Official White House Photo by Andrea Hanks
Remember those thick paperbacks claiming to explain highly complex subjects in simple sentences? They bore titles like Nuclear Physics for Dummies. I thought of them after enduring a July 4 weekend of simple-minded lectures on American history from a president who clearly knows absolutely nothing about the history of American democracy.
Donald Trump used his child’s version of U.S. history to demonize growing numbers of Americans now attempting to create a more perfect union to live up to the beautiful ideals of equality written into our Constitution. Our founding fathers couldn’t yet envision those principles applying to all Americans including women, people of color and ordinary working folks regardless of income, but they assured them for wealthy, white, male property owners like themselves.
Anyone in the White House with a minimal education really should tell Trump Christopher Columbus didn’t discover America in 1492 after sailing the ocean blue. Columbus landed in what is now the Bahamas. He never set foot in North America, but even if he had he wouldn’t have discovered it. There were already people living here.
Undermining the Presidency
It was embarrassing to hear the president of the United States recite Wikipedia entries at Mount Rushmore about four of our greatest presidents without any self-awareness of how brazenly he undermines their most important achievements every day of his presidency.
The most openly racist president in modern history hypocritically paid tribute to Abraham Lincoln as commander in chief of the victorious U.S. Army for winning the Civil War to extinguish “the evils of slavery.” Trump never mentioned the opposing army that killed more than 360,000 U.S. soldiers in that war, but we all know it was the Confederacy led by those treasonous generals whose “beautiful” statues all over America Trump vows to protect as part of “our great American heritage.”
|
|
Hundreds of those statues were erected in the 1920s and ‘30s more than 50 years after the Civil War by racist groups including the Ku Klux Klan during an era when white supremacists were reasserting their political power to deny citizenship rights and equal protection under the law to African Americans in violation of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution in 1868.
Trashing their Legacy
Trump’s presidency just as obscenely trashes the legacies of the other presidents on Mount Rushmore. It’s impossible to imagine George Washington, the first general of the Continental Army, ignoring concerns about a foreign adversary paying bounties for the murder of U.S. soldiers. Thomas Jefferson, for all his human flaws as a predatory slaveholder, was the author of what became the inclusive concept that all Americans are endowed with equal and inalienable rights. Theodore Roosevelt was a trustbuster preventing wealthy monopolies from exploiting the working class and one of our earliest environmentalists before the term even existed.
At one time or another, Trump absurdly has proclaimed himself to be greater than any of those chumps. This Fourth of July he did something even more demeaning to their memories. He tried to pass himself off as one of them, protecting democracy at a critical moment for the nation’s survival from imaginary violent, angry mobs of radical leftists ravaging America,
“Their goal is not a better America,” Trump insisted. “Their goal is to end America. . . We will never let them rip America’s heroes from our monuments or from our hearts!” Trump’s now promising to protect his supporters from their fellow Americans who are hellbent on committing the same violent mayhem as all those rampaging hordes of foreign immigrants he warned them about.
Those Trump identifies as “bad, evil people” are actually more than two-thirds of all Americans who responded to polls after watching the slow-motion police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in support of the overwhelmingly peaceful, multi-racial Black Lives Matter protests over racial inequality in policing. Most Americans care more about staying alive and earning a living during Trump’s public health crisis and shattered economy than whether any inanimate statues get removed.
Many of us consider the growing number of white Americans who recognize police routinely use brutal, inhumane tactics that regularly kill unarmed black Americans suspected of minor crimes as an extremely positive step toward improving policing for all Americans. White supremacists prefer the traditional methods.
The moments in American history that make even mediocre presidents look good are when Americans come together in a national crisis. In 2002, shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attack on our country, 92% of Americans in a Gallup poll said they were “extremely” or “very proud” of our country. Last month amid Trump’s multiple national crises of historic proportions, only 63% said that. Among nonwhites, only 24%,
Trump has no intention of bringing the country together. His election success depends upon inflaming racism and division. Trump’s completely out of place in American history. He longs for those bygone days when only rich, white males had any rights in our democracy.
To read more news stories, click here.
To read more Taking Liberties columns by Joel McNally, click here.
