Hypocrisy and ignorance

The President’s comments last week reminded our editors of an incident witnessed in Ireland ten years ago. An angry young man overheard a mother and daughter chatting in a language other than English as they walked down Dublin’s main shopping street. He yelled as they passed, “Foreigners Go Home.”

Ireland was for the Irish, he went on to scream, presumably assuming they were part of the Celtic nation’s large immigrant Polish community. The problem was that the two women hailed from the “gaeltacht,” one of the areas in which the citizenry still primarily speak Gaelic, the native language of Ireland and Scotland. The young Irish man had no idea of the irony of his critique.

Neither does Donald J. Trump. When the President admonished his four progressive Democratic critics to “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime-infested places” from which they came, he seemed unaware that three of the four lawmakers —Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan — were born in the U.S. Their mothers DID hail from abroad, from impoverished places where their first language spoken was not English.

Just like Donald Trump. The perverse humor is that the President is the son of a Scottish-born Gaelic speaker. Mary Anne Trump, the youngest of ten children born to Malcolm and Mary MacLeod, did not even learn English until she started primary school. It was her second language, almost never spoken to her poor Gaelicophone fisherman-father or crofter-mother.

In fact, Mary MacLeod Trump’s ancestors suffered ethnic cleansing in the tragic events in the Highland Clearances. She descended from refugees, from a land once broken by strife, and interestingly, she was listed as a domestic worker on her immigration documents. “A maid,” just the sort of economic migrant that her son now decries.

Moreover, Mary’s native Outer Hebrides today rank as one of the poorest parts of the United Kingdom, with rural problems of methamphetamine trafficking and resulting spikes in crime plaguing those islands today. And little of the money that Trump has lavished on Turnberry and other swanky golf estates in Scotland has made its way to his mother’s barren home isle. Joe Biden proved more right than he may have realized when he suggested that “Maybe the President should go home.” By his own standards, Trump does not belong, as the mothers’ of the three aforementioned Congresswomen immigrated as legally as his.

Even this truth will do little to stop the waves of hatred and racism which the President’s comments have unleashed. Members of the U.S. House last Thursday expressed alarm over the threats made toward freshman Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.). The night before, a crowd at President Trump’s rally chanted “send her back.” Multiple Democrats subsequently called for more enhanced security for Congresspersons, including Omar and her three closest allies also targeted by Trump.

That the Editorial Board of The Louisiana Weekly finds this raging racist rhetoric reprehensible goes without saying. However, we do more than shed tears for the myriad of ways Donald Trump has destroyed the standards of decency of which our presidents of both parties once conducted themselves, regardless of ideology. When only four Republican Congressmen vote in support of a measure condemning the President’s comments, our editors grow truly afraid for the Republic. Hate becomes a wildfire when set on high, and the GOP fanned the flames with its silence.

So when Trump said that he rejects the “send her home” chants directed at Omar by his supporters, we know that he does so with a wink. As the New York Times noted, “It is the kind of fight that the president relishes. He has told aides, in fact, that he is pleased with the Democratic reaction to his attacks, boasting that he is ‘marrying’ the House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic Party to the four congresswomen known as ‘the Squad.’” Meanwhile, nativist incidents against immigrant groups continue to rise, with only the Caucasian sons of Scotswomen seemingly exempt.

This metastasizing conflagration of hatred may stand as the reason that Congressman Al Green, the Houston representative who was born in New Orleans’ Charity Hospital, managed to convince 95 members of the U.S. House of Representatives to vote in support of his resolution authorizing articles of impeachment. He noted “to tolerate bigotry is to perpetuate bigotry, especially when you can do something about it.”

Green argued that the House should go farther and move to impeach Trump for a pattern of inflaming racial tensions in America. “The effort [on Wednesday condemning Trump] was wonderful. I supported it. But it does not punish the President,” Green said in a House floor speech.

Speaker Pelosi, though, considers impeachment too politically fraught to attempt, with little chance of a conviction in a Senate trial. Yet, when only four members of the Party of Lincoln stand up against racism, and Trump considers a resolution reprimanding him a political positive, we must find a way to more loudly proclaim this truth:

Any person who is sworn in as – or born – a citizen of this country, no matter their family’s place of origin, ethnicity, or religion has as much right to be called American as those whose ancestors landed with the first settlers. This is what has always made America great. Alas, ending Trump’s unwelcome racist rants may only come at the ballot box in November 2020. Until then, even the President’s closest Republican supporters should care that he appears neither shamed by Congress, nor so a feared of electorate as to pack a bag for the Outer Hebrides.

This article originally published in the July 22, 2019 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.