It comes as no surprise to everyone that America has elected a bona fide racist as president.
For years, President Donald Trump has tacitly winked and nudged among the bigots, coyly declining their adoration and worship only when the groundswell of public revulsion became dangerously loud.
This weekend followed the familiar nauseating pattern. Some horrific episode of racism and violence maims or kills someone, and Trump either ignores it or winks at it, saying something about how “many sides” need to behave. The clear connotation is that minorities deserve to be discriminated against, beaten or even killed because they act up to white supremacists. Then the enlightened world pushes harder on Trump, and he finally capitulates.
Me thinks he dost protest too late, and so does pretty much everyone else.
The Twitterverse then erupts with trolls, insisting that anti-racism protesters are hypocrites because they won’t accept bigots and racists, who are just Americans with an alternative point of view on minority rights.
Please. Bigotry and racism is not a point of view, it’s a personality disorder. Having the right to say any damned thing you want doesn’t make saying it right. As a society, we create logical, defensible rules everyone must abide by. Imperfect as it is, government is our attempt to to be fair and equitable. The ridiculous notion that we should just allow people to do anything they want in public without consequences is anarchy, not freedom. Those morons in Charlottesville do have a right to peacefully assemble, but reasonable people don’t have to stand for it any more than reasonable people will not stand for Westboro Baptist Church freaks trying to spoil the funerals of veterans with their insane homophobic schtick.
Even party and presidential loyalists like Colo. Sen. Cory Gardner drew the line this weekend by telling Trump to call out this chilling racist theater. Weary of Trump’s endless cadre of sicknesses and deficiencies, American expected this to be eclipsed by the next news cycle covering North Korea, Russiagate, Trumpcare or some other temper tantrum.
Trump’s cat-and-mouse game of “If-you-can’t-catch-me-being-a-racist-then-shut-up” changed, however, when he decided to play the Sheriff Joe Arpaio card.
Trump’s faux pas started Saturday when he feigned displeasure at the mob of ridiculous racist frat boys marching like refugees from Gilligan’s Island. Despite the sick comedy Tiki-torch wielding white dudes evoked, one of the misfits hideously murdered anti-racism protester Heather Heyer and injured scores more by driving his car into a crowd like some kind of whack ISIS terrorist.
The next day, when the press and the free world let Trump know how shocking his duplicitous stunt was, he tells his chums at Fox News that he wants to pardon Arpaio, one of the country’s most egregious and infamous racists. No need to draw your own conclusions, Trump set off a fog-horn-level dog-whistle to David Duke and every other frat-boy racist in the country: “I’m still your guy no matter what they make me say.”
The infamous Arizona sheriff is the man who ran a gulag in his jail. He virtually — and sometimes literally — tortured Latinos in his effort to cleanse his community of Mexicans. Arpaio was convicted in federal court of ignoring a court order to stop his repugnant racial profiling of Latinos in his southern Arizona county. Voters ousted the unrepentant racist last November. Trump told Fox News on Sunday that Arpaio is “a great American patriot.”
In Trump’s eyes, American patriots harass and round up Mexican-looking Americans in case they might be illegal immigrants.
Nope. Patriots don’t bring back chain gangs for county prisoners. They don’t imprison Latinos in dangerous sweat-rooms to punish them for driving while brown.
Arpaio is worse even than Duke and all the frothing racists across The South because he used the power of the United States government to inflict his bigotry on his victims.
ACLU lawyer Cecillia Wang was most eloquent about Trump’s pardoning Arpaio to appease the nation’s white supremacists and run-of-the-mill racists and bigots.
“Make no mistake: This would be an official presidential endorsement of racism,” Wang told the Associated Press on Monday.
That it would.
But it certainly wasn’t Trump’s first patronage of American racists. And until he’s run out of Washington by voters, Congress or Trump’s elderly-toddler stamina, it certainly won’t be the last.
Follow @EditorDavePerry on Twitter and Facebook or reach him at 303-750-7555 or dperry@aurorasentinel.com.