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MAHATMA GANDHI ~ Truth never damages a cause that is just.
Amid the horror of watching the president defend white supremacists
comes the amusement of seeing media allies trying to distance themselves
‘Rightwing news anchors struggled to react to incontrovertible evidence
that the president they’ve been backing is a neo-Nazi apologist.’
Photograph: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images
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There
was precious little to laugh about in the US this week, save for one
grimly comic spectacle: that of rightwing news anchors struggling, live
on air, to react to incontrovertible evidence that the president they’ve been backing is a neo-Nazi apologist.
First and most gratifying was the sight of Jim Cramer, shock-jock
presenter of CNBC’s Mad Money and supporter of many of Donald Trump’s
policies, trying to absorb the news that Kenneth Frazier, CEO of Merck, had resigned from Trump’s advisory board
and been promptly savaged by the president on Twitter. For Cramer, a
man who claims to care nothing for politics beyond its effect on “the
markets”, Trump’s attack on big business clearly represented an
existential threat. He opened and closed his mouth a few times before
uttering the word “ill-advised” and pronouncing, in a whisper, Trump’s
ad hominem attack to be “unfair”. He looked as if he was about to be
sick.
And this was before Tuesday’s incendiary press conference.
As Trump wrapped up his defence of white nationalism in New York, a
stunned Katherine Timpf, Fox News host and libertarian, said, “I’m
wondering if it was actually real life. I have too much eye makeup on to
start crying right now.” Guy Benson, her co-host, whose last book bore
the subtitle How the Left’s Outrage Industry Shuts Down Debate,
Manipulates Voters, and Makes America Less Free (and Fun), simply sat
there looking stunned. “They were chanting things like, ‘Jews will not
replace us,’” said Benson of the Charlottesville rally-goers, before
adding, for the benefit of regular Fox News viewers, “there’s nothing
good about that.”
Even that staunch defender of Trump, the New York Post, judged the
president’s press conference performance to be a case of him being “back
at it”, and while the precise nature of “it” was unclear, and evidently
meant as a cheeky rather than an evil designation, for the Post it
still constituted a breach. To see the tabloid use the term “white
nationalists” critically and imply Trump’s assessment of them as “very
fine people” was bad looked, along with the response of almost everyone
else on the right, like the beginnings of a sea-change.
America’s next civil war
Ku Klux Klan members and supporters rally in
Charlottesville, Virginia, July 2017. Photograph: Andrew
Caballero-Reynolds/AFP/Getty Images
In a New Yorker article
this week the chances of another civil war breaking out in the US in
the next 10 to 15 years were put anywhere from 5% and 95%, with at least
one credible analyst coming in at 60%. That number was from Keith
Mines, a national security expert with experience in multiple foreign
war zones, who clarified that by “civil war” he referred not to
traditional warfare, but to sporadic outbursts of “large-scale” violence
and an increase in the kind of attacks by rightwing terror groups that
have accounted for 74% of domestic terror incidents in the US over the past 10 years. (Percentage of deaths ascribed to leftwing terrorists in that period: 2%).
The magazine Business Insider, which in happier days tends towards
articles on how to get your kids into Ivy League schools, took this
rather badly and after reassuring its readers that “no, America is not
heading for a new civil war”, called the New Yorker article “very
irresponsible” because civil unrest in the 50s and 60s might by that
definition have been called civil war. On Google autocomplete,
meanwhile, the question “is civil war coming to … ” was completed with
“South Africa?” more often than “America?”, a brief but salutary
reminder that there are parts of the world with even more problematic
presidents than Trump.
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