Trump Goes Ape Over the Obamas

This is a picture of Barack and Michelle Obama. 

A lot of people have been posting pictures of the Obamas over the weekend.  And I am posting on here on my blog.  We're posting such pictures to get back at Donald Trump for posting an unfunny, inappropriate, just plain sick video meme showing the Obamas as apes in the jungle.  Which he did for . . . no apparent reason.

Well, actually, I think there was a reason.  Trump is tanking in the polls so badly that even his supporters are abandoning him.  The economy is tanking.  American arrogance toward the rest of the planet, long a leitmotif of U.S. foreign policy, has become officially enshrined as doctrine by Trump with the blessing of Marco Rubio's State Department.  ICE is committing crimes against humanity and getting away with it.  MAGA acolytes are still waking free despite their mentions in the Epstein files - and Trump is mentioned in them at least 38,000 times.  All Trump had to do to regain his base, or so he figured, was to remind supporters whom they hate more than anyone else - black people.

What Trump forgot, apparently, was that while all racists are Trump supporters, not all Trump supporters are racist.  And while non-racist Trump supporters may have disliked Trump's bigotry but still voted for him because their dislike for the Democrats was even greater, this stunt was too much for them to bear.

Which is unfortunate, because Trump's previous racist social-media stunts - not to mention his racist  policies, his racist statements, and his racist behavior, as well as his chief of staff Susie Wiles' racist attitude (she said that a mixed-race First Couple, as Kamala Harris and Doug Emhoff would have been had Harris won the 2024 election, was "too much" for some people) - should have soured non-racist Trump supporters on the MAGA movement long ago.  The mainstream media are framing the reaction to the Obamas video meme from Republicans in Congress as a sign that Trump has gone too far this time.  Oh, really - after Trump had gone too far too many times to count, they're suddenly offended now?  Representative Mike Lawler (R-NY) expressed his disgust over the Obamas video meme and added that, since Trump took the meme down (but not before Trump-haters took screenshots of the evidence), we should just move on from it and go forward.  But go forward to what? A video meme from Trump depicting the Obama sisters as a chained pair of orangutangs?  (I know, I shouldn't give Trump ideas - but if I could think of something so offensive, Trump may be able to think of something far more so.)  Senator Tim Scott (R-SC), who is black, said he is appalled by Trump's racism.  Even though Scott once said that America is not a racist country and apparently never noticed Trump's previous racism . . . or never noticed the racism of other Republicans, such as when ancient white woman and U.S. Representative Virginia Foxx (R-NC) once told black ABC-TV reporter Rachel Scott (no relation to Tim) to "shut up" after Rachel Scott asked a question that Foxx didn't like. 

Trump supporters who say they now have seen the light and do not support him anymore in fact have thrice voted for Trump and had simply preferred to overlook his bigotry and his other unsavory qualities.  Vote for him once, in 2016?  Okay, Hillary Clinton was no prize, and no one knew how Trump would fare as Chief Executive.  Vote for him a second time, in 2020?  Okay, Trump made a lot of unforced errors handling COVID, but so did other countries, like Sweden, the failing economy wasn't his fault, and not even President Martin O'Malley - 😉 - could have handled the pandemic without a few stumbles, though he, Hillary Clinton, or Bernie Sanders certainly would have done better.  But vote for Trump again in 2024 - after all of the top-secret files he took back to Florida, after he was convicted for business fraud, after he was indicted for election interference in Georgia, after all of the continuing racism - and after January freakin' Sixth??  Now you're appalled by him?  

Another reason  these Trump supporters are deserting him is because his policies didn't personally affect them in any adverse way.  It's like the independent feminist women who supported President Ronald Reagan's re-election in 1984, which John Belushi's brother Jim parodied with a "Saturday Night Live" white woman's rap he wrote for a skit - "I'm liberated, I joined NOW, I voted for Reagan anyhow, because his tax and budget cuts will hurt other people - but not us!"

I don't doubt the sincerity of those who voted for Trump and say they turned against him because of his racist attitudes.  But another reason they turned against him is because Trump's tax and budget cuts, which had hurt other people, now hurt them.  And Trump supporters who are racist are deserting him for that reason alone.  I wouldn't buy a used car from any of them.  But then they probably would only have a used SUV to sell anyway. 

Elijah's Cummin'

U.S. Representative Elijah Cummings (D-MD), chairman of the House Oversight Committee, should have seen it coming (no pun intended there), and he probably did, when Donald Trump slammed him for spending too much time investigating him and not enough time trying to fix the rat-infested Baltimore neighborhoods he represents.  Indeed, Trump angered many a Baltimore resident - and native Baltimorean Nancy Pelosi - by suggesting that the entire city was a hellhole.  

Except that his district, Maryland's Seventh U.S. House District (a map of which is below), includes Baltimore neighborhoods that aren't stereotypical urban ghettos and also includes several suburban and some rural areas, with a good deal of it stretching along the Interstate 70 corridor forty miles west to the town of Mount Airy.  But not only does it include some black ghettos in black-majority Baltimore, it's also a black-majority district - about 54 percent black and 36 percent white, with other groups making up the rest of the district's population.  It's also the second-wealthiest and the second-best-educated black-majority House district in the country. 

Trump's comments are in keeping with his attitude that any black-majority piece of real estate must be a big slumscape.  Kind of weird for a guy whose first properties as a real-estate owner included an apartment house in East Orange, New Jersey, an overwhelmingly black suburb of Newark that has its run-down neighborhoods but also has some charming areas with homes as beautiful as any you'd find in the overwhelmingly white neighboring town of Glen Ridge.  And this isn't the first time Trump has attacked a black congressman representing a black-majority district; just before he moved into the White House (courtesy of Debbie Wasserman Schultz), he attacked Georgia congressman and civil-rights icon John Lewis for problems in his House district, even though the demographics in Lewis' district are similar to Cummings'.  If there's anything Trump can't stand more than a black congressman who can't stand him, it's a black congressman who's investigating him.  And these attacks are perfectly well-tuned to whip up his base and get them to the polls next year.

Trump and his supporters complain that his criticisms of Cummings are not racist but rather a frank examination of how Democratic policies toward the cities and local Democratic control of cities like Baltimore, which is a whole lot better off than one might think (despite former Mayor Catherine Pugh's forced resignation over a book deal gone bad, a continuation of old-fashioned Baltimore corruption), have failed inner-city populations and cities in general.  Someone should send Trump a video copy of native Baltimorean Barry Levinson's 1990 classic movie Avalon, which showed how cities declined as a result of pro-suburban, autocentric policies championed by both parties in the postwar decades.  Then maybe he'll get it.  (Yeah, right.)  This was the same Donald Trump who promised to rebuild our cities and towns but now exploits the problems of urban America to whip up anti-black sentiment.

But then, maybe what Trump is doing now isn't racist this time.  Because as I recall, Baltimore's last white mayor, Martin O'Malley, ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016 but (again, courtesy of Debbie Wasserman Schultz) never got taken seriously.  I am convinced that, had O'Malley been Trump's opponent in the 2016 general election. Trump would have levied the same blistering attack for Baltimore's failings on him that he did on Cummings.  Assuming, of course, his attempt to identify O'Malley as the father of a single black TV newswoman's child based on a rumor started by Maryland Republicans didn't do the trick. (Irony.)

And you can bet that O'Malley, a Batlimorean by choice and a friend of Cummings, had a lot to say about Trump's tirade.

O'Malley should have run for President in 2020.