Terminally vile
What have Trump and his accomplices been up to lately?
In Washington, an aide mocks an American icon as he lays dying in Arizona. The administration refuses to apologize for the cruel remark.
Trump himself threatens to veto the massive farm bill (a huge deal for many in his base and for GOP members of Congress from agricultural states) just to make it harder and more humiliating for Americans poor enough to need food stamps, now officially the Supplementary Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), to qualify for the meager aid.
Moving from the class war to the war on immigrants, Trump and the willing executioners of his policies, led in this case by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, unapologetically adopted as official policy ripping apart immigrant families as they cross the U.S.-Mexico border.
In Jerusalem, representing the president, first daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband, special presidential adviser Jared Kushner, celebrated with Benjamin Netanyahu as the United States and Israel drove in the final nail in the coffin of what once was a promising Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
Meanwhile, in Gaza, the Israeli Defense Force, heavily subsidized by the United States with weapons and dollars, rained bullets and artillery against Palestinians wielding slingshots, killing more than 60 people and wounding thousands.
It was all in a week’s work for this administration.
Decency is an alien word in the White House today, alien for the administration, for the president, for the implementers of his policies, for the brazen disseminators of his lies, for his enablers, and for the spinners and dissemblers.
The bile runs from the top all the way down. During the campaign, Trump said he didn’t consider John McCain a hero because he was captured. Whatever you think of the Vietnam War, and I think it unjustifiably inflicted horrible pain on the Vietnamese people and self-inflicted harm to this country, McCain fought, was shot down, endured years in a prisoner-of-war camp. Much later, McCain was a key player in cementing peace between this country and Vietnam. That’s why most people in this country respect him. Most of the Vietnamese respect him too. Imagine that.
For Trump, who supported the war but managed to get five dubious deferments, to sneer at McCain’s service brings chutzpah to an entirely new level. Shameless. Cynical. Cruel.
All those unsavory qualities of character sure trickled down to Kelly Sadler, a White house staffer on the communications team. In a meeting, Sadler remarked that McCain’s opposition to Trump’s nominee for director of the CIA doesn’t matter because “he is dying anyway.”
It would be a feat to get lower than that. Any other president would have chastised Sadler, fired her, and personally apologized to McCain and his family. But Trump, like most arrogant narcissists, never apologizes. And he hates McCain, so anything goes. Deep down, I suspect Trump resents that McCain, despite some serious flaws, mostly has lived an honorable life while Trump is and has always been a flimflam man.
Disgusting words can’t hurt John McCain now, but the sticks and stones Trump threatens to throw at the program formerly known as food stamps will cause real pain to millions of the most vulnerable people in the country, including children and the elderly. Compared to the GOP’s attitude toward the poor, and Trump’s own view, which is even more perverse than those of the average Republican, Scrooge was a philanthropist. Meanwhile, corporations are reporting record profits directly resulting from the Trump/Ryan tax cuts.
Tearing families apart to deter people from crossing the border is indecent, mean-spirited, despicable. But what could one expect from a Jeff Sessions, who has always thought, acted and sounded like a racist and a xenophobe. Birds of a feather, Sessions and Trump, flock together. Trump, though, is the bigger and meaner crow, pecking at Sessions in a show of dominance whenever he feels inclined.
Moving the U.S. embassy in Israel to the contested city of Jerusalem was a grand gift to Benjamin Netanyahu, possibly as corrupt a politician as Trump, for doing everything possible to destroy any possibility of a Palestinian state and for following the standard Israeli practice of “an eye for an eyelash.” That’s a philosophy Trump would love to adopt domestically in the United States if he only could.
The United States has been massively on the side of Israel and against the Palestinians for a long time. The move now adds insult to injury. It means giving Israel carte blanche to do almost anything it wants, including attacking Iranian targets in Syria and massacring Palestinians.
The embassy move was a provocation orchestrated by Trump and Netanyahu resulting in a predictable bloodletting. It sent a message to the Palestinians. We will crush you mercilessly, every single time. Act as a crushed people already. Hang your head. Accept whatever we give you, if anything. No more resistance. No more defiance.
Then, in a final act of infinite chutzpah, the Trump administration and the Israeli government blamed the Palestinians, who took all the casualties, for the violence.
The idea of the United States as an honest broker in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was always a joke. Under Trump, it has become a travesty, a bloody, dishonest smokescreen for supporting systemic injustice and giving aid and comfort to Goliath in the face of David’s defiance.
