Ours is a dangerous, white-nationalist, terrorist president

Donald Trump is guilty. He may not have fired the guns that killed dozens of people this past weekend in El Paso, Texas, or Dayton, Ohio. But he has yet to learn that words and actions, especially coming from a president, have meaning. And in the case of El Paso and Dayton, consequences. 

Study, for example, how the president reacted during a rally a few months before these last two massacres. While visiting Florida’s panhandle a follower yelled, “Shoot ‘em!”, after the president mused aloud about how to stop migrants from crossing the southern border.

From his bully pulpit, Trump could have taken the high road, the right road, and helped diffuse feelings that are now too prevalent in American society. Instead, upon hearing someone wanting to shoot a migrant, Trump smiled and said: “That’s only in the Panhandle you can get away with that statement.” In other words, Trump found it funny and plausible, but only in certain places. As we’ve seen and read, there are more plausibilities being created for these types of violent actions weekly in Trump’s America.

In this country we have the First Amendment. I live by it as a journalist. It guarantees our freedom of speech. But, and this is a big but, our words cannot lead others to dangerous situations. For example, I cannot go into a crowded and dark theater and shout: “Fire!”

The idea of falsely shouting “fire” arose from the Supreme Court’s 1919 decision in the case Schenck v. United States. The Court ruled unanimously that the First Amendment, though it protects freedom of expression, does not protect dangerous speech. In the decision, Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote that no free speech safeguard would cover someone “falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic.”

So, I then ask, is the president of the United States above the limitations of the First Amendment? 

Since the day he came down the escalator at New York’s Trump Tower with his wife, an immigrant by the way, and said that Mexicans were sending “people with lots of problems… They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. …” Trump has not relented in demonizing and putting people he dislikes (because of his bigotry) in danger from Americans who listen to a president who tells them they have a right to punch, beat up, and laugh with persons who suggest shooting someone.

That bigotry is aimed in this country at Latinos, African Americans, the physically handicapped, the LGBTQ community — anyone he deems inferior. Around the world it is focused on people who live in what he terms “shithole” countries — mostly populated by Latinos, blacks and Muslims.

New York Times columnist Frank Bruni wrote of the lowlights of Trump’s campaign and now his presidency. They include, he says, “the Muslim ban; the repeated references to illegal immigration as an ‘invasion;’ the characterization of migrants as vermin who ‘pour into and infest‘ America; the tweet urging four congresswomen of color to ‘go back’ to their countries, though only one of them wasn’t born here; and, of course, the insistence that there were ‘very fine people on both sides’ of the violence at a gathering of neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Va.” 

The killer in El Paso this past weekend left a hate-filled manifesto where he wrote of a “Hispanic invasion of Texas” and said, “If we can get rid of enough people, then our way of life can be more sustainable.” Not coincidentally, he used an AK-47-style assault rifle.

A “Hispanic invasion” and getting “rid of people,” and “our way of life.” Substitute Hispanic for Mexican and the language used by Patrick Crusius, the 21-year-old white man from Allen, Tex., who is alleged to have shot and killed more than 20 people, comes directly from the Trump dictionary.

So I again wonder: If I can be arrested for shouting “fire!” in a theater and causing a panic, what about a president who urges followers to beat up, push and do harm to “invaders” from other places and laughs off the idea of shooting them… Isn’t that worse than simply shouting fire and causing a stampede?

Sooner rather than later a majority of decent Americans must come to realize that what we have now is a dangerous man in the White House. He is not only deranged, but he’s also a white nationalist and currently the world’s most feared terrorist. 

And I say sooner because whether you’re a Democrat or Republican, no matter who runs against this monster next year, we must vote for him or her. We cannot afford four more years of the devil incarnate who is tearing this country apart.