I have no reason to think that anyone will take my apology as anything but my personal opinion, but perhaps it may serve as an example of what so many patriotic American citizens and residents believe: Our president is a bigot. His facilitators are even worse, willing to compromise our attempts to right the wrongs in our history for political gain and pull down the legal and moral ideals and what has been accomplished since our founding.
First, and most clearly, the United States is a nation of immigrants, except for those Native Americans whose land we stole and the Black Americans who are the descendants of those who were brought here in chains. This is not subject to any dispute; history is history, and no pseudo-sophisticated racist theory can change those facts.
We have stumbled over the years, but we have tried to take action to remedy our fraught history of intolerance and hatred. We fought a civil war over it; we have passed laws, demonstrated, and died to expand true civil rights for all. We have attempted throughout our history to change—sometimes successfully, sometimes not. We have passed restrictive nativist immigration laws and then attempted to change them. Over the course of our history, we have tried in many ways to make our country live up to our founding ideals, and yet racism and hatred of the other has persisted.
It was a major reason that Trump was elected as many were worried that the population was becoming less white. This is reprehensible, yet humans are in many ways the products of their personal history and fears, in this case stoked by the bigot in chief who has dined with racists and antisemites and opined that there were good people on both sides of a race riot.
The tacit and not so tacit hints to his most ardent supporters are now out in the open for all to see. Perhaps it is his diminishing capacity as he ages or his belief that he has nothing to lose since he must try to keep his core supporters in the face of his plummeting pole numbers, but the mask is off. He is a lame duck and knows that his power is ebbing. (I do not believe he will attempt a coup d’état and try to run again, but who knows).
This man is a hater, a traitor to America and its ideals, a bigot and misogynist bent on destroying the fragile democracy he has undermined since taking office. His comments over the years about Black people, women, the LGBTQ community, the poor, the disabled, and others who do not look like the Aryan ideal he and Hitler so admire were just the hint of the intolerance he is now openly displaying daily. Americans must reject his statements and show that this creature, a bigoted, draft-dodging coward and would-be-king, is anathema to true Americans. Basta, we are better than this—if we are not, it is the end of the American dream.
I will not bother to restate his comments on African states—the world has heard them and seen him in action. His virtual dismantling of immigration and asylum has made our country into a pariah state in opposition to our ideals and those enshrined in the U.N. Charter and in international law.
America was never a “shining city on a hill” as President Ronald Reagan claimed, but for over 250 years, it has tried to be a place of freedom and opportunity. As they say, “My country, right or wrong, if right, support her; if wrong, change her.” (Sorry about the two cliche’s in a row.)
We must wait three years now to change her substantially with a new president, but we have a year to elect new members of Congress, ones who will live up to their oath to support the Constitution rather than collapse in a heap to avoid risking the ire of their party’s president. Will they grow a backbone now that Trump’s approval ratings hover around 38 percent? I know that principles will not enter into their decision (at least they have not until now), but maybe the rats will start to desert the sinking ship.
America offered one thing to the rest of the world: more freedom as the only large democracy and the opportunity for immigrants to improve their lives because of that freedom. Has it been a false promise? Certainly it was in many ways to people of color and initially to many immigrants, but I submit we tried to change that and make our nation live up to its promise.
Italians, Central Europeans, Jews, Chinese, Japanese, Middle Eastern, and other groups came here in large numbers over the years. There was a regular opposition to all of this immigration, often based on ethnic, religious, or racial reasons, as well as the concern that they would take American jobs and reduce wages. It seems that these new Americans have only made us stronger, more culturally diverse, and more intellectually and economically productive.
Americans are no better than any other people. We are a work in progress, but Trump’s regression is outside the pall of any political actions in recent memory. We are better than this, and for that I apologize to the world for his actions. We are not Trump; we are patriots who want to make our nation what it should be. Trump should read the poem by Emma Lazarus on the base of the Statue of Liberty—it would be a quick history lesson and would not tax his limited intellectual capacity.
