and currently is pushing for a 25 percent cut in both. During his campaign Trump told working class voters that he would touch neither, but then again, he will do what “needs to be done” to pay for his “great military” and his “beautiful wall.” Needless-to-say, House Republicans have no substantive immigration “plan” on the table, and have made no promises that they will even consider a Trump-approved plan, that will likely have a difficult time even passing the Senate.

The upshot of all of this is that Democrats and the few moderate Republicans in the Senate (that the emotionally infantile Trump refuses to talk to now) should have no more expectation that an immigration deal will be done without compulsion than since December, when they last “punted” the issue without a resolution, or since September when they knew the day of reckoning was coming. Or for that matter since at least 2004, when Republicans renewed using immigration as tool of scapegoating and hate to motivate their “base”—and which as Trump has proven, is still “useful” to them. No one should expect an immigration deal that has any humanity or decency or common sense to the real economic needs of this country by February 8, when the current short-term spending bill ends. 

What will the Democrats do then? One thing that is certain that they must continue to make clear that it is Trump and the far-right of the political spectrum who are pushing their version of “reform” that is inherently indecent and deliberately focused not on passage but defeat. But then again that certainly won’t bother those from Trump’s base, like Stefanie MacWilliams, who posted this on the website Halsey News, which with no apparent irony claims that “the more biased the better” is not incompatible with the truth: “I can say the American people have zero legal responsibility for a single one of these (DACA) people. They would be fully within their rights to ship every last one home. Every one of them is a criminal, whether they actively chose to be or not. Tough luck.” Most Americans may claim to be less immoral, but I’ll believe it when I see it.