LETTER President turns a blind eye to endemic hatred
Since he burst into the national consciousness with his never-ending use of Twitter, I have learned more than I would want to know about Donald Trump from what he has used 280 characters and misspelled words to say. I have also learned a great deal from what he has not said.
When Trump pal Roseanne Barr compared Barack Obama senior advisor Valerie Jarrett to an ape, the Twitterer in chief had no words of criticism. Instead, he used the incident as an opportunity to whine once again about how unfairly he believes he is treated by ABC and other “fake news” media organizations.
Not long before he condemned and called for the resignation of U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar for anti-Semitic remarks, a known bigot and anti-immigrant hater from his own party, U.S. Rep. Steve King, was stripped of committee assignments for outrageous remarks he had made, asserting that there is nothing wrong with proudly proclaiming that one is a white nationalist. When questioned about King, the president, who is closely following the divorce of Amazon.com owner Jeff Bezos and is tweeting about it, claimed that he “has not been following” the King affair and is not in a position to comment. The president campaigned for King: Was he not aware of the type of person King is, the bigotry which has long defined him?
In the past week, a white, native-born American Coast Guard lieutenant was arrested, suspected of being an American terrorist. The man is alleged to have amassed a large cache of weapons and to have plotted mass murder which would target Democratic elected officials and liberal television personalities. If the alleged perpetrator had brown skin, was named Mohammed, and claimed to be a Muslim, we know that there would be a non-stop Twitter storm about how we must slam the door on immigration, and we could expect Trump to be calling for the perpetrator to be sentenced to death upon conviction. What is the president’s response to the arrest of this dangerous man? Nothing: not a word.
The president’s “national emergency” is a Trumped-up “crisis” on the U.S. border with Mexico. He sees no national emergency in the rise of baseless hatred, which is endemic to his administration and which consumes our country, a hatred which has triggered many incidents of violence engaged in by homegrown American men, not the immigrants whom the president consistently seeks to demonize.
Oren Spiegler
South Strabane Township