Donald Trump’s new sinister racist agenda
When Donald Trump announced his plan to defund America’s contribution to the World Health Organization and launch an investigation into the WHO’s alleged misdeeds, it would be simple, and possibly simplistic, to condemn it as merely another example of Trumpian hypocrisy and misdirection and leave it there. Certainly, another instantiation of François de La Rochefoucauld’s famous quote, that “hypocrisy is the compliment vice pays to virtue,” would not be out of order for the occasion. Certainly Trump ought to know as well as anyone that real investigations are due into his own actual mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic, and most emphatically not the alleged ones of the WHO.
But that kind of thing never stopped the child rapist and murderer Donald Trump. His now famous assertion that he could shoot a man on Fifth Avenue and not lose a supporter is looking less implausible each day. It doesn’t actually seem to matter what he says any longer, the drooling cretins ready to fawn all over him don’t appear to have any theoretical boundary for their capacity to consume pure bullshit. For them Trump simply cannot do any wrong — by definition. Hypotheticals need not apply.
I believe, however, there is, even still, a darker, hidden agenda at work here. Any good chess player knows to look for a superior move when he or she has already found a good one, and if the move can do two things at once, so much the better. Trump, of course, isn’t a competent tiddlywinks player, let alone chess player. No, I detect the hand of Stephen Miller behind this one. The chess move in question is to also advance a racist agenda, to blame China for all of the woes created by this pandemic and to excoriate China with condemnations and sanctions.
It’s important to remember that China does, in fact, bear quite a lot of blame. There is no question that the Chinese government downplayed the seriousness of the outbreak and lied a great deal about its extent, its number of citizens infected and its death toll. China has also been scolded repeatedly for its exotic animal industry in Wuhan, the one that caters to the ignorant and superstitious idle rich. But by blaming the WHO for cooperating with China and accusing the organization of deliberately helping China to cover up its culpability, Miller has removed or softened the blame. That way this indirect attack on China won’t appear overtly racist by the Trump regime. Very clever, Mr. Miller, my compliments.
Naturally the tack comes at an inordinately inopportune moment. America can’t afford an investigation right now, and the WHO needs all the funding it can get in order to fight this pandemic. So by hobbling the WHO Trump and Miller put all our lives at risk. Do I need to tell anyone at this point that neither of those two “gentlemen” give an actual shit? I thought not.
But herein is the point. More racist attacks will result — against the Chinese people, against Chinese Americans, against Asians in general — as a result of Trump and Miller’s misdirecting ploy. And since many people need a face to blame for this worldwide tragedy, the face of the Chinese and Asian people will become a welcome target of hatred. The point is they will be too busy blaming the innocent to remember to blame the guilty, that is, Trump. It will, of course, compound the tragedy. More human suffering must result in the never ending effort to rehabilitate that murdering child rapist.
I cannot adequately describe how infuriating this is for me personally. I can ordinarily handle human evil with a certain amount of clinical detachment. But just now that detachment has failed me. If I knew an uglier word than “evil” I would use it. For now, evil will have to do. But it is evil so wide and so deep that I cannot bear to think that anything short of a swift and terrible and equivalent justice awaits these merchants of hate. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.