Donald Trump has poisoned politics in the United States, photo by Gage Skidmore 5.
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Tennessee GOP legislators showed the world their depravity by expelling two Black Democratic state representatives merely for using bullhorns and joining forces with young protestors nonviolently demanding gun control laws after a recent mass shooting at a Nashville school.
This terrible fiasco could not have happened but for the bitter political climate of recent years that was the result of the influence of our 45th president, Donald J. Trump. His bullying, aggression, empty promises, and overconfidence fooled tens of millions of dissatisfied voters into thinking he was a leader capable of "Making America Great Again." Our country has not recovered.
The Republican state House action in Tennessee was an unprecedented reaction to a nonviolent act of protest. Stripping the power of two two young Black legislators, (and letting the White representative off, even though she joined the same demonstration) sent a clear message about the intention of the House Republicans. They wanted even more power to make the rules, no matter how egregious their decisions were. They wanted to see their political adversaries weakened, or better yet, completely out of the picture.
How did Donald Trump's corrosive influence contribute to this ugly debacle? Let's start with his racist history which was evident long before he won the presidency in 2016. In 1973 Nixon's Department of Justice sued the Trump family business for refusing to rent to Black tenants. Then came the infamous "Central Park 5" incident in 1989 when four Black and one Latino teenager were accused of attacking and raping a jogger in New York City. Trump ran spectacular ads demanding "BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY! BRING BACK OUR POLICE!" But after years in jail, the young men were exonerated by DNA evidence. Unsurprisingly, Trump never apologized and continued to maintain their guilt.
Most of us remember how Trump spent years trying to prove that Barack Obama was not a real American. After all, Barack's father was a black man from Kenya, therefore Barack must have been born in Kenya, not in the U.S., and for that reason not eligible to be president. And clearly, Obama certainly didn't look like any other U.S. president Trump had seen.
All that racist rambling escalated when he campaigned in the 2016 presidential election and while he served in office, starting with calling Mexican immigrants "rapists" who were bringing crime and drugs into our country. Soon he advocated banning immigration of Muslims. His incidents of racist rhetoric are too long to list. But we can highlight one particularly egregious incident.
White supremacist protests were planned in Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017. White Nationalists and neo-Nazis held a "Unite the Right" rally also attended by counter-protesters. The torch-carrying White Power crowd shouted chants like the Nazi slogan "blood and soil" as well as "Jews will not replace us!" One counter-protester, 32-year-old Heather Heyer was deliberately run down by a car and killed. The reaction to the Charlottesville events from President Trump was a condemnation of the violence. But then he shocked many when he added, "there's blame on both sides," and there were "very fine people, on both sides."
It should be obvious that Donald Trump has poisoned the political atmosphere. Sensing that their president was not remotely tolerant, racists and right-wing extremists felt liberated to express their bigoted point of view, and the Republican Party rarely, if ever, pushed back on that kind of hateful rhetoric. These bigoted views helped Republicans win elections in some states during Trump's heyday and GOP officeholders feared going against Trump and his "Make America Great Again (MAGA)" followers.
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