By Brigitte L. Nacos
With the news media already in weekend mode, the US Supreme Court announced on Friday its ruling that President Trump can use $2.5 billion to build his controversial Wall at the Southern border –although the Congress had earmarked this money for the Defense Department. Ignoring that the US Constitutions reserves the power of the purse to the legislative branch, the Court’s decision allows Trump to spend billions to fulfill his number one campaign promise in 2016. Not Mexico as he promised then but American taxpayers at the expense of the military will pay for the wall.
Reports about the ruling were momentarily “breaking news” on cable TV and mostly forgotten, when Trump threw another of his tweet bombs insulting Congressman Elijah Cummings and his Black constituents in Baltimore. Just as the President had early characterized countries with Black populations s-holes, his latest tweet insult called Cummings “a brutal bully” and his congressional district “a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess” and “the worst run and most dangerous anywhere in the United States.” Cummings is one of the most soft-spoken members of the House. Given that Trump has a long history of attacking, insulting, and stereotyping African-Americans, Latinos, and other minorities of color, he added to the list of outrageously racist statements.
The attack on the African-American Congressman and African-Americans residing in his district, about half of his constituents, came shortly after similar content in his beloved Fox & Friends program on FOX News. This is typically how it works—the President sees and hears what he likes on FOX, tweets it as his own and thereby triggers massive mainstream news coverage.
In this case as in many similar tweet bombs before, his core supporters received another assurance from their Dear Leader that he is a White Nationalist defending their hateful, divisive ideology. Building the Wall, putting racial and religious minorities in their place along with Democrats and everyone else who does not support him is the Song of the King for the coming election campaign.
America’s liberal democracy is under attack and shows already some cracks. Just like power-hungry leaders abroad, such as Erdogan in Turkey or Viktor Orban in Hungary break institutions or hand them over to loyal supporters, Trump, too, has partners in Courts, the Department of Justice, and most of all in the Republican majority caucus in the US Senate.
How deep the GOP leadership has fallen into Trump’s authoritarian net was demonstrated the other day, when majority leader Mitch McConnell killed two bipartisan election security bills aiming at protecting the US election system from foreign attacks. This happened just after US intelligence agencies and a report by the Senate’s intelligence committee warned of foreign interference in the 2020 elections. Obviously, the most powerful Republican in the US Senate is of one mind with President Trump who declared that in the next election he would again accept useful information from foreign governments.
But there is no massive outrage. Americans have gotten used to the new normal. Nothing is shocking anymore. That is precisely the climate favorable to authoritarian and, yes, fascist leaders and movements.
Recently, in Puerto Rico huge protests forced Governor Ricardo Rosello to resign? Millions of Puerto Ricans were outraged about their leader’s leaked messages described by Bloomberg as “profane, vengeful and cruel, mocking his political opponents with often misogynistic and homophobic slurs, openly fantasizing about an assassination of San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz and heaping ridicule on ordinary Puerto Ricans the government came into contact with.”
Doesn’t that sound familiar? Haven’t we seen and heard stuff like this from our President—and worse from extremists among Trump’s supporters?
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