I didn’t listen to Trump’s Mount Rushmore speech, as I have had enough of him. But what is being reported is not a surprise to me. The surprise would be words of unity and cooperation. He continues to play the same card as in 2016. Blame the left with overt language, and those of brown and black skin with covert hints and dog whistles.We hear and will hear more implied calls to violence, couched in the language of hatred, pointing his racist finger at those who look different than his aryan ideal.
But what is different is that the America has rounded a corner. A new card and been flipped. The worm has turned. People who turned a deaf ear to his worst messages are starting to see him for what he is and they don’t like it.
There are many who are what I call “soft racists.” They fear groups of the other, and they believe that inner-city blacks bring the police problems on themselves with lawless actions. They have accepted the con that things are basically equal, and that institutional racism doesn’t really exist except in some small towns in the deep south. But they don’t consider themselves racist. They reject that appellation outright.
What Trump has done recently is take racist stands that are less covert. His defense of Confederate Statues that were placed during the apex of the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s or in response to the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, his denunciation of Antifa (which only stands against fascism), and his claim that Black Lives Matter is a symbol of hate; all demand that those who do not think themselves racist accept the label and fall in line.
This, for many of them, is a line they will not cross.
Some are truly digging deep to analyze their own feelings and prejudices, and others are simply learning some truths about how our world looks through the eyes of minorities; but many more still are simply rejecting what they cannot ignore. They are troubled by what they cannot un-see. His call to dominate American citizens. The dismissal of the right of The People to protest and seek redress of grievances, setting loose bands of armed blackshirts on peaceful protestors so he can get a picture with a bible someone leant him.
They may want a conservative country, and they may never embrace radical or even progressive reforms, but they won’t call themselves racist, and they increasingly can’t ignore this President displaying that he is.
They are walking away from him.
They are rejecting his divisiveness. They are accepting that something is wrong with this man and that his occupation of the highest office in the land is harmful to us all. MAGA has been revealed to mean take America back to before we had a black President, to before laws against red-lining, to before America’s broad acceptance of equality, and to before the Civil Rights Act. We are seeing now that it means nothing more than this.
And America has caught on.
The only way Trump stays in office after January 20th is through fraud and usurpation.
I call now for all Americans to reject by whatever means necessary any election outcome in 2020 that does not remove Donald J. Trump from The Presidency.