I didn’t need to think long and hard, as they say, before deciding not to share Donald Trump’s social media post showing Barack and Michelle Obama as monkeys. But I was pleased, if that’s the right word, at my own reaction. I am not exaggerating when I say I felt physically sick when I first saw the grotesque racist picture. It was unforgivable.
Unsurprisingly, amid the furore that developed following Trump’s actions, the leader of the free world did not apologise. On the contrary, he doubled-down on it. This is from the Sky News report:
“No, I didn’t make a mistake,” he said, adding that he didn’t see the full video. “I looked at the beginning of it. It was fine.”
He then said: “I looked in the first part and it was really about voter fraud in, and the machines, how crooked it is, how disgusting it is.
“Then I gave it to the people. Generally, they’d look at the whole thing. But I guess somebody didn’t, and they posted. We took it down as soon as we found out about it.”
To which I call bullshit.
I don’t accept the derogation of responsibility involved. Trump posted a racist video on his own social media account and that’s the end of it. If he enabled others to use his account – “the people“, as he calls them – then nothing has changed. There is no suggestion that his account was hacked. This is on him.
The rest of the video, which I have seen, featured Trump repeating his old lies about how the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him. Then, there’s this so-called Obama video and there is only one possible conclusion for the viewer: the president is a filthy racist. But we already knew that.
I don’t accept his comment that “We took it down as soon as we found out about it.” Are we seriously expected to believe that no one within Trump’s circle noticed the racism in the 12 hours it remained on his account? Of course not. It was posted for a reason. It’s who he is.
Quite how the US managed to elect such a terrible human being to office in the first place is not beyond me, as you might expect it to be. When someone tells who they are – and everyone in the US knew exactly who and what he was before they re-elected him as president – then believe them. And don’t let anyone tell you that it could never happen here. Working class people voted in droves to elect Margaret Thatcher, despite her loathing of working class people, and sure enough she made them, us, much poorer, all but closing down Britain’s manufacturing industry and all but destroying the public sector in general and the NHS in particular. And now, hovering in the foreground of British politics, we have the privately-educated former city trader, establishment figure and now career politician, and close friend of Trump, Nigel Farage offering us the same thing for the UK. Sure, Trump is completely unhinged and likely suffering from severe cognitive decline, but Farage is neither. And the fact that he was a teenage racist raises the obvious question: do leopards change their spots? Of course not.
Trump is, or at least should be, America’s embarrassment, yet to many he remains a hero, a hero who trades in fear and loathing, as exemplified by his latest dalliance on social media.
I saw Barack Obama as being one of America’s better presidents and his wife, Michelle, was far more than just a first lady. Indeed, I often wish she had run for president. That they happen to be black should be of zero consequence but to Trump it is clearly very important. I suspect that there is an element of petty jealousy on Trump’s part, given his rampant narcissism, that he cannot cope with being an intellectual inferior to anyone, let alone a black man and woman.
There’s an old saying that goes: “If you have nothing nice to say, then don’t say anything at all.” I have nothing good to say about Donald J. Trump so perhaps I should leave it at that? The only thing that makes me a little sad is that when he dies, there isn’t a hell for him to go to.
