The Racist Hate Cult of Donald J. Trump
When Donald Trump took office in 2016, hate crimes in America soared 320%. Trump narrowly won the election trafficking in vitriolic, vengeful, violent language, toward anyone questioning him, any person or group defying him, any minority he didn’t like. He never attempted to bring the country together, to unite and inspire Americans around common goals and interests. Through dog whistles and slights, adolescent name calling, gaslighting lies, racial slurs and direct attacks, Trump divided the country into those who worshiped him and those who were repulsed by him.
Trump mocked Latinos, Muslims, Asians, immigrants, Native Americans, any people of color, their leaders and representatives. In his run announcement he called Mexicans seeking asylum at the southern border “rapists.” In rallies he boasted about knocking people out and carrying them out on stretchers. Trump mocked a reporter afflicted with the muscular disability arthrogryposis, obscenely aping him, ridiculing his physical handicap. When women questioned Trump he called them nasty, pigs, monsters, ugly, with “blood coming out of wherever.” Twenty-nine women accused Trump of sexual assault, and he said they weren’t his type and he’d sue them all, which he never did. Trump had crowds chanting “lock her up!” about Hillary Clinton, who had never committed a crime, and unlike Donald Trump, has never been charged with one.
Trump ridiculed respected war hero Senator John McCain, assuming if he attacked this man who had suffered so much for his country, a revered war hero, he’d appear to be a bigger, tougher, strong guy. Instead Trump came off as a petty coward trying to steal an honorable man’s glory. In an interview with Howard Stern, Trump, who had gotten military deferments for bone spurs in the 60's, said that “He fought the battle of STD’s in New York City during the Vietnam War,” while John McCain was being tortured in a Hanoi war prison.
Trump’s blowhard bragging and bigoted grandstanding built the toxic Hate Cult of Trump. Its foundation had been laid when he’d stormed the country falsely claiming Barack Obama’s birth certificate was fake. Trump’s attacks on the first African American President was a signal to his cohort, a clarion call to anyone, who, like Trump, despised that a wise, well-spoken, brilliant black man, a constitutional scholar, was President of the United States.
Trump’s followers got the message. Before he had announced, Trump was their white supremacist hero. The stage was set. Rather than being proud to live in a free, democratic, multi-racial country, Trump’s hate cult blamed anyone who wasn’t white for America’s problems, which included anyone coming across the southern border. And they wanted Donald J. Trump, unabashedly committed in his bigotry, to be their champion.
With Trump’s incendiary dog whistles, publicly slighting and outright attacking people of color, his cult recognized their savior and bulwark who would beat back the immigrant horde, the dark and swarthy people. Racists who had lived under a rock had full permission to crawl out and flex their hate in broad daylight. They had a mounting army waiting in the shadows and a shameless racist leader doing their bidding.
When Nazis marched with torches in Charlottesville chanting “Jews will not replace us,” opposed by a crowd including a young woman who was run over by a car and killed, Trump said “there were good people on both sides.”
After Trump tweeted repeatedly about “Latino replacement theory” and “caravans of invaders” pouring in across the border from Mexico, Patrick Wood Crusius, a 21 year old white man, went into an El Paso Walmart with a GP WASR-10 rifle, murdering 23 people and injuring 22 more. He said his sole intention that day was to kill Hispanic people.
Donald Trump was now responsible for minorities being attacked all over America.
When Trump’s bigoted language and policies were called out by the free press, reporters and media outlets joined the hated enemies list, unless they were Fox News. When they quoted Trump, he lashed out at them for using his own words against him. The American press, who, since the beginning of the Republic has held every president accountable, exposed him. Now Trump scrambled to discredit the press itself, calling it, as Richard Nixon did, “the enemy of the people,” claiming everything reported about him was “Fake News.” “Don’t believe what you hear from the Fake News,” Trump said. But the term originated with false stories being put out by Trump and Trump’s people.
Yet Trump’s bigotry was on the surface where he wanted it. His intention was to normalize it, drag it into the open and make it policy. Take it mainstream, never be ashamed of it. Talk it up proudly with more dog whistles and draw racists out like feeding hyenas.
Be bold, debase and dehumanize as many Americans as possible to the lowest, most toxic instincts of hatred in mankind — to hate any people of color, different, marginalized, struggling for a life within the American dream. Keep those marauding caravans out you don’t want in. Call them “hordes” and “invaders” from “shithole countries.” Blame those who are already here for the problems in America. This was Donald Trump’s dream and mantra. The Hate Cult Of Donald J. Trump wanted to Make America Great Again by keeping it white and run by white people, as it had been in the 1950’s.
And then Trump took it a step farther, proclaiming outright that immigrants had “poisoned the blood of America,” using the exact language of Adolph Hitler, despite the fact that Trump’s father was an immigrant and Trump is married to one.
When Trump attacked President Obama’s birth certificate, they knew who he was. When Trump said that Mexicans coming across the border were “rapists,” they got the message. When Trump told four Congresswomen of color to “go back where they came from,” Donald Trump’s cult heard him loud and clear. The Hate Cult of Trump loved him for it, and there is no indignity, no traitorous act, no crime Donald Trump can commit that will separate them from him because of it.
You don’t have to look any farther to understand why, as Trump said himself, “I can shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and no one will care.”
Here is your reason. This is the dirty little secret Trump’s followers will never talk about openly or admit, why they will never turn on him. It isn’t his business acumen and track record, which is abysmal, wherein he cheated virtually everyone he did business with, and filed bankruptcy three times. It isn’t his economic policies, his tariffs against China for instance, which were disastrous for American farmers. It isn’t Trump’s bold, absurdly bragging claims about himself, which are gaslighting lies.
DONALD TRUMP HATES FOR THEM. Twenty-four hours a day Trump is seething, spewing hatred into the air waves, at rallies, in interviews, on social media. His hate cult feeds on it, viewing it as some sort of “freedom.” You can’t “open their eyes” to the evils of hate and racism, they’re well aware of what they’re doing, what Trump is doing for them, and they’re proud of it.
Trump is their savior, their messiah, their rod and their staff, but not according to the teachings of Jesus Christ. Evangelicals who claim to follow the teachings of Christ follow and endorse a man who preaches hate instead of love, vengeance instead of forgiveness, cruelty instead of kindness, in Donald Trump’s diseased church of the poisoned mind. Trump is not just a politician, he is a cult leader in the vein of Jim Jones, David Koresh and Warren Jeffs.
And anyone who wonders why Trump’s followers don’t care what Trump says and does that is repulsive, hateful, racist, traitorous, anti American, how many laws he breaks, the answer is: they follow him for leading them in the racist hate they relish and embrace. Like every other wannabe fascist dictator in history, he uses that hate and bigotry and fear to manipulate them and empower Donald J. Trump.
Scripture tells us, “You will know a man by his fruits.” And the fruits of hatred are why, against all reason, and everything that is good and decent in America, so many misled, blindly hating people will not be swayed from Donald Trump, or ever admit that he is a sick and evil man.
Ron Clinton Smith is a film actor, seen on “True Detective,” “Hidden Figures,” “Just Mercy,” and a writer of stories, songs, poetry, screenplays, and the novel Creature Storms.
