The Whole World at Trump Speed
There’s speed and then there’s Trump speed: the dizzying, careening way that the president drives the Formula One car of state. Just when we’ve started to adjust to one outrage -- say, the ripping of migrant children from their mothers’ arms (a procedure that continues to this day, despite court prohibition) -- here comes another down the track. This time it’s the construction in Texas of a tent city to house immigrant children. No, wait. That was the last lap. Now, it’s the mustering of almost 6,000 troops on the border, authorized to use lethal force "if they have to" against people desperately fleeing lethal conditions in their own countries.
No, now it’s the president, like Humpty-Dumpty in Alice in Wonderland, redefining the word “rock” to mean “rifle.” During a press briefing in November, he told reporters, “They want to throw rocks at our military, our military fights back. I told them to consider it a rifle. When they throw rocks like what they did to the Mexican military and police I say consider it a rifle.”
Oops, that was the last lap, too. Now it’s the launching of tear gas grenades -- a weapon that the Geneva Conventions prohibit in actual warfare -- against a few hundred mostly peaceful migrants, including small children on Mexican, not U.S. territory. And now it’s the president blaming the decision to deploy a toxic chemical agent against unarmed people on individuals whom -- he says -- an unidentified “they” call “grabbers.” Those grabbers are apparently seizing random migrant children to use as “human shields.” Before we can absorb that bizarre contention, he follows up with a new lie: that “three Border Patrol people yesterday were very badly hurt, getting hit with rocks and stones.”
Unlike the speed of my college days, which sharpened the attention, Trump speed makes it impossible to focus on anything for very long, not when the next outrage is already heading for you at full tilt.
In ordinary times, we would have focused, at least for a while, on any one of these occurrences. There would have been space to carefully consider the unlawful practice of taking children from their parents and shipping them thousands of miles away. We could have paid more than a fleeting moment’s attention to the cruel bureaucratic incompetence that left officials unable to reunite some families because records had been lost or destroyed -- or were never kept in the first place. There would have been time to discuss the legality of deploying U.S. troops inside this country on what has essentially been a policing mission, in possible violation of the Posse Comitatus Act. We could have stopped to consider whether such a deployment might be a prelude to other domestic uses of the military under an increasingly authoritarian president.
We might even have had a moment to ask ourselves what it means that we’ve stopped being surprised by a president who consistently makes things up. Maybe it is a matter of opinion whether the caravan of refugees traveling from Central America in hopes of getting asylum in the United States constitutes an “invasion” (as Trump told CNN reporter Jim Acosta the day before the White House pulled his press credentials). Reasonable people can certainly disagree about the truthfulness of a metaphor. But we generally would expect at least some data to back up a presidential assertion that the caravan includes “criminals and unknown Middle Easterners.” When pressed for evidence, the president simply said, “There's no proof of anything but they could very well be.” He then added, “over a course of a period of time you [will] have [Middle Eastern individuals in the caravan], or they don't necessarily have to be in that group. But certainly, you have a lot of people coming up through the southern border from the Middle East and other places that are not appropriate for our country.”
How should we interpret the meaning of statements like this that simply have no basis in fact? Should we focus on how the president is shoving us into a pond of epistemological quicksand? (What is truth, after all?) Or should we turn our attention to the racial implications of the presidential view that -- whether or not they exist -- people “from the Middle East and other places... are not appropriate for our country”? Are those “other places” perhaps the “shithole countries” the president has mentioned in the past? And if so, then what exactly distinguishes those immigrants who are “appropriate for our country?”
But really there’s no time for thoughts like those, because it’s on to the next outrage! The crazy keeps piling up, along with the exclamation points. (There were eight of them in that November 20th 633-word statement on U.S. relations with Saudi Arabia that the president released in response to international outrage about the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.)
For the whole article:
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176504/tomgram%3A_rebecca_gordon%2C_speed_kills/#more
