The Disturbers of Our Harmony ***

The message is still the same though a little stronger.

Names not needed.

In spite of the embarrassment of having Boris-on-Speed leading the U.K. Government, and with an Excessively Positive, not to say Reckless Can-Do Outlook, [untethered to reality, as I read in the New Statesman] I am nonetheless unable to resist an anti-Trump rant. Each successive tweet from, or microphone opportunity for, the Keep America White Man-in-the-White-House, is SO disturbing and increasingly frightening, that silence is near impossible.

This outburst has been triggered by my hearing part of an Anthony Scaramucci interview on

Anthony Scaramucci.

BBC Radio 4 just now. Scaramucci was appointed as Communications Director by Trump in his first year, and lasted in the job about two weeks. For the following two years or so, unemployed by Donald but vilified by him, he continued to praise and defend his President. But suddenly, now, the scales seem to have fallen from his eyes as he has acknowledged that the real working class, Trump’s main power base, is not being respected or served well by him. Scaramucci is a Harvard-educated lawyer who has built up two businesses, the typical American dream for a boy born into a poor working class family. He represents some of the best of American achievements and the possibilities it has always, hitherto, afforded its incomers, immigrants and its poor.

 Republican Congressman Elijah Cummings

Trump’s white nationalist rhetoric is distasteful: “good people on both sides”, of the Charlottesville riots; the four young women Democratic lawmakers should ‘go back to help fix the totally broken and crime-infested places from which they came” [the eternal racist shout]; the Baltimore onslaught, and attack on Republican Congressman Elijah Cummings; and now the re-tweet suggesting that Bill Clinton was involved in the murder of Jeffrey Epstein. [AND, astonishingly, the quick White House defence of Trump’s defamatory re-tweet]. His earlier rants about Obama’s birth certificate; his unfounded allegation that millions of illegal votes were cast for Hilary Clinton; his constant refrain that Mexicans were invading America and were murderers and rapists [and his consequent imprisoning of unaccompanied children at the border]; his strong assertion that Russia didn’t interfere in the 2017 Presidential election [despite ample proof that it did, obtained by U.S. Intelligence] …. all seem to be a foundation for his increasingly paranoid remarks. But paranoia is being turned into policy according to CNN!

 Trump campaign trail crowd.

 In the 2016 election, 53% of white women
voted for Trump.

What does seem amazing and unbelievable is that he has a 44% approval rating and this has not slipped at all over his presidency. His support is, in the main, from far right and right-leaning white nationalists,
evangelists, racists and the working class, or the non-college-educated, as the Americans describe them. But what I find impossible to believe is that these large groups don’t mind, are willing to tolerate, or don’t notice, his painful degradation of American public life, the gradual shift in public discourse from caring and sharing, to excluding and denigrating. Do they not notice the ridicule, distrust and dismissal routinely directed now at America from

 Bewildered, lone toddler at Mexican/U.S.
border.

and in, the rest of the world? And our amazement should also be directed at the Republican Party; at how very little criticism of Trump has been voiced by Republican Senators and Congressional representatives as they have fallen into line. The silence over his various embarrassing and destructive racist pronouncements, attempted unsuitable State appointments and abortive efforts at changes in the law designed to complicate and hurt millions of small lives, has been deafening. His pugnacious relationship now with China which is inexorably developing into a trade war, will hurt American businesses in agriculture in particular, and increase the cost of living, potentially for millions who can least afford it.

But Trump didn't cause the bitter split in America between two huge groups though he has grossly exaggerated it; the far right is similarly, though less successfully active and popular in many countries; France, Spain, Italy, Hungary, Brazil, India, U.K. I read an interesting slant in The Times in July which suggested some critics saw Trump as a semi-literate halfwit totally lacking a reasonably sophisticated cognitive capability. Others had a darker view; they saw him as inarticulate, yes, but also as a manipulative and cynical demagogue, ... callously exploiting his supporters' ignorance to foster racial animus, intolerance and bigotry to further an autocratic right-wing agenda."  The title of the opinion piece [The Times. July 20 2019] is "Trump is riding a powerful wave of white resentment" but the article suggests that while white resentment has long been a vote-winner in America, outright appeals to, and encouragement of, overt racism have been relatively rare. 

The Pew Research Centre this year found support for Trump
at 69% among white evangelical Christians.

*** The Disturbers of Our Harmony.[Title]

From the original draft by Thomas Jefferson of the Declaration of Independence. The expression is contained in the section detailing the long list of King George's faults in his appalling treatment of Britain's largest colony, America, but the expression refers generally to the British. It seems now an apt but restrained epithet to describe the Trump Effect.

Signing of The Declaration of Independence 1776
Painted by John Trumbull 1819

Authored by many, over a period of months, the actual
Declaration of Independence was more of a final draft.