How they see us: A nation led by a ‘racist’
Americans are finally admitting what the rest of the world has known for years: Their president is a racist, said Corentin Pennarguear in Le Temps (Switzerland). Again and again, the deferential U.S. news media has bent over backward to give Donald Trump the benefit of the doubt, referring, for example, to his lies as “misleading statements” that are “not based in fact.” Even though Trump has long trafficked in racism—calling Mexicans rapists, saying President Barack Obama wasn’t born in the U.S., demanding that all Muslims be turned back at the border—many Americans have hesitated to label him a bigot. It has taken this latest, most egregious case of xenophobia, when he tweeted that four brown-skinned Democratic congresswomen—all of whom are U.S. citizens and three of whom are American-born—should “go back” to their countries of origin, for a few U.S. outlets to face the truth. CNN now mentions “racist tweets” in its chyron, and last week the Los Angeles Times even titled an editorial “Trump is truly America’s bigot-in-chief.”
We’re a long way from the America that once sheltered me as a refugee, said Cuban author Carlos Alberto Montaner in La Nación (Costa Rica). Trump’s words are “the worst and most dangerous kind of extremism,” implying that only those who agree with him are true Americans. This is what “Hitler and Mussolini said in relation to Germany and Italy,” and “what Stalin and Castro said in relation to the USSR and Cuba.” Trump is so opposed to taking in brown-skinned refugees that he is willing to “violate the laws of his nation and international treaties” to refuse them entry. It’s tempting to “call Trump a fascist,” said Pat Kane in The National (Scotland). First came the caging of toddlers at the southern border, and now the threats to deport nonwhite Americans. His rallies are creepy, and the demonization of the fact-based press as “fake news” is dangerous. Yet academics say there are crucial differences: The fascism of the 1930s was a “bourgeois nationalist response to a radicalized and internationalist working class,” while Trumpism is the reverse, a white working class that sees itself as oppressed by globalist elites. The Trump phenomenon is much more “incoherent, contingent—and therefore opposable—than the juggernaut of cruelty and perversion implied by ‘fascism.’”
Trump’s racist rhetoric isn’t just America’s problem, said The Sydney Morning Herald (Australia) in an editorial. It has global repercussions. What do you think China hears when the U.S. president divides Americans “into two racially defined classes,” implying that foreign-born citizens of color and their descendants “have less right to speak than ‘real’ white Americans”? Now, when people criticize China’s horrific re-education camps, where a million Uighur Muslims are being brainwashed or disappeared, Beijing can point to Trump’s statements “to show that America is just as bad or worse.” America’s “moral leadership on human rights” has always been stronger than its military might in the fight to uphold the democratic world order. In abandoning even lip service to equality, Trump emboldens oppressors everywhere. ■
