Trump’s Zenith of Hate and Hypocrisy

Last night saw Donald Trump deliver his culmination of the RNC speech.

Unsurprisingly, it was the pile of fake and flimsy garbage that you would expect from a grifting conman such as Trump. Putting aside his flagrant use of the White House for an illegal publicity stunt, his wooden speech oozed with lies and dishonesty. For example, Trump ludicrously claimed that his administration had effectively tackled the COVID pandemic and had deferred to science and fact all along. While that is an astonishingly see-through assertion, even more jaw dropping was Trump referencing how he was so good in terms of racial issues. Absolutely staggering. Let’s consider that massively dubious assertion with a little more context.

Earlier this week, Kenosha Wisconsin saw the latest example of egregious police violence against African-American with the shooting of Jacob Blake. Seven times. In the back. The world is yet again utterly appalled. Yet did Trump reference this at any time during his speech? Of course not. He instead fanned over the police and spewed forth his dreary and predictable claim of being in favor of “law and order.”

Trump glaringly failed to mention how 17-year old Kyle Rittenhouse, a big Trump and blue lives matter fan, travelled half an hour to Kenosha, armed with an A-15 and then played white vigilante supposedly “protecting” businesses. The city was already in uproar about the shooting of Blake. The last thing it needed was for white, heavily armed, militias descending upon it. But descend they did.

Resulting in Rittenhouse killing two protestors of police brutality and seriously injuring a third.

Unbelievably, Rittenhouse was not apprehended at the scene, being allowed to travel back to his home for the night. He was arrested the next day. Now compare his treatment with that of Tamir Rice, with a toy gun, who was killed in downtown Cleveland by police officers who made a two second decision to open fire on him. The contrast between Rittenhouse and Rice couldn’t be any more eye-opening and perfectly indicative of how this country really has two justice systems – one of white people and one for non-white people. Of course, there was as much chance of Trump bringing up that sort of elephant in the room in his speech as there is of him reading a book from cover to cover – zero.

LeBron James summed things up perfectly on Twitter, declaring: “Fuck this man!!!! We demand change. Sick of it.”

However, here’s the thing. When the Trump nightmare is finally over, it’s not as if the US is then going to enter into a period of graceful racial harmony. Absolutely not. The entirety of the US is riddled, from top to bottom and from side to side, with systemic and institutional racism. Trump has just been more vocal and brazen about it. This is a problem that a Civil War and a Civil Rights Movement has been unable to resolve. It is a near 250-year old festering wound on the body politic of America.

For African-Americans and people of color to finally be on a societal, economic and judicial par with white Americans, there needs to be fundamental, not superficial, change across and throughout the country. \

No other supposedly “advanced” Western country has anywhere near this level of racial disharmony. When it comes to race, the US is for sure one very sick, very racist, puppy. It has to be to allow a man become President who is on record of saying that “laziness is a trait in Blacks”.

As we inch ever closer to November, the infuriating reality is that we are not inching at all toward meaningful justice for tens of millions of African-Americans.

While Biden is preferably to Trump, he most certainly is not going to be the dynamo to drive meaningful change for non-whites in America. African- Americans have to accept this and then tirelessly work against it. In the absence of that, they are forever stuck in an endless, racist, grisly merry-go-round of oppression, discrimination, disenfranchisement, brutality and death. Currently there is a colossal fraud in the White House. While he is temporary, the colossal fraud of “with liberty and justice for all” will linger on in the absence of lasting, meaningful change.

America was born out of a revolution. It desperately needs another on right now.