Let America breathe again
Every time US President Donald Trump does something outrageous, harmful, hateful, or just plain dumb you think to yourself, surely that’s as bad as it can get. But somehow, next time, he manages to get worse.
This past week he’s scraped the bottom of at least three different barrels, covering free speech, law and order, and religion, and managed to set the bar of bad taste so low even an ant wouldn’t trip over it.
First came his spat with his favourite media, Twitter. Having used the online platform incessantly to tweet his way to power and relentlessly reinforce it, gaining some 86 million feed-followers in the process, he was a tad annoyed to find himself fact-checked by the company’s new algorithm.
The company placed a warning on two of his tweets that made false claims about voting by mail. Then it labelled a text which in part warned people protesting about Minneapolis man George Floyd’s death at the hands of police that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” as a violation of its rules about glorifying violence.
In retaliation, Trump threatened to “close the company down” — something he can’t lawfully do — and signed an executive order encouraging federal regulators to reexamine a legal shield that prevents companies like Facebook, Twitter and Google from being held legally responsible for what users post and allows the platforms to police content by their own rules.
At time of writing Twitter was standing strong behind its stance — and good on it for that — but in contrast Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said his company wasn’t “arbiters of truth” and so would take no action over any such posts.
Then, as protests over Floyd’s killing intensified, the president called protesters “thugs, lowlifes, and losers” and threatened to use the Insurrection Act of 1807 to deploy the military to suppress any rioting.
That Act was designed to suppress rebellion against the state, and was last used in 1992 to help quell rioting in Los Angeles. Trump’s threat was to use it if any city or state refused to “take the actions necessary” to protect people and property.
He continued to ramp up the rhetoric that many see as encouraging racism and violence even after spending several hours hiding in the bunker beneath the White House because his security team were worried a peaceful protest outside might turn nasty.
Then he carried out what may well go down as the “most Trumpian” act of his presidency: having police use tear gas, flash grenades, and rubber bullets to clear away protesters outside the White House so he could walk to the nearby St John’s Episcopal Church and spend several minutes there posing in front of it for a photo-op, Bible in hand.
Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde said she was “outraged” Trump should use her church to share “a message antithetical to the teachings of Jesus”, while a fellow Episcopal bishop called it “blasphemy in real time”.
Why does this matter, for us in New Zealand? First, because if civil war erupts in the US — as it is threatening to do — we will have to deal with the devastation of the major global financial markets such a war would spark.
And second, because as much as we might like to think we couldn’t also descend into a land of idiots led by an idiot, if nothing else Trump proves that when hard-right capitalism meets fundamentalist religion, the most ludicrous hypocrisy is possible. Think about that before you vote for a man with a MAGA-hat in his trophy case.