204. START THINKING THE UNTHINKABLE - Time to Name Trump For What He Is
There is little to say about the ethics of Donald Trump’s recent appalling comments about Gaza. The obvious moral wrong of advocating ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people and suggesting an unwelcome American invasion of someone else’s sovereign land requires little more than our immediate condemnation. Especially as it comes as simply the latest obscene foreign policy suggestion in a long series of obscene foreign policy suggestions, from once again undermining international climate efforts by withdrawing from the Paris accords, to the hostile takeover of Greenland. The current President of the United States has long signposted he cares not a jot for ethical norms and international agreements. And that’s before we even consider any of the many other moral outrages this man has either committed or endorsed, from his actual felony convictions, to allegations of sexual assault, and his clear facilitation of far-right extremism, racism, sexism and other assorted prejudices. On the question of Donald Trump’s immoral character, there is nothing more that needs to be said.
So why do I seem to be gearing up here to say something?
This week at work a colleague asked me if I’d heard the latest Trump comments about Gaza? They described Trump’s words as “inconceivable”. But the word jarred with me and I couldn’t hold my tongue.
“What exactly is inconceivable about them?” I asked. “The man has shown nothing but contempt for international boundaries and shared moral norms for his entire public life, including playing fast and loose with that particular part of the Middle East. He moved the US embassy to Jerusalem during his last term in office as an intentional provocation of the Palestinian people and has cozied up to every authoritarian strong man on the international scene since 2016. It was easy to conceive of him saying something like this. All too easy. It is completely in character and in line with everything he has ever publicly done and publicly said.”
What was “inconceivable” to me was that so few people seem to be willing to conceive of the true capacity for danger of the current President of the United States despite all the lessons from history of how fascism, authoritarianism, and totalitarianism arise. Slowly, gradually, eroding and then replacing previous social contracts. A frog boiling slowly in water that started out cold instead of being plunged into a roiling furnace. When someone shows you who they are, the old adage goes, believe them. Well, Donald Trump has been showing us who he is long before he ever came down that escalator and threw his name on the 2016 ballot. The Donald Trump in the White House today is exactly the same morally moribund tyrant that he was on every season of The Apprentice in the years before he developed his public political aspirations, and the same morally moribund tyrant he was before he ever uttered the phrase “you’re fired” in front of television cameras. His callousness, his racism, his misogyny and his fascination with self-serving power have all been incredibly clear for decades for all unfortunate enough to bear witness. The only “inconceivable” bit is how people still seemed surprised by the direction of travel of this man. How much they continue to underestimate the possibility that this really is a sign of something very, very bad happening in the United States.
It has made me think about the stupidity of human beings. A stupidity so dependable that professional magicians and theatre directors can practice sufficiently to bewilder us on demand for eight shows a week. “It can’t happen here” a phrase so familiar that safeguarding specialists have to actively remind people working in professions where vulnerable people frequently get exploited or abused that it can and it does happen here all the time. The monster next door so quiet and unassuming that when the authorities dig up the bodies buried in their back garden our only response is to gasp in surprise and mutter how they were “always so quiet”.
Growing up in a Jewish family, decades removed from World War II but with grandparents for whom it was a living memory, there was always that question nagging in the back of the mind: how could so many people have let the holocaust happen? The soldiers who committed the atrocities, but more so the many, many everyday civilians who simply accepted the rhetoric and actions of the time and let Jewish people have their rights and personhood taken away piece by piece before there even were extermination camps? But then as a teenager I saw we’d done it again in Rwanda, silently ignoring the build up to a genocide until it was too late. And the older I got I learned about how international inspectors got the wool pulled over their eyes in Cambodia as the Khmer Rouge murdered millions, turning Cambodian against Cambodian. How quickly we normalised our own massacres in Afghanistan and Iraq at the start of the century and the creeping Islamophobia associated with the war on terror. How we have sat and watched the attempted genocide unfold in Gaza since October 7th of 2023. The Russian invasion of Ukraine too. We watch. We mutter how awful it all is. And we get on with our lives, thankful it isn’t happening to us.
Just like we did during the pandemic. Solidarity eroding once we realised that putting our lives on hold and staying locked down in our homes was only saving the lives of some people. For the young and healthy (not to mention the wealthy) the desire was to carry on enjoying our freedoms and reverting to the traditional hidden sufferings of every day life: the sick dying behind the closed walls of the hospital.
Just like we do with our spiralling prison population. The denial of basic human rights and constant threat of violence - and actual experience of violence - ignored by the majority because it is happening somewhere else, out of sight. A police car can pull up in the middle of a civilised shopping centre and a person hoisted off the streets and dragged off to jail and few even bat an eyelid at the known fact that this person they just watched get put in handcuffs - this fellow human being - is about to have their rights taken from them and get locked in a cell, possibly for years. Them, not us, allows us to carry on pretending it isn’t really happening. Or, if it is, that it is happening to people who deserve it.
When Trump’s forces come for the undocumented, they will mutter something soothing to themselves about how if only they’d followed the proper procedures none of this would happen. When non-binary and trans people have their humanity taken from them by callous legislation and mocking speeches, they will whisper under their breath about how it’s only a problem for a very small minority and how maybe if they’d only just stop being so difficult…
Never forget: America is, of course, an entire nation built on the ethnic cleansing of its native people and the expansionist theft of land. And I say this living in a United Kingdom built on the colonial theft of an Empire we’re still too afraid to teach our children about.
The point is - humanity routinely ignores the evidence of their eyes to make the common, everyday, standard oppressions and violences that are going on to people other than themselves “inconceivable”. My argument, as it has always been, is we need to start waking up and seeing reality for what it actually is instead of getting lost in our comfortable fictions.
Alas, the evidence of history suggests such an awakening to be likely inconceivable.
Author: DaN McKee (he/him)
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