Christendom will soon celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ who, according to the Bible, preached a colorblind gospel of love and inclusivity for all humankind.
Donald Trump says he’s a Christian. “But he is a racist, pure and simple,” said Dr. Brian Clardy, a Murray State University history professor. “His racism is escalating to the point where it is becoming even more dangerous. His words are going to get someone killed.”
Clardy, an Episcopalian, cited the president’s recent cabinet meeting rant that combined racism and xenophobia. He called Somali immigrants, including a Minnesota Democratic congresswoman, “garbage.”
According to Trump, Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Somalia-born, naturalized U.S. citizen, came to the U.S. from a country that “stinks.” Trump said Somali immigrants “contribute nothing.”
The president added, “I don’t want them in our country.”
He continued, “When they come from hell and they complain and do nothing but bitch, we don’t want them in our country. Let them go back to where they came from and fix it.”
Omar represents a mostly Minneapolis district which includes Somali emigres. “His rhetoric has put the entire Somali community in America at risk,” Clardy said.
He warned that under Trump “we’re slouching toward an autocracy based on cruelty and hate, based upon meanness, and at its core is anti-intellectual, anti-diversity, racist, and misogynist.”
Clardy recalled that after Barack Obama was elected in 2012, many Americans believed, or wanted to believe, that the country had entered a post-racial period in its history. “I never bought that,” he said. “Even George Wallace was more subtle than Trump.”
When he was Alabama’s segregationist Democratic governor, Wallace became the symbol of white resistance to the civil rights movement and federal legislation aimed at ending decades of Jim Crow racism in Dixie. He ran for president as an independent in 1968, won Alabama and four other former Confederate states, and carried Bullitt, Christian, Fulton, Hickman and Todd counties in Kentucky.
Wallace, said Clardy, used racial dog whistles while Trump prefers “a fog horn.”
Trump is a Republican, a party founded on anti-slavery principles before the Civil War and that, in the post-war Reconstruction era, championed constitutional amendments that ended slavery, made Blacks citizens, and put the ballot in the hands of Black men. That party of “Lincoln and Liberty” is long gone, Clardy said.
He noted that, thus far, Trump’s GOP has refused to universally denounce the president’s remarks about Somalia and Somali immigrants. Rep. Randy Fine (R-FL) seemed to defend Trump, then segued into a racist tirade of his own.
“Honestly, I hate to say this, but many Republicans probably feel the same way he does,” said Clardy.
Trump is tanking in most polls. “But the hard-core true believers worry me,” Clardy said.
A recent NBC News Decision Desk Poll revealed some cracks in Trump’s MAGA base, which is largely white, conservative, evangelical Christian, and rural. But the survey also showed that “7 in 10 MAGA supporters still say they ‘strongly approve’ of the president’s job performance.”
Clardy put his own spin on Trump’s characterization of Somalia and immigrants from the northeastern African nation. He said the president’s harangue was “old Trump garbage repackaged as new Trump garbage. His rhetoric is empowering these crazies, and somebody among them is going to shed blood.”
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