Donald Trump didn’t merely
criticize his political opponents this week, both at the SOTU and from his
office yesterday morning. He went on a racist rant that would have
embarrassed a talk radio shock jock (if it didn’t get them fired), much less a
head of state.
After Representatives Ilhan Omar
and Rashida Tlaib shouted “shame” and “liar” during his State of the Union and
walked out in protest, Trump took to social media to sneer that they had “the
bulging, bloodshot eyes of crazy people” and were “LUNATICS, mentally deranged
and sick” who “look like they should be institutionalized.”
He labeled them “Low IQ” — his
favorite slur for women, Black, and Hispanic people — and suggested they be
sent back “from where they came.” He lumped in Robert De Niro as “Trump
Deranged,” “demented,” and possibly “criminal” for criticizing him.
This is the president of the United States talking. This may have been normal politics in the old Confederacy — which Trump is trying to revive with his base naming and statues and purging Black history from museums and monuments — but it shouldn’t be normal today.
This is an elderly man — whose
father was busted in a Klan rally and who himself was busted in the 1970s for
refusing to rent to Black people — now occupying the Oval Office and responding
to dissent with language that sounds like it was scraped from the darkest, most
disgusting corners of the internet.
When Trump tells elected
racial-minority members of Congress to “go back where they came from” — US
citizens who’ve sworn an oath to defend the Constitution — and trash-talks
well-known and respected public figures like De Niro this way, he’s using the oldest
dictator’s trick in the book: he’s trying to dehumanize them.
And when he says they should be
sent overseas “as fast as possible,” he’s invoking one of the ugliest refrains
in American history, the taunt racists have hurled at people of color for
generations to tell them they don’t really belong in our nation.
Ilhan Omar came to this country
as a refugee and went through the arduous and lengthy process to become a US
citizen. Rashida Tlaib was born in Detroit. Yet Trump’s first racist instinct
when confronted by two outspoken women of color is to question their right to
be here at all.
That’s not an accident; it’s
an ancient political strategy rooted in dividing people and turning them
against each other. He wants his followers to hate them, and then to act on
that hate, making them fearful and putting their lives at risk.
He knows his followers tried to
kill Obama, Biden, Pence, Nancy Pelosi’s husband, and actually killed a state
legislator in Minnesota and her husband, a federal judge’s son, and others. He
knows that by painting Tlaib, Omar, and De Niro as alien, unhinged, and
dangerous, he can activate that part of his base that regularly acts on
grievance and fear with violence.
This is Blackshirt and
Brownshirt politics for the 21st century. It’s pure, unadulterated hate, and
should be beneath any elected official. But, of course, this is Donald Trump,
for whom there’s no floor beneath which he and his Republican lickspittles can’t
sink.
He called his long, boring,
rambling, lie-filled State of the Union speech an “important and beautiful
event” and accused them of ruining it with their protests. But democracy isn’t
a pageant like his old Miss Teen USA contests (that are accused of feeding the Epstein machine). It’s not a
royal court where subjects must sit quietly while the monarch speaks (or walks
into their dressing rooms while they’re naked).
Members of Congress are not
props. They’re co-equal representatives of We the People. If they
believe a president or anybody else is lying or has harmed their constituents
(and Trump’s ICE goons murdered two of Omar’s constituents in cold blood), they
have every right to say so, to do it loudly, and to suffer the consequences
like removal or censure if they come.
The Founders and Framers of the Constitution didn’t design a system to protect a president’s feelings. They designed one to protect liberty. Trump’s attack on Robert De Niro follows the same playbook. De Niro criticized his fascist-like behavior and Trump responded by calling him “sick and demented” with an “extremely Low IQ,” hinting that some of what he said was “seriously CRIMINAL.”
“Criminal.” For speech. In
America! That word should chill to the bone anyone who cares about the First
Amendment and our most basic freedoms. When Trump toys with the idea that
criticism of him could be prosecuted, he’s not joking any more than Putin did
in the months before he started arresting protestors. He’s testing the
boundaries of what his followers in Congress and what’s left of our system of
justice will accept.
And then, almost as an afterthought, Trump boasted that “America is now Bigger, Better, Richer, and Stronger than ever before.” “Richer” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Yes, the top sliver of this country is now, as a result of 45 years of Republican tax cuts, staggeringly wealthy. Billionaires saw their fortunes explode with the Reagan, Bush, and Trump tax cuts. Corporate profits have soared because of Republican deregulation and the destruction of our union movement.
But for working families staring
down sky-high rents, unaffordable health care, crushing student loans, stagnant
wages, and grocery bills that don’t match their paychecks, Republicans bragging
about unprecedented riches among their Epstein-billionaire donor class rings
hollow.
We’re living through an
affordability crisis caused by Republican policies. More than half of Americans
are one emergency away from financial ruin. Young people wonder if they’ll ever
own a home. Parents juggle two or three jobs and still fall behind. If this is
what Trump’s “richer than ever” looks like, it’s a prosperity reserved for a
gilded few while the rest of us tread water.
Any president with a moral
compass would acknowledge that reality. He’d understand that leadership
requires more than chest thumping and name calling. The office carries a
responsibility to elevate the national conversation, not drag it into the
gutter. It requires the maturity to accept that in a diverse republic, people
will disagree, sometimes loudly, sometimes angrily, and that’s a sign of
a healthy democracy.
That diversity is not a flaw
in the American experiment: it’s its genius. A democracy that includes Somali
refugees turned lawmakers, Palestinian American women from Detroit, Hollywood
actors, rural conservatives, urban progressives, people of every color and
creed, is a democracy that reflects the real America. And,
apparently, the America that Republicans once embraced but today the
GOP now hates.
A clash of perspectives and
approaches is how we fine-tune our ideas and correct mistakes. It’s how we
prevent a concentration of power from calcifying into naked tyranny.
When Trump calls dissenters
“lunatics” and tells them to “go back where they came from,” he’s attacking
that very foundational American principle. He’s signaling that only certain
voices — specifically those of wealthy white Christian men — are legitimate.
That they’re only “real” Americans who count.
History teaches us where that
road leads, and it doesn’t end in strength. It ends in repression, decay, and
the ultimate destruction of the republic itself, which is most likely why Putin
probably encourages Trump in this sort of thing during their regular phone
conversations.
The bigger picture here is
about more than one bizarre, racist, hateful rant among many. It’s about the
playbook that authoritarians across the world have used for generations to
fracture democracies from within.
When people are anxious about
their jobs, their bills, and their futures, an aspiring strongman doesn’t calm
those fears with honest solutions; he redirects them. He points at the “other”
and says, “There’s your problem!” The immigrant. The Muslim woman in Congress.
The Black lawmaker. The outspoken actor.
He tells us to be afraid of each other, so we won’t question how Reagan Revolution Republican policies of
the past 45 years are crushing working people.
Trump’s words matter because
they’re not just insults. They’re signals. When a president calls political
opponents “lunatics,” suggests they should be “institutionalized,” or tells
American citizens to “go back where they came from,” he’s normalizing hate and
exclusion, the “othering” of his opponents.
That poison seeps into public
life and erodes the traditional American shared understanding that no matter
how fierce our disagreements, we’re all equal citizens under
the law. Democracy can’t survive if we start treating dissent as treason and
diversity as a threat, which is exactly why Trump is doing this. Like his
mentor Putin, whose picture he just hung in the White House along with Washington
and Jackson, he hates democracy and has said as much over and over again.
America is strongest when it refuses that dictator’s trap, when it expands the circle of American belonging instead of narrowing it. The real danger to our country isn’t Omar’s loud protest or De Niro’s sharp criticism. It’s America being stuck with a leader who lives and breathes hate, fear, and division, who wants us to see our neighbors as our enemies, and a party that’s so terrified of him that they back everything he does and says, no matter how grotesque.
That sort of fear-stoking and poisonous hatred doesn’t make America bigger or better. It makes us smaller, angrier, and — as Trump and Putin want — easier to divide and thus control.
-Thom Hartmann
