Donald Trump is a liar and a bigot. Decades of evidence confirm this. Why do you feel the need to enable his mendacious, discriminatory and dishonest behavior? What should be as clear to you as the disappointment on Sen. Lindsay Graham’s face, is that the self-proclaimed “great negotiator” does not negotiate in good faith. Having spent much of the 2016 campaign deriding Trump’s mental acuity and fitness, the South Carolina Senator was certain that, as he spent some time on the golf course, he could convince his primary opponent to govern in a manner worthy of the presidency and the respect of the American people. But whatever Mr. Trump must have said to Graham on the golf course, and in White House meetings, that miraculously turned the anti-Trump primary Senator Graham into the pro-Trump presidency Graham, seems to have dissipated in an alarmingly quick fashion. Sadly, the evidence was always there. It has been there for decades. In hundreds upon hundreds of lawsuits across the country wherein headings are titled, Plaintiff v. Defendant Donald Trump, or, Plaintiff v. Defendant Trump Organization, the art of the dealer has been not to pay for his end of the deal – because Donald Trump does not negotiate in good faith.
It is deeply troubling that after 8 years of stifling bipartisan efforts by President Obama to engage consensus over policy that Republicans have generally supported, the GOP legislature dares to castigate their Democrat counterparts for eschewing policy they believe is not in the best interest of the American people. After neglecting to work with Obama on meaningful corporate tax cuts, your party’s “historic” tax reform is clearly a sham designed to placate low and middle class Americans to keep them from demanding an increase in the minimum wage. You cannot claim to be for putting more money into the pockets of hard working Americans with the pittance of a tax cut you’ve designed by letting them keep another 20 to 30 cents an hour of the money they already earn when you know that a mere $1.50 to $3.00 an hour increase in the minimum wage will give them 5 to 10 times more than the few dollars your tax cut provides. And please don’t spin me that raising the minimum wage costs jobs. History has shown that it doesn’t and it hasn’t.
Your allegiance to Donald Trump, and not the American people, continues to take his lying and disdain for the 4th Estate to a fever pitch. And now, Trump’s talent for bigotry has come front and center at issue before the Congress. His derogatory comments about African countries and Haiti were not just “unfortunate” or “unhelpful.” Neither was his opening campaign salvo disparaging Mexicans. It was overt bigotry. And it is who and what he is. Donald is the apple of his Klan sympathizer daddy’s eye who did not fall far enough away from the tree. The evidence is there, and it has been there for decades. The very federal government he now heads as its chief executive has sued him for refusing to rent housing to qualified black applicants. His outburst during the 2016 presidential debate that he “settled the case with no admission of guilt” is a clear indication that he believes he did nothing wrong. He called for the death penalty for 5 black and Latino youths for rape, who were in fact innocent, before a witness was called, evidence introduced or even a trial date set.
Trump’s race based bonafides are always on full display. He needlessly rescinded DACA and surreptitiously attempts to tie law abiding students, workers and entrepreneurs to gang and undocumented immigrant violence. He limits the scope of the violence against Americans to Crips, Bloods and MS-13, all people of color. He never includes the Mafia, the KKK, neo-Nazis, or the eastern European communities in the US that house undocumented immigrant gangs that traffic in drugs, guns and the kidnapping of European immigrant women into the sex trade. However, while these menaces to society infect American communities, ICE raids are non-existent where white immigrants tread. And after all the anti-racist bluster that Republicans uttered when condemning Trump’s disgraceful pronouncement that he could not be treated fairly by an American judge because “he’s a Mexican,” the deafening silence echos as an antiquated policy of Jim Crow justice rears its ugly head with federal judgeships being appointed and relegated to an exclusive club of white men.
During the Obama administration, Trump claimed to have “heard” of a fake birth certificate, phony employment and unemployment numbers, illegal wiretaps, phony crime statistics and millions of illegal voters, all from sources as invisible as the tens of thousands of inauguration attendees he claims to have seen. And despite mounting evidence to the contrary, he continues to lie, and send the Press Secretary out to lie, that an investigation that began 4 months before the election, is really a hoax started by the Democrats for losing the election.
Mitch, Paul, in 1998 your Republican Party vociferously denounced the affair of President Clinton with a White House intern because it could compromise national security by making Clinton subject to blackmail should knowledge of the affair fall into the wrong hands. And your party was right. Why then, do alleged affairs and payoffs to adult porn actresses, and the cries and acknowledgment for justice from women assaulted by Citizen Trump evoke such a non-committal silence from you?
You sit idly by while your congressional colleagues in the “law and order” party maligns law enforcement, distorts truths, ignores facts, and elevates a lost presidential campaign to shield an administration clearly infected by the influence of a hostile foreign government. What will it take for you to be the co-equal branch of government that your office compels of you? Trump has disparaged prisoners of war and those who love them – then uses our military image to attack those who honor and employ the First Amendment. The President has already come for the Mexicans and Salvadorans. He has come for the Muslims. Now he is coming for the Africans and the Haitians. And, though he has been temporarily thwarted, he will come again for the ballot box. In effect, he is coming for what truly makes America great. Will his political opponents have to be shot to death on Pennsylvania Avenue, in full view of the White House – or suspected drug dealers and users shot to death and hailed as thinning an undesirable herd? Those are atrocities committed by the leadership of countries we deride, but whose leadership Trump admires. What will it take for you to rein him in?
Even as America watches, Donald Trump is not the least bit embarrassed that he doesn’t hold open the car door for his wife nor shelter her from the rain with his umbrella. He ran from a presidential debate because the infantile misogyny in him was afraid Megan Kelly might ask him a question. The twiddling thumbs of a narcissist shouldn’t frighten you. You must now know from all that has transpired in the past two and a half years that his capacity for knowledge of someone in his position is severely lacking and limited. Like most of the two-thirds of Americans who don’t hang on, and revere, his every word and Tweet, it must have given you a very hearty laugh to hear him anoint himself “a very stable genius.” Surely, anything he can Tweet, we can Tweet better. You call yourself the leadership – be that!
“And just so you understand,” the rednecks I experienced in Mississippi in 1968 were much scarier and a lot more dangerous than an aging, unenlightened redneck from Queens – “BELIEVE ME!”
Respectfully and Constitutionally,
Calvin Hill
The Op-Ed Alternative 