*45th POTUS Donald Trump – Page 25

July 28, 2020July 28, 2020

Editorial: Trump Fights Against All That John Lewis Fought For

As a horse-drawn caisson carried the body of beloved Congressman and civil rights leader John Lewis (D-GA) over the Edmund Pettus Bridge for one last crossing before being laid to rest, the scene brought to mind the stark contrast between John Lewis and our president, Donald Trump. It also underlined the fact that Trump is working to undo all that John Lewis stood for and worked for, for most of his life and all of his career.

John Lewis, the last surviving member of the “Big Six,” who led and organized the 1963 March on Washington, was a key leader in the civil rights movement that worked to end racial segregation in the U.S. Lewis led the 1965 Selma to Montgomery marches across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, during which he and other civil rights demonstrators suffered brutal beatings by Alabama state troopers. Lewis suffered a fractured skull.

That event, referred to as “Bloody Sunday,” was a turning point in the civil rights movement.

“We were beaten. We were tear-gassed. I thought I was going to die on this bridge. But somehow and some way, God almighty helped me here,” Lewis said of that day as he stood again on the bridge, years later. “We must go out and vote like we never, ever voted before.”

On Sunday, when the caisson carrying Lewis’ body completed its journey across the bridge, Alabama state troopers saluted Lewis.

“It is poetic justice that this time Alabama state troopers will see John to his safety,” Rep. Terri A. Sewell (D-Ala.) said.

Across the country, in Portland, Oregon, however, unidentifiable federal law enforcement agents, sent by Trump, and uninvited by local leaders, were disbursing “law and order” in the form of teargas, violence, and the rounding up of protesters into unmarked cars, making no distinction between peaceful Black Lives Matter demonstrators and violent anarchists. Trump has plans to do the same in “Democrat-led” cities across the country, even against the will of local officials, claiming that the cities’ Democratic leaders aren’t doing their jobs.

“We were beaten. We were tear-gassed. “

Earlier this summer, on June 1, 2020, it must have been heartbreaking for John Lewis to witness Trump’s chest-beating deployment of military troops using teargas, rubber bullets, and violent force to shut down anti-racism demonstrators as they protested peacefully in front of the White House. The demonstrators were there to protest the systemic racism and police brutality that led to the recent death of African American George Floyd and, over the years, many other people of color…a phenomenon still happening in 2020—55 years after Lewis and other civil rights leaders were beaten for peacefully protesting.

It was the start of the next racist chapter of Trump’s aggressive dog-whistle posturing disguised as “law and order.” Drawing on the racist resentment and xenophobia of his base that got him elected in 2016, Trump’s message conflates the peaceful anti-racist protests with violence, vandalism, and anarchy, and promises to use Homeland Security special forces to squelch them.

“We must go out and vote like we never, ever voted before.”

In the wake of Bloody Sunday, President Lyndon B. Johnson enacted the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which prohibits racial discrimination in voting. Two days after it was first introduced in Congress, civil rights leaders led a march of 25,000 people from Selma to Montgomery, this time under the protection of federal troops.

In 2020, in addition to using federal troops to forcibly squelch anti-racist demonstrations, Donald Trump is doing what he can to prevent voters from casting their ballots in the 2020 election. His most blatant tactic of late is to try to stop voting by mail. In his continued efforts to turn Americans against mail-in voting, he has falsely claimed numerous times that mail-in voting leads to widespread voter fraud.

Preventing mail-in voting will most impact voters of color, who have always had to contend with voter disenfranchisement. Trump knows that making it easer and safer for them, and others, to vote during the pandemic crisis will hurt him in the election, because the ability to vote by mail will increase voter turnout. He also knows that large numbers of black voters, including low-income black voters who otherwise would not be able to easily get to polling places to vote, or who may not have access to photo IDs where they are required, are Democrats.

“…Somehow and some way, God almighty helped me here”

When Lewis talked about his Christian faith, we could believe him. Lewis graduated from the American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville, Tennessee and was an ordained Baptist minister. His faith was what motivated him to work for racial equality, and he looked to his faith for sustenance. Faith was powerful and real for John Lewis.

“In my estimation, the civil rights movement was a religious phenomenon,” Lewis said in 2004. “When we’d go out to sit in or go out to march, I felt, and I really believe, there was a force in front of us and a force behind us, ’cause sometimes you didn’t know what to do. You didn’t know what to say, you didn’t know how you were going to make it through the day or through the night. But somehow and some way, you believed – you had faith – that it all was going to be all right.”

Contrast that with Donald Trump’s equation of “faith” to partisan politics. Trump has perceived that the gun-wielding white evangelical Christians who make up much of his base also have racist and xenophobic tendencies, even if they don’t own up to them. They may say they don’t support violence against African Americans, for example, but when Trump presents African Americans as “violent thugs who might hurt their wives and children,” they can suddenly justify police brutality (“Floyd had a criminal record”) and they can get behind sending Homeland Security Agents to cities (especially the ones that are Democrat-led) where there are racial tensions because they are “dangerous and violent.”

For his base, all Trump needs to do to be seen as a man of faith is stand in front of a vandalized church, as he did following his June 1 crackdown on peaceful protesters, and wield a Bible. He doesn’t have to know what it says inside, and he doesn’t even have to hold it right-side-up, for his base to proclaim him a “Warrior for God.”

Donald Trump constantly pushes his base’s buttons labeled “Black and Brown People are Bad and Dangerous,” and “The Bible,” in hopes that they will not ask him for substance. When he throws in the word “liberty,” it’s understood that he’s only referring to the personal liberties of his base.

John Lewis didn’t see Donald Trump as a legitimate president. He condemned Donald Trump’s racism as “shameful.”

“I know racism when I see it,” said Lewis in a speech condemning Trump’s racist tweets about four Congresswomen of color. “I know racism when I feel it. And at the highest level of government, there’s no room for racism. It sows the seeds of violence and destroys the hopes and dreams of people. The world is watching. They are shocked and dismayed because it seems we have lost our way as a nation, as a proud and great people.”

Trump responded by denigrating Lewis’ majority Black Georgia district as “crime infested” and “falling apart.”

In 2017, Lewis declined to speak at the opening of Mississippi civil rights and history museums because Donald Trump would be in attendance. Lewis said that Trump’s “hurtful policies are an insult to the people portrayed in this civil rights museum.”

John Lewis’ was an honorable life well-lived in service to others and to his country. He fought on behalf of the disenfranchised, the unfortunate, and the underrepresented in our society.

Donald Trumps’ is a life devoid of honor, lived in service to himself, and to his re-election. He fights to vilify those in whom John Lewis and others in the civil rights movement invested their lives and careers.

“As a nation and as a people we need to go forward and not backward.” (John Lewis)

This year, 2020, to ensure that we silence the awful din of divisiveness and hate, we must all vote like we never, ever voted before.

John Lewis: Body of civil rights leader carried across Selma bridge on his final journey | The Independent [2020-07-26]

Bloody Sunday | Rep. John Lewis remembers the fateful day in Selma
AJC Atlanta Journal-Constitution [2020-07-18]

July 21, 2020July 21, 2020

Editorial: The U.S. Response to the Coronavirus Shows a Nation that Was Already Unwell

America has long taken for granted, if somewhat arrogantly, that it was special; exceptional; that other countries would always look to America as a world leader. Now the world is not looking to us, it’s standing at a safe distance and looking at us, dropping its collective jaw as it witnesses our colossal failure in our response to the coronavirus pandemic.

As a country, we’ve taken for granted, too, that things would always turn out well for us in the end; that we could somehow fix things if they went too far wrong. The election of our current president, however, has taken us into new and unfamiliar territory.

A certain number of Americans were, and are, avid Trump supporters who have shown that they will support him and make excuses for him, no matter what. Another group of Americans, however, didn’t necessarily want Trump as president, but were more certain they couldn’t stomach Hillary Clinton. “Let’s give Trump a try,” they said. They were ready for “something different.” Others who found both candidates unpalatable either wrote in a candidate, or didn’t bother to vote at all. If Trump didn’t work out very well, many told themselves, we’d bounce back as a country and elect someone else in four years.

Our casual belief that America would always right itself has made us blind to the idea that no country’s ability to bounce back lasts forever if taken for granted. We may have been a world leader for decades, and our allies may have been staunch, but under Donald Trump, the weight-bearing walls of our place in the world have been whittled down; the floor is beginning to sag, and now it has a real possibility of falling in.

We were horrified when Donald Trump began to systematically roll back Obama-era protections and alliances for the environment and for public health. When he talked of pulling out of global agreements, we were disgusted. We stared at the news in disbelief when we saw him cozy up to the world’s despots and mock the leaders of our nation’s allies. It angered and frustrated us when he called for violent military responses to peaceful demonstrations. We gasped when he pardoned his corrupt cronies. And when he slithered out of removal from office during the impeachment proceedings, he demonstrated what he and his enablers believed to be true: that he was above the law. We found it chilling.

Over and over, Donald Trump has demonstrated his incompetence, his corruptness, his penchant for telling lies (the Washington Post has documented 20,000 of them to date since he took office), his authoritarian aspirations, and his belief that the law doesn’t apply to him. He has caused us to question his mental and physical fitness for office, even after we’d acknowledged the futility of questioning his moral fitness. The world has watched it all.

As it turns out, in order to navigate and survive a global crisis like the coronavirus pandemic, a country must have a leader who eschews those qualities that are all abundant in Donald Trump. The measure of a great nation is not that it is the loudest in the room, the biggest bully, the one that cozies up to despots, the one that pulls out of agreements, or the one that tries to keep others out. And the measure is certainly not that it places its people in peril by downplaying a pandemic or blaming other nations. Nevertheless, we have Donald Trump.

Each successive crisis, drama, and scandal since Trump took office has been and ever-increasing cause for concern. The coronavirus pandemic, however, is the culmination of all that has or that could possibly go wrong in a country. It underscores racial and economic inequity, an inadequate and poorly managed healthcare system, corruption of leaders, mistrust of authority, denial of science, mismanagement of funding, and incompetence of leadership.

Our case count rises daily by record numbers. As of July 20, we have almost 4 million cases and 140,000 deaths. Yet our administration and its loyalists continue to respond as if it were nothing more than a political game.

Kenyan human rights and anti-corruption attorney Maina Kiai, who previously worked for the United Nations, says, “A lot of people in Kenya, in Africa, have been quite shocked at how the United States has been dealing with this pandemic…the fact that it has elevated politics before life, before science, and that this is a response that you would expect from…almost a third world country. The lack of leadership at the national level, and the fact that things are going from bad to worse rather than improving, and so the luster, the sparkle, that the United States has been for so many people has faded in a very dramatic way.”

In countries where the numbers of cases and deaths have fallen in recent weeks, it is a result of their populations following the rules of lockdowns, business shutdowns, mask-wearing, social distancing, and other safety measures. These countries’ populations have largely understood the importance of helping protect the well-being of their fellow humans, and how that reaches all aspects of a society, including the economy.

Trump, in keeping with his penchant for sowing divisiveness, has instead planted suspicion and paranoia in the heads of his base, so that they see any caution toward COVID-19 as a Democrat plot against Trump, and any safety guidelines (such as mask-wearing) as “ineffective” at best, and “tyranny” at worst. Response to the virus has become a demonstration of political loyalty or disloyalty. Trump’s own refusal to wear a mask has spoken more loudly to his base than any recommendations from health experts.

At the same time that he has caused a great divide among Americans over the coronavirus, Trump has shown indifference to the virus’ seriousness. He has said numerous times that it would “just disappear” on its own; that it was no worse than the flu; that the country was doing “really well” at managing its spread. He wants churches and schools and rallies to go on as if America’s cases weren’t growing exponentially, and as if we hadn’t lost more than 140,000 Americans to the virus.

According to public health experts, COVID-19 is nowhere near done with us yet. Trump, however, talks of windmills and dishwashers, plays golf, and when asked, reasserts how “well” our country is doing in its battle against the virus.

Other countries see plainly how well we’re not doing. They have begun to question whether we’ve simply become resigned to the rising number of cases and the tragic loss of human life.

A public news website in Germany had this recent headline: “Has the U.S. given up its fight against coronavirus?”

A headline in Switzerland’s Neue Zürcher Zeitung newspaper reads, “U.S. increasingly accepts rising covid-19 numbers.”

If Donald Trump’s divisiveness, incompetence, and indifference weren’t dangerous enough, the fact that his administration has begun to take on an authoritarian tone regarding its response to the virus should be chilling.

The Trump administration has mandated that hospitals send all COVID-19 related data directly to the Trump administration, bypassing the usual transmission to the CDC. Trump has also threatened to cut off federal funding to schools that don’t re-open to hold classes on-site this fall, despite CDC guidelines for safely reopening. The White House coronavirus task force hasn’t briefed the public since April, and Donald Trump and the White House have taken to overriding any information or recommendations from health and science experts if they don’t align with Trump’s narrative around the virus.

“Like many other aspects of our country, the CDC’s ability to function well is being severely handicapped by the interference coming from the White House,” said Harvard epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch. “All of us in public health very much hope that this is not a permanent condition of the CDC.”

Outside the U.S., some fear our situation here will be difficult to reverse. Following the CDC’s botching of the early testing effort, Siouxsie Wiles, an infectious diseases specialist at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, said “I’ve always thought of the CDC as a reliable and trusted source of information. Not anymore.”

Everything is not going to turn out all right for us in the world if Donald Trump and his loyalists continue to bulldoze any effective response to COVID-19. The coronavirus is not going to disappear “like a miracle,” as Donald Trump hopes it will. We may soon have an effective vaccine, but in the meantime, the physical, spiritual, and moral damage done by Trump’s response (or lack thereof) to the coronavirus pandemic has put the U.S. on a trajectory that could leave us unwell — and no longer exceptional— as a nation for a very long time.

What the U.S. coronavirus response says about American exceptionalism |
PBS NewHour [2020-07-08]

Zuckerberg blames Trump for coronavirus hitting US ‘significantly worse’ than other countries | The Sun [2020-07-17]