Still, Against Trump
NOTE: This essay is a sequel, of sorts, to my critique of Trump before the 2016 election, which was entitled “Against Trump.” Like many other Americans, I gave Trump a chance and hoped for the best, but the results haven’t been encouraging. I will also discuss the sexual misconduct allegations against the President in great detail, which might make some readers uncomfortable.
“The cruelty is the point.”
I won’t be voting for Trump in 2020. I didn’t vote for him 2016, either, but I had hoped that he would prove himself better as a president than as a candidate. It is said that the weight of the Oval Office has a tempering effect, though Trump has proven considerably resistant. Granted, Trump as president hasn’t reached our worst nightmares, and despite what the pundits will tell you, I don’t think he’s the worst president in history, but he’s still been very dangerous. The damage that Trump has done to our nation won’t be cleared in one election, but defeating him will be an important first step.
Out of fairness, I will first make note of the things Trump has done which are worthy of praise. As you can imagine, the list is rather short, but regardless, I want to give credit where credit is due:
The pardon of Alice Johnson, a black grandmother imprisoned for a non-violent drug offense in 1996, was unquestionably just. Granted, it took some prodding from Kim Kardashian West to get him there, but he deserves some credit for following through. In addition to this, Trump has also signed the First Step Act, which aimed at criminal justice reform for low level-drug offenders, and the results have been concrete: over 2,000 people saw sentence reductions (91% were African-American), 342 people had been approved for the elderly confinement pilot program, 107 people had received compassionate release sentence reductions, and the expansion of good-time credits led to the release of 3,000 from federal prisons.
His appointment of Nikki Haley as UN Ambassador was also a good choice. She has called out the UN’s bias against Israel, she has raised the issue of minorities under attack, such as the Uighurs in China, the Rohingya in Myanmar, the gay men in Chechnya, and she has also criticized Russia’s attempts to block the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) from inspecting Iran’s nuclear program. Now, I don’t agree with Haley on everything. I have objected to her praise of Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, her refusal to criticize America’s role in Yemen’s civil war, or her ludicrous claim that Democratic leaders “mourned” the death of Qassem Soleimani. An inconsistent voice, but a rather refreshing one for this administration.
Trump oversaw the death of Abu Bakr El-Baghdadi, the founder of ISIS, and the cause of untold suffering in the Middle East and abroad. His death alone won’t be enough to stem the tide of terror in the region, but the loss of his leadership may have made ISIS less effective. Trump also oversaw the killing of the Iranian General Qassem Soleimani, who was every bit the terrorist that El-Baghdadi was. He used the Revolutionary Guards Quds Force to organize insurgency attacks against Iraqis, Americans, and Syrians. Soleimani deserved what came for him, but it’s perfectly reasonable to object to the legality of the killing and express skepticism of Trump’s wider strategy, as the journalist Oz Katerji wrote: “His death has made the world a better place. But it has also made the world a less safe place.”
Trump has signed an executive order to make hospital prices transparent and require insurance companies to provide cost estimates ahead of care. I always found it strange that, despite having a “free market” healthcare system, people don’t even know the prices of the available services. Imagine restaurants where the menus had no prices, so you wouldn’t know the cost of your meal until the check came. Now, not everyone has the privilege to shop around and patients may still end up paying high prices, but transparency is a step in the right direction. While we’re on the topic of health care, Trump has also signed an executive order to improve kidney care by emphasizing more effective treatments, making more kidneys available for transplant, and reducing the number of people who develop end-stage renal disease by 25% by 2030.
Though Trump may do a few good things, I won’t magically forget about the sort of man he is. I’m won’t forget that he ran his campaign on racist demagoguery and has been credibly accused of sexual misconduct. The overriding theme of his administration is a temper tantrum against the previous one. Trump behaves like an arrogant child who doesn’t like the way his mother cleaned his room, so he wrecks everything in his room and refuses to clean up anything at all. Trump doesn’t deserve four more years, and here are the reasons why:
Trump rejects scientific truth.
“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread, winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means, ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’”
- Isaac Asimov, science-fiction writer and educator
Trump’s election is the peak of anti-intellectualism in American culture. Now, “anti-intellectual" doesn’t mean stupid. I use the word to refer to a distrust of expert opinion which devolves from a healthy skepticism to a general revulsion towards anything perceived as “elitist.” I also use it to refer to a tendency among humans to privilege one’s gut over one’s mind. Anti-intellectualism is the denial of that which makes rational sense because it doesn’t fit with an acquired perception of reality. It is the feeling that, of course, two planes alone couldn’t bring down the World Trade Center. It is the certainty that any reports of human rights violations in China must be Western propaganda. It is the insistence that there must be some secret cure to cancer that they don’t want you to know about. These delusions are quite common, and liberals shouldn’t act as if they are above them.
Trump has also been fueled by our infotainment culture that elevates bombast over reflection. It isn’t an accident that Trump’s iconic image was solidified through his career as a reality TV star on The Apprentice. The problem isn’t so much that millions enjoy watching The Apprentice, the problem is that they saw it as a documentary. It’s pointless to list Trump’s numerous failed business ventures to his supporters, because that image in The Apprentice is indelible. Trump is a showman and we’re all complicit in the show.
Consider the rot of cable news, where talking heads shout over each other in five minute sound bites or where agents of fear try to make you believe that the other side is either the next Mao or Hitler. Debate, or what passes for it, either consists of the laughable presidential debates (which are about as sincere as pro-wrestling) or videos of young college students getting “destroyed” by pseudo-intellectuals who spit talking points faster than Speedy Gonzales. Newspapers are also on the decline, so more and more columnists have to write incendiary clickbait to keep competitive. On social media, the most popular posts are usually the ones that best feed into preconceived biases and stereotypes. It’s only natural, then, that Trump’s megaphone of choice is Twitter, where nuance goes to die.
Trump’s anti-scientific views are fueled by a prominent vein of conservatism that discredits science whenever it is ideologically inconvenient. Evolution by natural selection and the Big Bang theory are anathema because they appear to contradict the biblical creation myth. Solutions to crises like anthropogenic global warming might involve new taxes or the curtailment of fossil fuel industries, and so its severity must be discredited. Right-wing radio host Rush Limbaugh, who enjoys 15 million listeners, has downplayed the risks of secondhand smoking and denies the scientific evidence of climate change and ozone depletion. Neurosurgeon Ben Carson, who competed against Trump for presidential candidate and is now in his cabinet, has referred to the Big Bang as a fairy tale and evolution as Satanic. It doesn’t matter to these people that the Catholic Church accepts evolution or that GOP congressman Bob Inglis changed his mind on climate change. Political tribalism won’t allow for such complexities.
What a shame, too, because climate change represents the greatest challenge of our time. It is caused when greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide, trap the sun’s heat in the atmosphere and increase global temperatures. These gases are released by the burning of fossil fuels and the industrial farming that has built modern society. NASA estimates that humans have increased CO2 concentration in the atmosphere by 47% since the Industrial Revolution. The denialists argue that we can’t know how much warming is caused by humans, but 97% of climate scientists as well as roughly 200 scientific organizations agree that global warming is man-made. The consequences of this continued warming include more intense weather events such as droughts, hurricanes, and rainstorms, an increase in global sea levels due to ice melt, the acidification of the oceans due to absorption of CO2, the spread of diseases once confined to tropical areas, the mass extinction of numerous plants and animals, an increase in crop failure and food shortage, and a decrease in nutritious plants.
The denialists argue that such frank discussion is “alarmism” and that we can’t trust the climate models. On the contrary, just this year, NASA compared 17 climate prediction models between 1970 and 2004, finding that 14 of them to be accurate about the rate of warming. Far from being alarmist, many scientists have accused the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) of being too conservative. In fact, the effects of climate change can be observed in real time. The National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) found that the ten warmest years since they began recording in the mid-1970s have all been after 1998. The rising ocean temperatures have caused the Great Barrier Reef to suffer its worst coral bleaching on record this year, the third such mass bleaching event over the past five years. The Antarctic ice shelves have lost 4 million metric tons of ice since 1994. In 2019, Greenland lost more ice than in any year since 1948. In 2009, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers identified 31 Native Alaskan villages that face imminent threats due to growing erosion and flooding, 12 of which have already relocated. Acting on climate change should be our number one priority, but is Trump treating it like one?
Trump has repeatedly called climate change a hoax, though he’s recently conceded that humans bear some responsibility. Early in his administration, Al Gore met with Trump and Ivanka to find some common ground on climate change. Trump replied to this gesture by exiting from the Paris Climate Accord. The problem with the Paris Accord, as climate scientist James Hansen has said, is that it didn’t impose a global carbon tax to incentivize de-carbonization. Nobel Prize winning economist, William Nordhaus, found that carbon taxes are the most efficient means of reducing emissions. As of this writing, Trump has not signaled any interest in embracing a carbon tax, even though his top economic advisor does. Nuclear energy should be a central part of any climate change solution, given that it’s the largest source of carbon-free energy in the U.S. In this respect, Trump has made a positive step, given that he plans to bolster nuclear energy at home and abroad, with $1.2 billion set for nuclear research. He undercuts this, however, through other policies that will all but increase carbon emissions. He intends to rollback Obama-era regulations that pushed the auto industry to make more energy efficient vehicles. This will result in the release of billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Far from cutting back on fossil fuels, Trump wants to begin drilling in all U.S. waters, the greatest expansion of oil and gas leasing ever proposed. We can only conclude that despite his modest support for nuclear energy, Trump’s overall policy fails to grasp the gravity of the climate threat.
With Trump’s response to COVID-19, we have seen the consequences of electing a leader who puts his feelings over facts. Trump is a disciple of Minister Norman Vincent Peale, who taught his followers that any problem could be overcome and any goal achieved through the power of positive thinking. Trump attended Peale’s sermons and had his first marriage at Peale’s church. Knowing that Trump was influenced by a man who once said that there were no hopeless situations, but “only people who take hopeless attitudes,” his reaction to COVID-19 makes more sense.
In the early months of the pandemic, Trump repeatedly downplayed the severity of the virus. On January 30, when the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a public health emergency, Trump said, “We have it well under control.” That same day, Trump received a call from his health and human services secretary, Alex Azar II, who warned him that COVID-19 could be a public health emergency. Trump dismissed him as being alarmist. In February, Trump told a rally that he believed the virus would subside with warmer temperatures. Later that month, he incredulously claimed that a vaccine would be available “very quickly.” In March, he suggested that COVID-19 would be less dangerous than the flu. Trump has also occasionally downplayed the importance of masks, saying in April, that he couldn’t see himself wearing one. Trump has also promoted unproven cures like hydroxychloroquine, going so far as to bolster supportive doctors like Stella Immanuel, who also believe that gynecological diseases are caused by sex with demons. By no means does Trump deserve all the blame for COVID-19’s spread throughout the country, but his leadership has hindered the federal response and spread pseudoscience among the people.
By dismissing any criticisms from the media as “fake news,” Trump has inculcated his followers from any critical opinions of his untruthful statements. As a result, many of his supporters unfailingly believe in whatever he says and does, regardless of whether or not it makes any scientific sense.
Trump’s foreign policy is premised on continuing Obama’s failures.
One of the first things that Trump did after his election was to tear to shreds Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran. The aim of Obama’s deal was to allow Iran the freedom to enrich nuclear power, while restricting their ability to attain a nuclear weapon. In exchange for sanctions relief, Iran agreed to a number of restrictions: the limitation of centrifuges to no more than 5,060, limitation of uranium stockpiles by 98%, the limitation of enrichment by 3.67%, preventing the construction of heavy-water reactors that could produce plutonium, and allowing the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) free-range to inspect any area of Iran they found suspicious.
I supported the deal because I believed it was the best means of avoiding a possible military confrontation with Iran. That said, I admit that there were legitimate criticisms of the deal. Arab Spring activist Iyad-El Baghdadi was also a supporter of the deal, but has since reflected that “Iran’s foreign policy was not at all tempered by the deal — it only became more aggressive, ramping up support for Syria’s Assad and with the IRGC even going to the extent of recruiting and training Afghani refugees to fight in return for asylum for their families.” This hits at the deal’s central problem, it opposed non-proliferation in isolation, allowing Iran to freely destabilize the region. There have even been allegations in Politico that to secure this deal, the Obama administration stopped law a enforcement campaign targeting the drug trafficking operations of Iran-backed terror group Hezbollah.
Imperfect though it was, the Iran Deal was the only international check on Iran’s nuclear enrichment program. Ever since Trump left the agreement, Iran has tripled its stockpiles of enriched uranium. What is Trump’s plan to prevent Iran from seeking a nuclear weapon? He has boasted of renegotiating a better deal with Iran, but as of this writing, he has yet to produce one.
The refusal to intervene against Bashar al-Assad’s butchery in Syria will remain Obama’s greatest failure as president. After the quagmire of Afghanistan, the disaster of Iraq, and the fleeting victory of Libya, Obama was understandably skeptical of American military force, but while military intervention can produce terrible results, nonintervention can produce worse ones. As of March 2020, 384,000 people have died in the war, with the majority of civilian deaths at the hands of Assad. Obama warned Assad in 2012 that the use of chemical weapons would cross a “red line” that would warrant a military response. In 2013, after Assad used chemical weapons on his own people in Damascus, Aleppo, and Ghouta, Obama sought congressional approval for military strikes. Fearing intervention, Russia reached a deal with the United States to have all of Syria’s chemical arms destroyed by the middle of 2014. The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2013 for its efforts in overseeing the deal, declared in 2016 that it had destroyed all of Syria’s chemical arms.
This declaration, of course, proved to be a lie. As early as 2014, in fact, Assad had been accused of using a chemical weapons in the rebel-held town of Kafr-Zita. The more infamous attack occurred in 2017, when Assad launched a sarin gas attack on Khan Sheikoun, which killed 58 people, including 11 children. This gave Trump the opportunity to respond where Obama had failed. He ordered the launch of Tomahawk cruise missiles at the airbase where the chemical attacks were carried out. However, just hours after the attack, Assad began to attack the rebels again, even on Khan Sheikoun, from that very same base. This was because the United States had given Russia advance warning of the attack, and they turn warned Syria, which gave Assad enough time to prepare. The sheer ineffectiveness of this attack was laid bare when, in 2018, aid groups blamed Assad for yet another chemical attack in Douma, which killed 42 people. Trump responded yet again with military strikes, but was this time joined by France and the United Kingdom, tweeting, “Mission Accomplished!” The Pentagon, however, was sure to note that military strikes notwithstanding, Assad still retained the ability to launch future chemical attacks.
There are some ways, however, in which Trump has gone beyond Obama in foreign policy blunders. Nowhere was this better crystallized than in his abandonment of the Kurds. The Kurds were promised a state by the Allied Powers after World War I, but their land was instead divided among Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. Throughout the Cold War, the U.S. repeatedly supported and abandoned the Kurds whenever convenient to their objectives. More recently, the Kurds proved to be indispensable allies in the fight against ISIS, most famously in the battle of Kobani. Since Turkey’s founding in 1923, Kurdish minorities have been prevented from cultural expression and even speaking their own language. It is in this context that the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) launched an insurgency against Turkey that has since claimed 40,000 lives, most of them Kurdish civilians slain by Turkey’s hand. Though while the PKK may not be responsible of most of these causalities, they are still guilty of war crimes, such as the recruiting of child soldiers.
When Turkey launched an offensive against Kurdish-controlled northeast Syria in 2019, Trump abruptly withdrew the 1,000 troops that stood in their way, blindsiding both government officials and the Kurds themselves. The results were predictably horrific. Amnesty International found that Turkey openly committed war crimes against civilians, while the forced displacement of 190,000 Kurds with tactics such as white phosphorus was considered by some to be a form of ethnic cleansing. This was all entirely preventable, but Trump permitted it to placate Turkey’s authoritarian leader, Tayyip Erdogan, of whom Trump has spoken quite fondly, even going so far as to praise Erdogan’s relationship with the Kurds.
Is this a man to be trusted with a foreign policy that confronts authoritarians?
Trump has put his personal racism into harmful domestic policies against Muslims and Latin Immigrants.
Yes, I’m well aware that Trump isn’t the first racist president and I doubt he’ll be the last. Andrew Jackson passed the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which forcibly expelled many Native Americans, and led to the deaths of 4,000 Cherokee on a march known as the Trail of Tears. Woodrow Wilson supported the racial segregation of federal offices as beneficial for the races and screened D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation at the White House. Franklin D. Roosevelt seized on domestic anti-Japanese sentiment during World War II to pass an executive order which forced 120,000 Japanese-Americans into internment camps. Richard Nixon, in addition to being a virulent anti-Semite, had racist and misogynistic views towards Indians that may have influenced his support for the 1971 Bangladeshi genocide. Ronald Reagan referred to Tanzanian delegates at the UN as “monkeys” and initially opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (though he later came to support such laws in the 1980s). Never mind that many of the Founding Fathers were slave owners. Trump’s election is alarming, not because he is the first racist president, but because he was elected at a time when America appeared to be shifting away from its racist roots.
It’s quite telling that the election of the first black president was followed by the election of a man who accused that president of being born in Kenya. Trump’s election proved that droves of people will vote for a racist for political purposes, and indeed, that racism is still appealing to many Americans. This is not to say that all Trump voters are racists, but that most of them didn’t mind giving a racist the highest seat in the nation. In regards to policy, Trump has made explicit appeals to bigotry and xenophobia as the proper solutions to the issues of immigration and terrorism.
When Trump began his presidential campaign in 2015, he alleged that most of the illegal immigrants who crossed the U.S. border from Mexico and Latin America brought drugs, crime, and rape along with them. Trump grossly exaggerated this issue to sow racial fears. FactCheck.org examined multiple studies that found no conclusive relationship between an increase in illegal immigrants and an increase in crime. In fact, Alex Nowrasteh of the Cato Institute found that crime in counties along the border is lower than crime in counties elsewhere in the country. David J. Bier, also of Cato, found that 77% of drug traffickers are American citizens, not illegal immigrants. The other 23% of which could be stopped in their tracks if we ended the foolish War on Drugs. Trump does not mention these things because he is more motivated by racism than by evidence. You need only look at his argument that Judge Gonzalo Curiel couldn’t be impartial in presiding over a Trump University lawsuit because he was of Mexican heritage. Former Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, denounced Trump’s remarks as textbook racism. I suggest we take him at his word.
Now, the abuses of our immigration system far predate Trump, and any critique of his policies must acknowledge that. Dwight D. Eisenhower began “Operation Wetback” in 1954, which deported hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants who had crossed the U.S.-Mexico border. Human rights violations were common, such as one instance where hundreds of undocumented persons left in a Mexican desert where 88 died of heat stroke. In 1996, Bill Clinton passed immigration reform bills that increased mandatory detention of non-citizens awaiting deportation trials, some of which could be indefinite if they had no country to return to. In response to the 9/11 attacks, George W. Bush created the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), a subsidiary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to target the “people, money, and materials” that aid terrorist or criminal activities. This shift helped to frame immigration as a national security issue, which in turn encouraged more punitive responses. Indeed, in 2003, ICE outlined a plan known as “Operation Endgame,” which had the aim of 100% deportation of all illegal immigrants by 2012.
Barack Obama was infamously dubbed the “Deporter-in-Chief” by Latino rights activist Janet Murguía. This was hardly hyperbole, given that Obama deported 2.5 million people. Indeed, a 2014 New York Times investigation found that two-thirds of those deported under Obama had either committed minor infractions or had no criminal record. That same year, however, Obama pledged to focus his deportation policy on actual security threats, or as he phrased it: “felons not families,” but a felon is not always a threat. As Human Rights Watch has argued, Clinton’s 1996 law “defined a greatly expanded range of criminal convictions — including relatively minor, nonviolent ones — for which legal permanent residents could be automatically deported.” The result gives us cases like that of Roland Sylvain, who was nearly deported for the crime of signing his cousin’s name on a speeding ticket. In 2016, the Marshall Project found that of the 300,000 people deported since Obama’s “felons, not families” speech, fewer than 20% were violent criminals. A 2018 investigation by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) also found patterns of child abuse among the Border Patrol between 2009 and 2014. It is these policies, from Eisenhower to Obama, that set the stage for the barbarous crimes that Trump has committed along the border.
No, detention and deportation did not start under Trump, but it is he who has pursued and escalated it. Unlike Reagan, who passed an immigration reform bill in 1986 that granted amnesty to nearly 3 million illegal immigrants, or Bush, who in 2007 tried to pass an immigrant reform bill in 2007 that would have granted legalization to 12 million illegal immigrants, or Obama, who in 2012 authorized the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which would delay deportation for those who had illegally crossed the border as minors, Trump hasn’t even bothered to entertain compromise or compassion for illegal immigrants. It should be of little shock, then, that the President has also praised the model of “Operation Wetback.” The racism behind Trump’s handling of immigration is made blindingly clear in his selection of Stephen Miller as a senior policy advisor.
Miller spent his high school years harassing Latino students who spoke Spanish and was good friends with Neo-Nazi Richard Spencer in college. The Southern Poverty Law Center also found evidence of Miller’s white nationalist sympathies in a leaked email correspondence between him and Breitbart from 2015 to 2016, where he spoke favorably of racist sites like VDARE, the anti-refugee novel The Camp of the Saints, and anti-Muslim extremist Pamela Geller. This is the brainchild of Trump’s immigration policies. The suffering is intentional.
Trump’s version of “felons not families” is “bad hombres,” and like before, many of those targeted are hardly dangerous. In 2019, ICE saw a record 63.5% drop in the number of illegal immigrants it arrested with a criminal record, the lowest since 2012. Nor is Trump only targeting illegal immigrants. He also threw his support behind the Raise Act, which, if passed, would cut legal immigration by 50% over 10 years. Trump also wants to terminate birthright citizenship in America by executive order.
The Trump administration also saw a rise in asylum seekers from Central America, most of whom are fleeing gang violence, government persecution, and abusive spouses. Article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognizes the right to asylum for those fleeing persecution, but that doesn’t much matter to Trump. He has outlined a series of proposals to restrict U.S. asylum law, which includes: denying claims where the applicant suffered persecution due to their gender, allowing judges to deny applications without a court hearing or testimony, and creating new barriers to asylum such as making applicants wait 150 days before seeking employment authorization.
As you can imagine, hundreds of non-citizens are in detention facilities, many of whom shouldn’t be there to start with. The conditions of these facilities is also grotesque. A joint 2020 report from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Human Rights Watch (HRW), and the National Immigration Justice Center (NIJC) found that many detained had little access to medical care, had been isolated from legal counsel, had no soap for bathing, and at least 12 died by suicide. Francisco Erwin Galicia, one among the many U.S citizens unlawfully detained at these facilities, said that he was not allowed to shower, make a phone call, and lost 26 pounds due to the lack of food. Trump also reversed a 2016 policy that discouraged the detention of pregnant women, and as a result, their detention rose 80% the following year. Several Democratic lawmakers who have visited these detention facilities also claim that migrants were expected to drink from the toilet water. It doesn’t have to be this way. Given that most of these people are not a threat, we can use the same alternatives to detention that we use in pre-trial criminal justice, such as release on recognizance, community support or bond, and formal monitoring programs.
By far, the most unconscionable aspect of Trump’s immigration policies is his separation of families that cross the border. Trump can’t pin this on previous administrations. This is on him. Bush also had a “zero tolerance” policy of prosecuting anyone who illegally crossed the border, but generally did not separate adults traveling with children during detention. Obama considered doing so in 2014 when hundreds of children arrived at the border, but ultimately decided against it. NBC News estimates from numbers given to them by DHS that more than 4,100 children were separated from their families on the border and the effects have been brutal.
Star Trek actor George Takei, a survivor of Japanese-American internment, described the family separation policy as worse than his experiences: “I and other children were not stripped from our parents. We were not pulled screaming from our mothers’ arms. We were not left to change the diapers of younger children by ourselves.” Lawyers investigating an El Paso facility found that the children detained often lacked adequate food, water, and sanitation. A report from the Department of Health and Human Services found that the children separated suffered serious trauma, such as anger at their parents or fear for their own lives. Anyone who doubts this should listen to the ProPublica recording of the sobbing children who were just torn from their parents. There have also been harrowing allegations of detained children being forcibly injected with psychiatric drugs. After international criticism that ranged from four former First Ladies to Pope Francis, Trump signed an executive order ending the policy in June of 2018, and then covertly continued it. Indeed, Border Patrol continues to separate families today under the guise of preventing coronavirus infections. Let’s not mince our words here: This is child abuse. And in case you’re curious, government data has found that the policy had little deterrent effect on migrants crossing the border.
Trump’s signature campaign promise was to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. The sheer stupidity of this idea must be briefly reiterated. The wall is a solution to a fictitious problem. There are no hordes of migrants flooding into our homes and wreaking havoc. While there has been a brief surge in migrant crossings this year, the New York Times notes that they are far lower than crossings of past decades. In any case, a wall wouldn’t even stop most illegal immigrants. The Center for Migration Studies found that for seven consecutive years, visa overstays surpassed border crossings in illegal immigration. The wall could also be evaded through tunnels. As late as this year, border officials found their longest smuggling tunnel ever under the U.S.-Mexico border. The wall could also have a negative effects on over 100 endangered species that cross the border. The wall would also need to run through privately-owned land, a lot of which won’t be yielded voluntarily. The wall is a waste of money that creates more problems than it solves.
Trump is a proud anti-Muslim bigot. He has repeatedly claimed, without evidence, that he saw thousands of Arab-Americans celebrating the 9/11 attacks in New Jersey. The implication being that most Arab-Americans (i.e. Muslims) are terrorist sympathizers. On the campaign trail, Trump suggested committing unconstitutional acts against Muslims, such a complete ban on all Muslims entering the country, as well as a national registry of all Muslims. Khizr Khan, who lost his son in Iraq, famously challenged the constitutionality of Trump’s statements at the 2016 DNC, imploring him to find the words “liberty” and “equal protection under the law.” Trump replied by suggesting that Khizr’s wife, Ghazala, who was silent during his DNC speech was forbidden from speaking due to being a Muslim wife. Ghazala later explained that she did not speak out of grief over her son. Since coming into office, Trump’s bigotry has hardly moderated. He has retweeted anti-Muslim videos from the neo-fascist group, Britain First, and has also implied that Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Muslim congresswoman, wasn’t a “real” American due to her immigrant status.
Trump, of course, couldn’t legally implement a complete Muslim ban, so he tried to get as near to that as he could without running afoul of the constitution. New York mayor, Rudy Giuliani, confessed to Fox News that this was exactly what Trump wanted, his intent was always to discriminate on the basis of religion, but hid it behind another guise. On January 27, 2017, Trump passed Executive Order 13769, which banned the travel of foreigners from seven Muslim countries for 90 days, suspended the entry of all Syrian refugees, and prohibited any other refugees from entering for 120 days. The seven Muslim majority countries selected by Trump for the ban, Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya, Sudan, Yemen, and Somalia, were previously restricted by the Obama administration as “countries of concern,” though Obama did not ban all would-be entrants.
In the text of the executive order, Trump cites the 9/11 attacks as a justification for the ban, but of the ten Islamist terror attacks on American soil since 9/11, none of the attackers came from any of the nations banned. In fact, the order excluded the very nations from which the hijackers claimed origin: Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Lebanon, United Arab Emirates, Pakistan, Russia, and Kyrgyzstan. Furthermore, an internal report from the DHS on the executive order found that “country of citizenship is unlikely to be a reliable indicator of potential terrorist activity.” The price we paid for this ban was high, indeed. Glenn Kessler of The Washington Post estimated that 90,000 visas were affected by the travel ban, many of whom were foreign-born doctors and students.
The ban, of course, was met with legal challenges almost as soon as it was passed, and as a result, Trump passed a watered-down version of the ban on March 6, 2017. The new executive order removed Iraq from the list of banned nations, exempted green card holders and those with current valid visas, and ended the indefinite block of Syrian refugees. Through a number of later presidential proclamations, Sudan was removed while Venezuelan officials and North Korean nationals were included. On June 28, 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the latest version of the travel ban in a narrow 5–4 decision, the majority opinion being that the president has a right to ban the entry of any migrants if he finds it to be in the national interest. The court also argued that President does not need to explain his reasoning. They emphasized that since the ban is temporary, it is assumed that these restrictions will end as soon the apparent threat subsides. Moreover, the court said that they would not take into account Trump’s previous statements on a Muslim ban, and instead neutrally assess the order on its own merits. They made the point that “the removal of three Muslim-majority countries (Iraq, Sudan and Chad) from the list, the existence of carve-outs for non-immigrant permanent residents and asylum seekers, and the inclusion of a waiver program all add plausibility to the travel ban’s facially claimed purposes.”
I disagree with the court’s ruling. The order is still effectively a Muslim ban, given that very few North Korean visas are actually issued out and that the Venezuelans restrictions only target a few government officials. What Trump doesn’t understand is that ideology can take root anywhere and easily spread across borders through the Internet. The Muslim ban, like his family separation policy, is less about preventing crime and more about exacting cruelty towards migrants. Outside of some empty rhetoric, Trump has shown little empathy for the suffering of those who desperately arrive here. Nor has he shown any interest in solving the problems that cause them to flee.
Reasonable people can disagree on how best to craft a sensible immigration and refugee policy, but should such policies be made at the direction of xenophobes and racists?
Trump has been credibly accused by over twenty women of various forms of sexual misconduct and inappropriate behavior.
“You can’t work in Hollywood if you’re a sexual predator, but can you become the commander-in-chief?”
Again, I realize that Trump isn’t the first president to be guilty of sexual misconduct: Thomas Jefferson impregnated his black slave Sally Hemings. John F. Kennedy pressured his intern, Mimi Alford, into giving oral sex to his friends. Richard Nixon allegedly beat his wife Pat so terribly that she ended up in the hospital. Bill Clinton, in addition to the Lewinsky affair, has been accused to varying degrees of sexual misconduct by Paula Jones, Kathleen Wiley, Juanita Broaddrick, and Leslie Millwee. However, the fact that we’ve elected sexists in the past shouldn’t permit the election of sexists in the future.
Trump’s alleged sexual misconduct should’ve been grounds for an impeachment trial alone. If Clinton was impeached for lying about oral sex, then surely Trump could face the same punishment for lying about sexual assault. The infamous Access Hollywood tape, where he boasts that his celebrity allows him to do whatever he wants with women, could be dismissed as mere “locker room talk” in isolation. However, his words must also be taken with the fact that he has been credibly accused by several women of serious sexual misconduct. To dismiss all of these women of lying for political or financial gain would amount to a conspiracy unheard of in the history of American politics.
1) Jessica Leeds
Leeds alleges that in the 1970’s, Trump groped her in the while seated next to her on a flight to New York, likening his hands to that of an “octopus.” She ran to the back of the plane, but did not complain to the staff, as such advances were common in her field at the time.
2) Kristin Anderson
Anderson alleges that in the 1990s, while working as a model at a club, Trump reached under her miniskirt and touched her vagina through her underwear. Anderson’s friend, Kelly Stedman, testified to The Washington Post that Anderson told her about this incident at the time. Anderson, for the record, supported neither Trump nor Hillary.
3) Jill Harth
Harth first brought forward a lawsuit against Trump alleging “attempted rape” in 1997, well before he ever announced his run for President. Harth later dropped the suit after her partner, George Houraney, had settle with Trump over his withdrawal from the American Dream festival. She resolved to never speak of it again until May of 2016, when Trump referred to her as a liar. She alleges that Trump repeatedly made unwanted sexual advances towards her, which culminated in a physical assault while her partner was in the other room.
4–8) 1997 Miss Teen USA Contestants
Buzzfeed News was able to get five former contestants of 1997’s Miss Teen USA, which Trump owned at the time, to testify that he walked in on them while they were changing. One of the contestants, Mariah Billado, recalled, “I remember putting on my dress really quick because I was like, ‘Oh my god, there’s a man in here.’” Victoria Hughes, Miss New Mexico Teen USA, who was also a witness to the alleged incident, said that many of the girls were underage, with the youngest being 15. Trump, of course, had openly admitted to such behavior on Howard Stern’s radio show: “Well, I’ll tell you the funniest is that before a show, I’ll go backstage and everyone’s getting dressed, and everything else, and you know, no men are anywhere, and I’m allowed to go in because I’m the owner of the pageant and therefore I’m inspecting it.” I should note here that 11 other contestants in the dressing room do not recall seeing Trump barge in, and among them, Miss Wisconsin Teen USA, Allison Bowman, and Miss Massachusetts Teen USA, Jessica Granata, both expressed doubt about the allegations.
9) E. Jean Carroll
Carroll is a well-known columnist of Elle magazine, who in her book, What Do We Need Men For?, alleged that Trump raped her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the 1990s. Trump denied that he ever met Carroll, even though she has produced a photo of them together from 1987. Two friends of Carroll, a magazine reporter and a TV anchor, confirmed to the New York Times that she told them about this incident at the time.
10) Temple Taggart McDowell
McDowell was a Miss USA contestant in 1997, and alleges that after being introduced to Trump, the President embraced her and kissed her on the lips. When she met him again in Trump Tower, he once more embraced her and kissed her on the lips in front of two pageant chaperones. This allegedly made one of the chaperones uncomfortable, who advised her not enter any room alone with Trump.
11) Cathy Heller
Heller told The Guardian that while at a Mother’s Day brunch in Mar-a-Lago, Trump grabbed her and kissed her as soon as they were introduced. The Guardian also heard from Susan Klein, a friend of Heller’s, and an unnamed relative, who witnessed the event and could attest to the allegation.
12) Rachel Crooks
Crooks alleges that while working at Trump Tower in 2006, Trump forcibly started kissing her. For evidence of this, she also provided three emails she sent out to relatives not long after the incident occurred.
13) Summer Zervos
Zervos, a former contestant of The Apprentice, alleges that Trump sexually assaulted her on two separate incidents in 2007. The first time was at a New York office with a kiss on the lips and the second time was at a Beverley Hills office, that involved not only kissing, but groping her breast and thrusting his genitals. According to a 2019 court filing from her lawyers, Zervos contacted her lawyers about the incident in 2011 and contacted Fox News about it in 2015. This was all well before he became the Republican nominee. Zervos’ lawyers also produced cellphone records proving that he called to invite her to dinner, the day she alleged an assault occurred.
14) Alva Johnson
Johnson, who was staffer for Trump’s 2016 campaign, has accused the president of forcibly kissing her without her consent at a rally in Florida. She told The Washington Post that she “immediately felt violated” by the experience.
15) Amy Dorris
Dorris, a former model, has recently alleged that Trump forced his tongue down her throat during a 1997 US Open tennis tournament. To support her claims, Dorris provided photos with her meetings with Trump, including her ticket to the game. Several people, including friends, her mother, and therapist, all confided to The Guardian that she had told them about the incident not long after it happened.
16) Karena Virginia
Virginia has alleged that Trump groped her breast outside of a 1998 US Open and that she had long felt shame for what occurred, saying, “your moment of random sexual pleasure came at my expense and affected me greatly.”
17) Karen Johnson
Johnson has alleged in Barry Levine and Monique El-Faizy’s book, All the President’s Women: Donald Trump and the Making of a Predator, that Trump grabbed and forcibly kissed her during a 2000s New Year’s Eve party at Mar-a-Lago. Johnson’s account was corroborated by documentation and photographs, as well as a former friend who was informed by Johnson about the incident before.
18) Natasha Stoynoff
Stoynoff, a journalist and author, wrote in People that she traveled to Mar-a-Lago in 2005 to cover Trump’s first wedding anniversary to Melania Knauss. She then alleges that Trump guided her to one of the rooms in his mansion, where he then pushed her against the wall and forced his tongue down her throat. People also brought in six witnesses who can corroborate that Stoynoff told them about the assault at the time. It should also be noted that Trump’s butler, the late Anthony Senecal, who was, according to Stoynoff, a partial witness to the event, denied that said incident ever occurred. It should also be noted that Senecal believed that Obama was a secret Muslim, called for his execution by the military, and called for the use of nuclear weapons to wipe out the Muslim populations of Detroit and Milwaukee.
19) Mindy McGillivray
McGillivray, a friend of Mar-a-Lago’s official photographer Ken Davidoff, was brought along by Davidoff for 2003 Ray Charles concert. She alleges that Trump groped her at the concert. Davidoff corroborated this account, alleging that McGillivray told him “Donald just grabbed my ass!” I should note that Ken’s brother, Darryl, who also present, denies that the event ever happened, and has accused her and Ken of seeking publicity. Ken, in turn, has replied that Darryl fears their family business will lose customers, many of whom are Trump supporters.
20) Jessica Drake
Drake, an adult film actress, alleges that after meeting Trump at a golf tournament at Lake Tahoe, that he invited her and her friends into his suite. He kissed all three of them without permission and then repeatedly phoned her with unwanted sexual advances.
21) Ninni Laaksoonen
Laaksoonen, the former Miss Finland, alleges that Trump grabbed her buttocks in 2006 before a joint appearance on The Late Show with David Letterman.
22) Cassandra Seales
Seales, Miss Washington 2013, accused Trump of treating the Miss USA contestants like cattle, has also accused him grabbing her buttocks and inviting her into his hotel room.
23) Tasha Dixon
Dixon, former Miss Arizona, alleges that Trump walked into the dressing room of the 2001 Miss USA pageant contestants, while many were still topless and naked. Her account is contested by Miss California Carrie Prejean Bollier, was also there at the time.
24) Bridget Sullivan
Sullivan, former Miss New Hampshire, also alleges that Trump barged into the dressing rooms of the Miss USA contestants and stared at them while they were naked.
25) Samantha Holvey
Holvey, former Miss North Carolina USA, also alleges that while competing for Miss USA in 2006, Trump barged into the dressing room along with his wife.
Now, is it possible that some of these women might be lying for political gain? Yes, I suppose so. It is also possible that some of the women who accused Cosby and Weinstein might be lying, too. Does that discredit all of their claims? To paraphrase Carl Sagan, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and the claim that all of these women are lying, or engaged in sort of Clintonian conspiracy to smear the President, demands an overwhelming amount of evidence that Trump and his supporters have yet to persuasively provide.
To Trump’s defenders, I ask only this: Would Harvey Weinstein or Bill Cosby be forgiven if either were elected to the Oval Office? Would Jeffrey Epstein or R. Kelly be respected conservative leaders if they came out against abortion and political correctness? Why are Bill Clinton’s accusers credible and Trump’s accusers political pawns?
Trumpism is sadopopulism.
At the 2020 Republican National Convention, the party forewent adopting any new policy platform, instead deciding to throw its weight behind whatever Trump wishes. By the end of the day, Trumpism is less about conservative values and more about “owning the libs.” Instead of finding common ground, it drinks up liberal tears. It does not try to appeal to a united America, but to a slavish one, where any disagreement with Trump is tantamount to treason. Does conservatism need to be this way? Does it need to rally around one so temperamental, so anti-scientific, so xenophobic, so misogynistic? No, but the temptation is just too great to resist. It is a temptation that appeals to all sides of the political spectrum, that of exacting vengeance on your “enemies.” However, a mind drunk on the pursuit of vengeance is still drunk, and with that drunkenness comes moral collateral. As journalist Adam Serwer wrote in The Atlantic:
“The president’s ability to execute that cruelty through word and deed makes them euphoric. It makes them feel good, it makes them feel proud, it makes them feel happy, it makes them feel united. And as long as he makes them feel that way, they will let him get away with anything, no matter what it costs them.”
I ask Trump defenders, what would it take for this man to lose your support? Is there anything Trump could do which would cause you to break your allegiance? Are there no standards to which he should be upheld to? Are there no lines that can’t be crossed? Is there no point at which principle comes before politics? Is anything justified in the pursuit of ending abortion or a more conservative Supreme Court?
Many on the right ask us to empathize with Trump supporters, to understand that not all of them are bigots or stupid. I agree with that, but the empathy should go both ways. I doubt if any Trump supporters reading this will have their opinions swayed, but I hope that, at the very least, they can begin to share that empathy for Trump’s critics.
