To Each What He Deserves
TO EACH WHAT HE DESERVES
By Deborah Long
With one press conference, Elizabeth Warren confused Democrats across the country with her fraught acquiescence to Donald Trump’s “Pocahontas” taunt. But curled up inside Trump’s tagline for Warren lies an old racial slur from the late 1800s, when the American government wanted to limit the power of its tribal nations by introducing the notion of “Blood Quantum” as a test for eligibility to claim Native American ancestry rights to tribal land. Trump knows this racist tactic like the back of his tiny hand because, as a casino owner, he had to compete with Native American tribes who were legally granted the right by the US government to operate their own casinos - a business he wanted in on, but ultimately had to declare bankruptcy to get out of.
But what everyone really wanted to see was whether Warren could crack the code Trump uses to decimate his opponents, because that will be the litmus test for Democratic presidential candidates in 2020. After all, his ridiculously juvenile taunts pretty decisively crushed the presidential aspirations of all of the 16 Republican candidates in the 2016 nomination and did massive damage to Hillary Clinton’s image in the eyes of the country prior to the election. Democrats want to see someone who can stand up to Trump’s seemingly bulletproof use of vicious taglines. Many Democrats imagine Al Pacino standing at the podium in 2020 and saying, “You want to play rough? OK. Say hello to my little friend”.
Trump’s “Lyin’ Ted” taunt took out Ted Cruz while claiming that Cruz’s father was a traitorous communist who had infiltrated the country from Cuba in order to kill JFK. Curled up inside that one was the old Nazi justification for rounding up and murdering communists during the 1930s as threats to the "Vaterland” (fatherland), the nationalist/fascist theme of Nazi Germany.
Low IQ Maxine Waters and Birtherism are classic Trump taglines echoing the: “One Drop Rule” of the antebellum South where African Americans were denied the rights of citizenship based upon their genetic heritage. And lying curled up inside those taunts is another Nazi trope: racial purity to preserve the imagined genetic superiority of Caucasians, or simply put: White Nationalism.
And now, under Donald Trump, we’ve built internment camps to imprison Central American refugees for undisclosed periods of time in undeclared sites throughout the US. “Jedem das Seine”: The Nazi tagline on the gates of Buchenwald. “To Each What He Deserves”.
And tragically, this new migration of Central American refugees will undoubtedly change the debate just in time for the midterm election. We’re no longer the country built on the labor of European immigrants fleeing the criminal regimes of Europe during the 20th Century. We’re no longer the country whose historic ethos is:
“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
We are poised to become the new America that Trump and the Republican Party have jointly woven out of their own whole cloth to echo the fascist rhetoric of 20th Century Europe - a country of theft, greed, indifference to the suffering of others, and soulless cruelty.
We are poised to become what Donald Trump was raised to be by his own father - by a father who made his millions defrauding and stealing from the US government; by a father who willfully violated the civil rights of minorities; by a father who marched in racist demonstrations exactly like that of Charlottesville; by a father whose photograph sits in a gilded frame over his shoulder at the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office. Steve Schmidt, former Republican strategist, recently said that Trump’s "…only affinity for reading anything were the Adolf Hitler speeches he kept on his nightstand", referring to Hitler’s book of his own speeches entitled, “My New Order”.
Trump is nothing if not a chip off the old block, and the Republican Party is, in Churchill’s words, furiously "...feeding the crocodile in the hopes that it will eat them last".
Deborah Long is a Principal at Development Management Group, Inc. and founder of several non-profit charitable organizations. If you find her perspectives interesting, controversial, or provocative, follow her at: https://www.facebook.com/debby.long.98499?ref=br_rs