By Donald V. Watkins
©Copyrighted and Published on October 20, 2018
Last week, he refused to condemn the torture, murder, and dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi by a Saudi Arabian “hit squad” because he did not want Khashoggi’s murder to interfere with a multi-billion dollar arms trade deal that is supposedly in the works. Khashoggi was an American journalist who was murdered in Turkey.
The Kingdom has acknowledged Khashoggi’s death and the killers have been linked directly to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the son of Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud. The Kingdom's story about what happened mutates daily.
Somehow, he is not outraged by Khashoggi’s gruesome murder. He readily embraces each and every false narrative advanced by the Saudis to explain Khashoggi's murder, even though Turkish and American intelligence agencies have informed the State Department that Khashoggi was tortured and murdered.
He also celebrated a Congressman who body-slammed a reporter and somehow managed to call his one-time, porn star sex partner a “Horseface.” Never mind that he paid her $130,000 during the 2016 presidential campaign to keep quiet about their affair.
Two weeks ago, he openly mocked a university professor who testified under oath that U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her when the two of them were teenagers. The professor took and passed a lie detector test. Kavanaugh would not do so.
Last year, he defended violent neo-Nazi protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia. He claimed there were some “good” people in the Nazi group, even though one of them murdered an innocent female counter-protester. He did not condemn those in the crowd of Nazis who were chanting, “Jews will not replace us.”
While campaigning for President in 2015 and 2016, he encouraged supporters at his rallies to beat up protesters. He even pledged to pay the legal fees incurred for assaulting the protesters.
He routinely criticizes the physical appearance of women, including the wives of his Republican allies. He often calls women “dogs” and “pigs”. He loves to sling mud at women. After all, he can grab women by the “pussy” because he is a star, or so he says.
He lusts after his own daughter, Ivanka, whom he allowed a celebrity radio host to call a “voluptuous”, “piece of ass,” with no adverse consequences for this man's disrespect of his daughter.
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His wife’s body language telegraphs that she cannot stand for him to touch her. They sleep in separate bedrooms in the White House. The way he mistreats the First Lady in public is embarrassing to all Americans. Yet, he is incapable of experiencing embarrassed for himself.
Supporters Excuse His Lack of Character, Compassion and Decency Because He is Doing a Good Job
His political allies and supporters say his character flaws, moral lapses, and lack of conscience do not matter because he is doing such a good job as President of the United States. After all, the economy is strong, Wall Street is thriving, inflation is under control, unemployment is low, taxes have been cut, and he has placed two far-right conservatives on the Supreme Court. The top one percent is doing extremely well. And, the list of his achievements goes on.
Like former Alabama Governor George C. Wallace, he has freed his political base from the burden of politically correctness when interacting with and/or discussing women, people of color, Muslims, gays, people from “shithole” African countries, Spanish-speaking people, and undocumented immigrants.
He has also made it clear that it is okay to separate parents from their young children in order to advance and protect homeland security. The Nazis did the same thing to Jewish families as they were rounded up in Germany.
He falls in love easily with brutal despots in North Korea, Russia, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, China, and other authoritarian countries. He never condemns their heinous actions. Instead, he searches for ways to justify and spin them.
He mocks the weak and poor, and trashes them with impunity. Meanwhile, he gleefully ingratiates himself to dictators.
He has attacked the mainstream news media, his own Department of Justice, the FBI, America’s 16 national intelligence agencies, and America’s most trusted allies.
He has run up the deficit to $17 trillion under a bogus and discredited theory that the economic benefits flowing to the rich from his big spending programs and recent tax cuts will trickle down to middle class Americans. As expected, nothing has trickled down from the enrichment programs for America’s wealthy oligarchs but their grey water and toilet sludge (figuratively speaking).
He has successfully demonized his political opponents and all of the traditional centers of influence that have historically provided a check and balance on executive power. This is why he is free to say and do as he pleases.
What is more, he has copied German Führer Adolf Hitler’s playbook for an “Aryan Nation” and is implementing it to perfection. As long as the streets in Germany were clean and paved, the trains ran on time, the economy was strong, the banks were open, trade was good, and the “good” German people were making money, Hitler could do as he pleased with Jews, Gypsies, Black Germans, members of the media, and his other declared “enemies of state.” The “good” Germans simply looked the other way while Hitler exterminated 6 million fellow Germans because he was doing what was necessary to advance and protect homeland security and their way of life.
Trump’s dehumanization of entire categories of people paves the way for some very dark and difficult days for America. When an American president actually tries to assist a Saudi Crown Prince in his efforts to cover-up the torture and gruesome murder of an American journalist, this singular disgusting event becomes a defining moment in American history and in the country's national values.
Adolf Hitler would have loved Donald J. Trump. Like Hitler, Trump is devoid of any feelings as a human being, and he has no conscience whatsoever. If Trump had been America’s president during Hitler’s reign of terror, he would have been a staunch ally of Hitler and an after-the-fact accomplice to the Holocaust.
Both despots exemplify the old axiom that leadership without a moral compass is no leadership at all.
PHOTO: President Donald J. Trump (left) and murdered American journalist Jamal Khashoggi (right).
