Nowhere is the responsibility of citizenship more serious than in the United States. Yet, throughout a long career spent reporting from many countries, I’ve learned just how stupid we sound to much of the world, particularly in the age of Trump.
Apologies for coming at you hard at the beginning of the week, while many of you are still easing into the day and starting to fantasize about your summer plans.
But this can’t wait.
I’ve expressed frequent concern about Trump’s authoritarianism, what with his zeal for arresting judges, heavy-handed ICE raids aimed at instilling fear into the hearts of the undocumented, and his expressed desire to silence prominent voices who dare criticize him, such as Bruce Springsteen, whose song “Born in the USA,” an anthem about the withering American Dream, Trump until recently blared at rallies thinking it was a testament to white-American citizenry/superiority.
[If you never bothered to listen to the lyrics of “Born in the USA,” give them a read now. They are, in fact, a scathing indictment of America.]
The only saving grace to Trump’s long march towards American Fascism (it’s not hyperbole – it’s historical mirroring) is the fact that he is colossally stupid.
Now, many disagree with me, citing Trump’s mastery over the legacy news media, whose daily “sky is falling coverage” of Trump’s every dunderheaded utterance further amplifies his message to those he’s convinced the “media” is a monolith intent on fooling you into taking vaccines that have tracking devices in them.
And yes, the dumber the conspiracy he promotes, like the recent one about Biden having died in 2020 and was secretly replaced by a robotic clone, the stupider we look to the rest of the world.
But some of these conspiracies Trump pumps aren’t just dumb; they are downright dangerous and in service to his aforementioned belief that people of color are unjustly targeting whites worldwide.
Take his recent meeting with the president of South Africa.
In case you missed it, Trump told President Cyril Ramaphosa that white farmers in his country were victims of genocide and that the legacy news media was covering up this atrocity. Trump then showed a video of a long caravan of cars driving along a highway flanked with crosses he said represented all those South African whites killed by Blacks in the country.
In reality, the video was recorded in Eastern Congo, not South Africa, and whites in the latter are statistically no more likely to be killed than anyone else in South Africa.
This blatant lie hasn’t stopped Trump from promoting this conspiracy and even providing asylum to a few dozen white South Africans at a time when America’s asylum program is all but shuttered to everyone else.
This is just the kind of policy aimed at fortifying a race-based lie on which condemnation of the Jews in Germany during the 1930s (and let’s face it, all of Europe for centuries before then) served as the basis for justifying their near extinction.
We’re not quite to the point of rounding up the “undesirables” and putting them on slow-rolling trains to concentration camps for extermination.
But we have already seen roundups resulting in several planeloads of people being sent to what amounts to a concentration camp in El Salvador, the justification for which is often predicated on a stupid president’s insistence that having certain tattoos make some a threat to the well being of all Americans.
And as someone who’s seen the inside of some Latin American prisons, I can attest they are nightmarish hellholes from which few escape. They’re not Auschwitz or Dachau, but they’re close enough to warrant concerns about the direction Trump is steering the country.
Much of the rest of the world already sees Trump echoing fascist leaders of old and wonders if the America they once thought was at least occasionally (though not often enough) willing to bear responsibility for the outsized role it plays in determining the direction of the planet is now gone.
It’s a good question. And one we Americans should ask ourselves.
Unfortunately for us, we may be too stupid in our current state and leadership to even consider such a serious query.
